Congratulations to Mike Papka, one of nine speakers at TEDxChicago 2024: Lighting the Way to be held Friday, September 27th at Harris Theater, Millennium Park fro 3pm - 7pm.

Mike holds a joint appointment as a UIC Computer Science faculty member and serves as the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility director at Argonne National Laboratory. As director of ALCF, Mike oversees the development and deployment of Aurora, the world’s second exascale supercomputer and the fastest AI supercomputer.

Mike is one of the inaugural recipients of the William S. McCulloch Collegiate Professorship of Computer Science. Warren S. McCulloch was a UIC professor of psychiatry who with Walter Pitts co-invented artificial neural networks in 1943. Today, neural nets form the foundation of much AI technology, including deep learning and large language models.

Mike is a professor of Computer Science, director of EVL, and co-director of the George Crabtree Institute for Discovery and Sustainability.