Speaker Bios

Joseph O'Rourke

After graduating from St. Joseph's University (physics and mathematics), Dr. O'Rourke studied computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he received the Ph.D. in 1980. He then joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University as an Assistant Professor. Dr. O'Rourke was promoted to Associate in 1985, and then left in 1988 to found and chair the Computer Science department of Smith College, as the Olin Professor of Computer Science.

Dr. O'Rourke has received several grants and awards, including a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987, and the NSF Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars in 2001. His research is in the field of computational geometry, where he has published a monograph (Oxford, 1987), a textbook (Cambridge, 1994; 2/e 1998), coedited the 1500-page Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry (CRC Press, 1997; 2/e 2004), coauthored another monograph, Geometric Folding Algorithms: Polyhedra, Origami, Polyhedra, and is currently writing two new books. More than thirty of his 140 papers published in journals and conference proceedings are co-authored with undergraduates.

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Godfried Toussaint

Godfried Toussaint is an Emeritus Professor and Killam Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He received a Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of British Columbia. Since then he has been teaching and doing research in the areas of information theory, pattern recognition, textile-pattern analysis and design, computational geometry, instance-based learning, music information retrieval, and computational music theory. In 2005 he became a researcher in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. He is a recipient of numerous awards, a founder of several conferences and workshops, an editor of several journals, and has published more than 360 papers. In 2009 he was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for the 2009-2010 academic year to do research on the phylogenetic analysis of musical rhythm.

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Anna Lubiw

Anna Lubiw is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She has a Master of Mathematics degree in Combinatorics and Optimization from the University of Waterloo, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. She is visiting MIT on sabbatical for the 2009/2010 year. Her area of research is computational geometry and graph algorithms. Specifically, she has recently worked on shortest path problems, and on morphing of graph drawings. She has also worked on folding and the mathematics of origami, on map labelling, and on music information retrieval. Her research is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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Jack S. Snoeyink

Jack Snoeyink is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received bachelor's degrees in Math and CS from Calvin College in 1985, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1990. After a postdoctoral year in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and eight years on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, he joined UNC-Chapel Hill as a full professor in the 1999-2000 academic year. Jack's research area is computational geometry, which is the design and analysis of computer algorithms for problems best stated in geometric form. In addition to working in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), robotics, and computer graphics, Jack is a member of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and the Biophysics programs at UNC. His most recent sabbatical to Seattle, Singapore, and Switzerland, which focused on geometric algorithms for molecular structure, was enabled by a Reynolds fellowship and the letter S.

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Gill Barequet

Gill Barequet is visiting Tufts University during the fall semester of 2009-2010 on his sabbatical from the Computer Science department at The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, where he is an Associate Professor as well as the cofounder and head of the Center for Graphics and Geometric Computing since 2001. Gill received his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. (1994) in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University. His major research interests include computational geometry, graph theory and combinatorics, and discrete mathematics. He holds seven patents. In spring 2009, Gill was awarded his institution's Henri Taub Prize for Academic Excellence for his polyomino- and polycube-related works. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications. Gill's research was funded by the European Union, the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology, Korean-Israeli Research Cooperation, and several industrial sponsors.

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Nancy M. Amato

Nancy M. Amato is a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University where she co-directs the Parasol Lab and is chair of the university-level Alliance for Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Systems Biology. She received undergraduate degrees in Mathematical Sciences and Economics from Stanford University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, she is a Distinguished Speaker for the ACM Distinguished Speakers Program, she was a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. She is an Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference Editorial Board, and she was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation and on Parallel and Distributed Systems. She is a member of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) and of the Coalition to Diversity Computing (CDC); she co-directs the CDC/CRA-W Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) program (known as the DMP from 1994-2008) and she co-directs the CDC/CRA-W Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS). Her main areas of research focus are motion planning and robotics, computational biology and geometry, and parallel and distributed computing. Current representative projects include the development of a new technique for modeling molecular motions (e.g., protein folding), STAPL, a parallel C++ library enabling the development of efficient, portable parallel programs, and the investigation of new strategies for crowd control and simulation.

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Roberto Tamassia

Roberto Tamassia is the Plastech Professor of Computer Science and the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Brown University. He is also the Director of Brown's Center for Geometric Computing. His research interests include information security, applied cryptography, analysis, design, and implementation of algorithms, graph drawing, computational geometry and information visualization. He has published six textbooks and more than 220 research articles in the above areas and has given more than 75 invited lectures worldwide. He is an IEEE Fellow and the recipient of a Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society for pioneering the field of graph drawing. He is listed among the 319 most cited computer science authors by Thomson Scientific, Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). He serves regularly on program committees of international conferences. His research has been funded by ARO, DARPA, NATO, NSF, and several industrial sponsors. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988.

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Matthew T. Dickerson

Matthew Dickerson earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell University in 1989 and has been teaching at Middlebury College in Vermont since then. His primary area of research interest is computational geometry, and especially proximity problems and Voronoi diagrams. He has also published papers on the areas of computational algebra, data structures, graph algorithms, graph drawing, and geographic information systems. Dickerson also did graduate work in Old English Language and Literature at Cornell and is a noted scholar of medieval literature, environmental literature, and especially the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. In addition to several dozen research publications in computational geometry over the past 21 years, Dickerson has published several books of literary criticism on the writings of Lewis and Tolkien, including his most recently co-authored book: Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: the Environmental Vision of C.S. Lewis. Dickerson lives in Vermont with his wife and three sons (the oldest of whom is studying computer science at St. Michael's College.) He boils his own maple syrup and attempts to keep honey bees to satisfy his taste for both the sweet and the natural things in life.

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