Akhil Kumar joined the Smeal faculty in June 2002. He received his Ph.D. from Berkeley and has previously been on the faculties at Cornell University and University of Colorado. He also spent a sabbatical year as a scientist at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ. He has published more than 60 papers in academic journals and international conferences. He was coauthor of a paper which received the best paper award at the INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technology in November 2001.
Akhil serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, and Information and Technology Management Journal, having recently completed service on the boards of INFORMS Journal on Computing and Information Systems Research. He also served as a co-chair of the Seventeenth Annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS'07) held in Monreal in December 2007. He has been a principal investigator for National Science Foundation, and also received support from IBM, Sun Microsystems and other organizations for his work. His current research is in workflow management systems, E-business and distributed information systems.
Akhil Kumar has taught the following courses at Penn State.
MIS431: Database Systems (Fall 2002)
MIS434: Internet Technologies (since Spring 2004)
MIS436: Business Data Communications (Fall 2003)
BA523: Introduction to Information Technologies (Spring 2003)
MIS597: PhD seminar course (Spring 2003, Spring 2004, Fall 2004)
SCIS505: Information Technology Research Seminar (Spring 2006, Spring 2008)
His research interests are in workflow systems, e-services, various aspects of database systems, distributed information systems and intelligent systems, e.g., replication and concurrency control, data mining, online analytical processing, data structures for spatial data.
Hobbies: He used to play badminton, but now plays more tennis. He also enjoys yoga, hiking and bicycling.