Charlie Catlett, senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy scientific research laboratory, will deliver a special technical a lecture on "Measuring Cities: New Opportunities for Embedded Systems and Data Analytics" at 1:30 p.m. April 17 in Stanley Auditorium, 1505 Seamans Center.

Catlett is also a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, and a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His current research focus areas include urban data science, cyber security and privacy, mobile devices and social networks, and the use of mobile and embedded computing to create intelligent infrastructure.

Catlett will discuss the work that Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago are doing in partnership with the City of Chicago and other cities through the Urban Center for Computation and Data, focusing in particular on new opportunities related to embedded systems and computational data analysis.

Prior to joining Argonne in 2000, Catlett was Chief Technology Officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). He was part of the original team that established NCSA in 1985 and his early work there included participation on the team that deployed and managed the NSFNet. In the early 1990′s Catlett participated in the DARPA/NSF Gigabit Testbeds Initiative, coordinated by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

Catlett was the founding chair of the Global Grid Forum (GGF, now Open Grid Forum) from 1999 through 2004. During this same period he designed and deployed one of the first regional optical networks dedicated to academic and research use – I-WIRE, funded by the State of Illinois.

He has been involved in Grid (distributed) computing since the early 1990s, when he co-authored (with Larry Smarr) a seminal paper “Metacomputing” in the Communications of the ACM, which outlined many of the high-level goals of what is today called Grid computing.

Catlett was also named to the Crain’s Chicago Business Tech 50 list for 2014, an annual list that includes people from research laboratories, academia, industry – from entrepreneurs to techies – those who are “shaping Chicago’s technology digital scene.”