Steven Sol Skiena
Born (1961-01-30) January 30, 1961 (age 63)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsStony Brook University (1988–present)
Doctoral advisorHerbert Edelsbrunner

Steven Sol Skiena (born January 30, 1961) is a Computer Scientist and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University.[1] He is also Director of AI Institute at Stony Brook.

He was co-founder of General Sentiment, a social media and news analytics company, and served as Chief Science Officer from 2009 until it shut down in 2015.[2] His research interests include algorithm design and its applications to biology. Skiena is the author of several popular books in the fields of algorithms, programming, and mathematics. The Algorithm Design Manual is widely used as an undergraduate text in algorithms and within the tech industry for job interview preparation.[3] In 2001, Skiena was awarded the IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award "for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education in the areas of algorithms and discrete mathematics and for influential textbook and software."[4]

Skiena has worked on algorithmic problems in synthetic biology, and, in particular, issues of optimal gene design for a given protein under various constraints. In collaboration with virologist Eckard Wimmer, he has worked to computationally design synthetic viruses for use as attenuated vaccines.[5] Their Synthetic Attenuated Virus Engineering (SAVE) approach has been validated in flu[6] and experiments with other viruses are ongoing. A popular account of this work appears in Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazare's Natural Computing.[7]

Skiena played a role in the conception of the Apple iPad. In 1988, Skiena and his team won a competition run by Apple to design the Computer of the Year 2000.[8] Their design, a tablet featuring a touch screen, GPS, and wireless communications was similar in many regards to the iPad as released by Apple in 2010.[9]

Bibliography

References

  1. ^ Distinguished Teaching Professor Award: Steven Skiena Archived 2017-10-04 at the Wayback Machine, Stony Brook CS, accessed 2017-10-03.
  2. ^ General Sentiment personnel page Archived 2012-06-11 at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ^ [1] Steve Yegge's blog
  4. ^ Steven Skiena: 2001 Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award, IEEE Computer Society, accessed 2017-10-03.
  5. ^ Coleman; et al. (2008). "Virus attenuation by genome-scale changes in codon pair bias". Science. 320 (5884): 1784–7. Bibcode:2008Sci...320.1784C. doi:10.1126/science.1155761. PMC 2754401. PMID 18583614.
  6. ^ Mueller; et al. (2010). "Live attenuated influenza virus vaccines by computer-aided rational design". Nature Biotechnology. 28 (7): 723–6. doi:10.1038/nbt.1636. PMC 2902615. PMID 20543832.
  7. ^ Natural Computing; Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazare, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.
  8. ^ Bartlett W. Mel; Stephen M. Omohundro; Arch D. Robison; Steven S. Skiena; Kurt H. Thearling; Luke T. Young; Stephen Wolfram (June 1988). "Tablet: Personal Computer in the Year 2000" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 31 (6): 638–648. doi:10.1145/62959.62960. hdl:2142/74389. S2CID 18112498.
  9. ^ James Barron (Jan 28, 2010). "Apple's New Device Looks Like a Winner. From 1988". New York Times.
  10. ^ Reviews of Where Historical Figures Really Rank: Ernest Davis (2014), SIAM News [2]; Nicholas Mattei (2014), ACM SIGACT News 45 (2): 40–42, doi:10.1145/2636805.2636817.
  11. ^ Review of The Algorithm Design Manual: Neelakantan Kartha (2011), ACM SIGACT News 42 (4): 29–31, doi:10.1145/2078162.2078169.
  12. ^ Review of Programming Challenges: A. M. Tenenbaum (2003), ACM Computing Reviews [3].
  13. ^ Reviews of Calculated Bets: Michael Ward (2002), Math. Gaz. 86 (507): 565–566, doi:10.2307/3621199; James H. Albert (2002), American Statistician 56 (4): 329–330, doi:10.1198/tas.2002.s252, JSTOR 3087358; Steven Byrnes (2007), Math. Horizons 14 (3): 28, JSTOR 25678674.
  14. ^ Review of Computational Discrete Mathematics: Martha Patricia Niño Mojica (2005), Leonardo [4].

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