Steven Skiena

Rank/Position Title:

Professor

Home Page:

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena

Date of original appointment to this faculty, followed by dates and ranks of advancement:

• Professor of Computer Science, fall 2001 to date.
• Associate Professor of Computer Science, fall 1994 to spring 2001.
• Assistant Professor of Computer Science, fall 1988 to spring 1994.

Degrees:

Conferences, workshops, and professional development:

• The primary research conferences I attend are in computational biology (RECOMB and ISMB, typically one per year) and algorithms (SODA, every year or two).

I have attended the following educational computer science conferences:

• Frontiers in Education (FIE '02) in Boston MA, where I received the 2001 IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award.
• Invited speaker on "Teaching Combinatorics and Graph Theory with Mathematica", at `Exploring Formal Methods in the Early Computer Science Curriculum', CUNY Graduate Center, September 16, 1995.
• Invited speaker on "Combinatorics and Graph Theory with Mathematica", New technologies and their influence on teaching mathematics, Barcelona Spain, February 16, 1995.

Other related computing experience:

• Caesarea Edmond Benjamin de Rothschild Foundation Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of Computer Science, University of Haifa , Israel , Fulbright Scholar, fall 2001 to spring 2002.
• DIMACS, Rutgers University , visitor, fall 1994 to spring 1995.

Department, college, and/or university committee membership:

Department committees:

• Undergraduate and accreditation committees.

University committees:

• Investigator Disclosure Implementation Review Committee

Principal publications of the last five years.

Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2001. ISBM number 0-521-80426-4.

• Computational Discrete Mathematics (with S. Pemmaraju), Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003.
• Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual (with M. Revilla), Springer-Verlag, New York, 2003. ISBN Number 0-387-00163-8.
• Polish translation by Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne of Warsaw, in progress.
• Korean translation by Hanbit Media, Inc., in progress.
• Russian translation by Kudits-Obraz Publishing Company, in progress.
• Improved Bounds on Sorting with Length-Weighted Reversals (with M. Bender, D. Ge, S. He, H. Hu, R. Pinter and F. Swidan) 15th ACM-SIAM Symp. on Discrete Algorithms (SODA '04). January 2004 New Orleans LA.
• Parsing without a Grammar: Making Sense of Unknown File Formats, (with L. Lloyd). Third IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'03) Melbourne FL, November 19-22, 2003.
• Deconvolving Sequence Variation in Mixed DNA Populations, (with A. Wildenberg and P. Sumazin). J. Computational Biology 10 (2003) 635-652. Also, Sixth International Conf. on Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 02), Washington DC, April 18-21, 2002.
• Natural selection and algorithmic design of mRNA. J. Computational Biology 10 (2003) 419-432. Also Sixth International Conf. on Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 02), Washington DC, April 18-21, 2002.
• Micro-array Synthesis through Multiple-Use PCR Primer Design (with R. Fernandes). Bioinformatics 18 (2002) S128-S135. Special issue on Tenth International Conf. on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2002). Edmonton, Alberta, August 3-7, 2002.
• Designing Better Phages, Bioinformatics 17 (2001) S253-261. Also Ninth International Conf. on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2001), Copenhagen, Denmark, July 21-25, 2001.
• Dealing with Errors in Interactive Sequencing by Hybridization (with V. Phan). Bioinformatics 17 (2001) 862-870.

Other scholarly activity: grants, sabbaticals, software development, etc.:

• Gene Design for Vaccines and Therapeutic Phages, (with E. Wimmer ), National Science Foundation ITR, 10/1/03-9/30/07, $793,623.
• Algorithm Engineering for NP-Complete Problems, National Science Foundation, 9/1/00-8/30/03, $210,000.
• Author of the Combinatorica system for teaching and research in combinatorics and graph theory, www.combinatorica.com

Scientific, professional, and honor societies of which you are a member:

ACM

Honors and awards:

• IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award, 2001.
• President's and Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, SUNY Stony Brook, 2000.
• ONR Young Investigator Award, 1993.
• EDUCOM Higher Education Software Award for Distinguished Mathematics Software, 1991.

Courses taught this and last academic year term-by-term

Academic advising:

• 4 students as Ph.D research advisor
• 1 student as MS research advisor
• Roughly 15 undergraduate students as course advisor
• Assigned advisor for 18 undergraduate students during 2004/2005 academic year.

Brief description of major research and scholarly activities:

My research interests include the design of graph, string, and geometric algorithms, and their applications (particularly to biology). I am the author of four books on algorithms and related areas, including "The Algorithm Design Manual" and "Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual".