Boon Thau Loo

Boon Thau Loo is a Singaporean-American computer scientist, university administrator, and businessperson. Loo is currently the RCA professor of artificial intelligence in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania where he leads a research lab working on distributed systems, and serves as the Associate Dean of Master's and Professional Programs at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Boon Thau Loo was born in Malaysia and grew up in Singapore. He studied at The Chinese High School (Singapore) and Raffles Junior College. In 1996, he moved to the United States in order to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where he received an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Following his studies there, he pursued his master's degree in computer sciences at Stanford University. He then returned to Berkeley for his PhD, which he graduated in 2006 with the David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize dissertation award and the 2007 ACM SIGMOD Dissertation Award for his thesis The Design and Implementation of Declarative Networks. Following his studies, Loo began working as a post-doctoral researcher at Microsoft Research.

As a scholar, Loo became the RCA professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Pennsylvania in the departments of Computer and Information Science and Electrical and Systems Engineering. At Penn he is also the director of the Distributed Systems Laboratory and the NetDB@Penn research group. In 2018, he became the associate dean of master's and professional programs, where he oversees all Master's and professional programs in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. As associate dean, Loo led several new academic initiatives, such as MCIT Online, first Ivy League fully online master's degree program in computer science for non-computer science majors, the J.P. Eckert Diversity Fellowship, Cybersecurity boot camp for mid-career professionals in the Philadelphia greater area, and the accelerated master's program for Penn undergraduates.

While serving as a researcher and professor, Loo has founded several private enterprises. He has published over 100 papers and two books - Declarative Networking (Synthesis Lectures on Data Management) in 2012 and Datalog and Recursive Query Processing (Foundations and Trends(r) in Databases) in 2013.

While on sabbatical leave from Penn in 2014, Loo cofounded and led Gencore Systems, a Penn startup company on cloud performance monitoring. Leading a group of his former students that spunoff the company with him, Loo formed a partnership with the OpenLab of Juniper Networks and integrated his group's research on high-performance declarative network analytics into Juniper's newly acquired Contrail SDN platform. The company raised seed funding in addition to a SBIR (Small Business Innovative Research) grant from the National Science Foundation. The company was later renamed Netsil and acquired by Nutanix in 2018.

In 2015, Loo also cofounded Termaxia, a big data storage company, where he serves as Chief Scientist.

In 2018, Loo was awarded the Emerging Inventor of the Year prize from the Penn Center for Innovation. In 2019, Loo was awarded the scholarly chair of RCA Professor in Artificial Intelligence.