Professor Roberto Tamassia

A computer scientist, he has been a faculty member of Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island since 1988, where he is the Plastech Professor of Computer Science; and since 2007, he has been chair of the Brown Computer Science department. His research specialty is in the design and analysis of algorithms for graph drawing, computational geometry, and computer security. Originally from Italy, he received a laurea (the Italian equivalent of an M.S. degree) from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1984, and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Franco Preparata in 1988. He then took a faculty position at Brown; he has also held visiting positions at the University of Texas at Dallas, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, and La Sapienza. He became interested in computer science as an undergraduate at the University of Rome, where he was an electrical engineering concentrator. He took a course on programming and data structures taught by Carlo Batini, who eventually became his first academic mentor. His primary research area is information security and privacy and he is also interested in design and analysis of algorithms, graph drawing, geometric computing, data management, and information visualization. He began investigating graph drawing problems in the early 80s, and one of his first contributions was a method for constructing optimal planar orthogonal embeddings that revealed a connection between the geometry of the layout and the topology of the embedding via a flow network. This method is the foundation of several research and commercial tools for graph visualization developed in the subsequent two decades. His recent work includes methods and a system prototype for checking the integrity of outsourced data. He has published more than 200 research articles; has given more than 50 invited lectures worldwide and is a Thomson Scientific, Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) highly cited researcher. His inspirational papers have given momentum to a growing community of researchers in this field. He was one of the original organizers of the International Symposium on Graph Drawing, and was co-Chair of that conference in 1994; he has also been co-Chair of the semiannual Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (1997, 1999, and 2001) and the annual Workshop on Algorithms and Experiments (2005). He is founding Editor-in-Chief (since 1996) of the Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications. In addition, he belongs to several other journal editorial boards. In 2006, the IEEE Computer Society gave him their Technical Achievement Award "for pioneering the field of graph drawing and for outstanding contributions to the design of graph and geometric algorithms." In 2008, he was elected an IEEE Fellow and in 2012 he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "for contributions to graph drawing, algorithms and data structures and to computer science education". He was also named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the author or co-author of several textbooks, including: with Goodrich, M. T. (1998), ?Data Structures and Algorithms in Java?, Wiley, Fourth edition, 2005; with Di Battista, G.; Eades, P.; and Tollis, I. G. (1999), ?Graph Drawing?, Prentice-Hall; with Goodrich, M. T. (2002), ?Algorithm Design?, Wiley; and with Goodrich, M. T. and Mount, D. (2003), ?Data Structures and Algorithms in C++?, Wiley.