Bruce Childers is the dean of the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has guided the school from a startup founded in 2017 into an established innovator. A principal architect of SCI's founding, he has grown enrollment from roughly 1,300 to more than 2,400 students, expanded research including quantum computing and AI directions, championed the development of people and strategy, and envisioned and launched the Professional Graduate Program Initiative including the first-of-its-kind at Pitt Master of Data Science. He also chairs Pitt's University Deans Council and previously served as Special Assistant to the Provost for Data Science, shaping strategy for data science and AI. Other prior roles at Pitt include Interim Dean, Senior Associate Dean, Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives, where he led faculty recruitment and development for SCI, Chair of the Department of Information Culture and Data Stewardship, and Co-director of Graduate Computer Engineering. A Professor of Computer Science, he earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Virginia (2000) and his BS in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary (1991).
Childers' recent research focuses on novel technologies and cultural change to advance transparency, reuse and reproducibility of data science for accelerated discovery and trustworthy insight. With colleagues, these scholarly contributions are disseminated through innovations embodied in open source software, including the Occam system. His computer systems research addresses the software-hardware boundary for improved energy, performance, reliability, and robustness, with an emphasis on embedded systems, including the Internet-of-Things.
He has participated in numerous events, including past steering committee chair of the ACM SIGPLAN and SIGBED Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES); program chair of LCTES; organizing committee of the DOE, DoD and NSF Workshop on Modeling and Simulation of Systems and Applications; and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers. He has participated in several activities on scientific reproducibility, particularly in computer science research.
A recent curriculum vitae is available.
Workflow Systems: OCCAM from Rachel Kelly on Vimeo.
Companion slides (PDF) to the video of the talk.
Talk given at the Modeling the World's Systems Conference, May 22, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA.
December 1, 2025: The SCI accomplished so much in the last year! Read selected highlights in our annual report. SCI is a thriving community and an amazing place to belong. I hope you are inspired to join us after reviewing the report.
January 18, 2021: The Data Science Task Force completed its recommendations for a set of goals and actions to coordinate and amplify data, data methods, and their intersections with multiple disciplines at Pitt. Enjoy!
May 1, 2022: It is my honor to serve as Dean of the SCI. Building on the period while serving as Interim Dean (2020-2022), as a school, we will strive to be collaborative, open, and transparent, and we will pursue our goals and ideas with thoughtfulness, energy, and optimism. And most importantly, I invite you to join SCI in continuing to write our story together. Read more from my annual message at the SCI website.
Inter-rater Reliability of the Infectious Disease Modeling Reproducibility Checklist (IDMRC) as Applied to COVID-19 Computational Model Research, Darya Pokutnaya, Willem G. Van Panhuis, Bruce R. Childers, Marquis S Hawkins, Alice E Arcury-Quandt, Meghan Matlack, Kharlya Carpio and Harry Hochheiser BMC Infectious Disease, Volume 23, Article number 733, October 27, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12879-023-08729-4
An implementation framework to improve the transparency and reproducibility of computational models of infectious diseases, Darya Pokutnaya, Bruce Childers, Alice E. Arcury-Quandt, Harry Hochheiser, and Willem G. Van Panhuis, PLOS Computational Biology, March 16, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010856
HPE: Hierarchical Page Eviction Policy for Unified Memory in GPUs, Qi Yu, Bruce Childers, Libo Huang, Cheng Qian, and Zhiying Wang IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems Vol. 39, No. 10, Oct. 2020
Coordinated Prefetching and Page Eviction for Memory Oversubscription Management in GPUs, Qi Yu, Bruce Childers, Libo Huang, Cheng Qian, Hui Quo, and Zhiying Wang, IEEE Int'l. Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, New Orleans, Louisiana, May 2020
CMH: Compression Management for Improving Capacity in the Hybrid Memory, Cheng Qian, Bruce R. Childers, Libo Huang, Qi Yu and Zhiying Wang, ACM Int'l. Conference on Computing Frontiers, Ischia, Italy, May 2018
Quality of Service Support for Fine-Grained Sharing on GPUs, Zhenning Wang, Jun Yang, Rami Melhem, Bruce R. Childers, Youtao Zhang and Minyi Guo, International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), Toronto, Canada, June 2017
On the Restore Time Variations of Future DRAM Memory, Xianwei Zhang, Youtao Zhang, Bruce R. Childers and Jun Yang, ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES), Volume 22, Issue 2, February 2017
Restore Truncation for Performance Improvement in Future DRAM Systems, Xianwei Zhang, Youtao, Zhang, Bruce R. Childers and Jun Yang, IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, Barcelona, Spain, March 2016
Simultaneous Multikernel GPU: Multi-tasking Throughput Processors via Fine-Grained Sharing, Zhenning Wang, Jun Yang, Rami Melhem, Bruce R. Childers, Youtao Zhang and Minyi Guo, IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, Barcelona, Spain, March 2016
Supporting Superpages in Non-Contiguous Physical Memory, Yu Du, Miao Zhou, Bruce R. Childers, Daniel Mosse' and Rami Melhem, IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture, San Francisco, California, February 2015