A Trio of New Distinguished Professors in ICS
Three computer science professors in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) recently received the Distinguished Professor title: Rina Dechter, Michael Goodrich and Gene Tsudik. The title is a campus-level distinction for faculty who have “achieved the highest levels of scholarship over the course of their careers.”
Rina Dechter has made numerous contributions to the algorithmic foundations of automated reasoning and knowledge representation, including search, constraint processing and probabilistic reasoning. She is the author of the leading textbook Constraint Processing (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003) and of Reasoning with Probabilistic and Deterministic Graphical Models: Exact Algorithms (Morgan and Claypool, 2013; second edition 2019). She is an ACM and AAAI fellow and a recipient of the 2007 Research excellence award from the Association of Constraint Programming. Dechter is believed to be the first to introduce the phrase “deep learning” with her 1986 paper, “Learning While Searching in Constraint-Satisfaction Problems.”
Michael Goodrich, elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences & Letters last year as a foreign member, is the Technical Director for the ICS Center for Algorithms and Theory of Computation and is a Fulbright Scholar and a fellow of AAAS, ACM and IEEE. Recognized as a world leader in the field of algorithm design, he has made major contributions to geometric computing, networking, geographic information systems, computer security and big data processing. His recent work includes contributions to efficient and secure distributed data structures, information privacy, social networks and cloud security, and he has served as a scientific consultant to AT&T, Walt Disney Animation Studios and the National Science Foundation.
Gene Tsudik conducts research in security, privacy and applied cryptography. One topic that his group is currently working on is Security of Internet of Things (IoT). The focus is on designing guaranteed-secure architectures and implementations thereof for simple IoT devices, which have been subject to numerous attacks and exploits. Gene Tsudik is, in his own words: “a Fellow of the usual professional societies and non-member of many others.”
These three esteemed faculty members join their ICS colleagues Pierre Baldi, Michael Carey, Nikil Dutt, Ramesh Jain, Alexandru Nicolau and Vijay Vazirani in earning the Distinguished Professor title.
— Shani Murray