CISE - News

New NSF Division Director for CISE CCF

CISE is pleased to announce the selection of Dr. Sampath Kannan as the Director for the CISE Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF) effective July 1, 2008. Sampath Kannan is currently a Professor of Computer and Information Science and Associate Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds an appointment in the graduate group for Genomics and Computational Biology in the Biomedical Graduate Studies Program at Penn. His research interests are in combinatorial and randomized algorithms and their applications to program reliability, computational biology, visual sensing, computer systems, coding and communication and massive data sets. Sampath received his Master's degree from Princeton University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989.

Sampath was one of the initial developers of the paradigm of program checking, a technique for producing probabilistic proofs of the correctness of program output at run-time. Working with the real-time systems group, he also developed a prototype implementation of a system for automatically checking the behavior of a running Java program against a temporal logic specification. In computational biology, he has worked on the computational complexity of reconstructing the evolutionary tree of organisms under a variety of criteria. He has also worked on some sequence comparison problems. In computer vision, he has worked on art-gallery-type problems and pursuit-evasion problems. In computer systems he has worked on register allocation and other problems that arise in compiling. He has designed massive data set algorithms for vector norms. He has also designed algorithms for massive graphs and massive geometric data sets.

Sampath received his Master's degree from Princeton University in 1984 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. He held a post-doctoral position at DIMACS before joining the University of Arizona in 1991. Since 1994 he has been at the University of Pennsylvania. He was on leave in the 99-00 academic year at AT&T Labs Research. He is the author of over 90 journal and refereed conference publications and has given several invited talks. Several of his papers have been selected for special issues of the best papers from conferences. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms and the ACM Transactions on Algorithms as well as on special issues of various journals. He has served on numerous conference program committees, NSF panels, and the steering committee of the DIMACS special year on computational biology. He won the best advisor award in the School of Engineering in 2005.