Henri Bal - Career

Career

After getting his PhD degree, Bal was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona and at Imperial College in London. He then came back to the Vrije Universiteit as an Assistant Professor. Shortly thereafter he was awarded a 'Pionier' grant from the Dutch National Science Foundation, the most prestigious award then available to young researchers. He used the grant of 1.6 million guilders (about $1 million) to start a research group on parallel programming. In 1994 he became an Associate Professor and in 1998 he became a Full Professor. His work has continued to focus on cluster computers, parallel programming languages, and parallel applications.

Together with one of his students, John Romein, he solved the game of awari, a 3500-year old game by cleverly enumerating all the possible positions reachable from the current position and choosing the best move, usually leading to a forced win. A paper about this research, entitled "Solving the Game of Awari using Parallel Retrograde Analysis" was published in IEEE Computer, Oct. 2003 and received worldwide publicity.

Bal has had about a dozen PhD students and has written nearly 100 scientific papers in leading computer science conferences and journals. He was also the driving force behind the acquisition and use of three large distributed cluster computers called the Distributed ASCI Supercomputer. Bal has also been a member of over 30 program committees, and as such has had a major impact on the field of parallel computing. He is currently adjunct director of the $50 million VL-e research project as well as being a professor.