User:Ekpe Okorafor/sandbox/Ekpe Okorafor

Ekpe Apia Okorafor is a Nigerian computer scientist and technology consultant focused on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data and Cloud Computing. Okorafor is an Applied Intelligence Innovation Director at Accenture.

Early life and education
Okorafor was born in Ghana. He studied electronic and computer engineering at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, graduating 1996. He moved to Texas for his graduate studies, earning both a master's degree and a PhD from Texas A&M University in 2002 and 2005 respectively, in computer science and engineering. His PhD, Design and analysis of a 3-dimensional cluster multicomputer architecture using optical interconnection for petaFLOP computing, was supervised by Mi Lu. Okorafor is married to Unoma Ndili Okorafor and has three children.

Career
Okorafor has worked at Schlumberger, and IBM. In 2010, he established the High Performance Computing Centers for Excellence in Africa (Nigeria and Ethiopia) that focuses on leveraging massively parallel computing platforms to solve regional problems through simulation and modeling funded by the Nelson Mandela Institution Research grant.

Okorafor is a visiting professor in computer science at the African University of Science & Technology Abuja and the Addis Ababa University, where he teaches graduate courses in computer science. He is a visiting scholar at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.

Awards and recognitions
2022 - United States Patent - Intelligent Data Ingestion System and Method for Governance and Security

2016 - Member, Research Data Alliance

2015 - Keynote Speaker at AUST International Conference on Technology

Selected published works
1. User first: Flexible data for better decisions

2. The path from data to knowledge

3. Optical Hybrid Architecture and Network Control Strategies

4. Integrated hybrid optical node using dynamic reconfiguration and routing algorithms for bimodal traffic

5. Percolation routing in a three-dimensional multicomputer network topology using optical interconnection

6. Design and analysis of a 3-dimensional cluster multicomputer architecture using optical interconnection for petaFLOP computing