Jeffrey S. VitterProvost and Executive Vice President for Academics; Professor of Computer Science
Email: jsv@tamu.edu
M.B.A. Duke University, 2002 BRIEF BIOGRAPHYJeff Vitter serves as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. He is the chief academic officer for the university, which includes the Mays Business School, Dwight Look College of Engineering, George Bush School of Government and Public Service, and Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Architecture, Education and Human Development, Geosciences, Liberal Arts, Science, and Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. Texas A&M has over 48,000 students and 2,700 faculty members, more than 400 of whom have been hired in the past four years under one of the most aggressive faculty hiring programs in the world. The University offers more than 120 undergraduate degrees and more than 240 Master's and doctoral degrees, including a doctorate in veterinary medicine. Many of these programs are ranked among the very best in their respective disciplines. More than 2,000 companies actively recruit A&M graduates through the University's Career Center. Annual research expenditures total approximately $570 million, including the agricultural and engineering experiment stations. $500 million in new construction is newly completed or underway. From 2002 to 2008, Dr. Vitter served as the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science and Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. As dean, he was the chief academic officer and administrator of the College of Science. In approximate terms, the College of Science comprised 325 faculty members, 550 staff members, 1,000 graduate students, and 2,800 undergraduate majors, with a total annual budget of $130 million. The courses offered by the College accounted for about one-fourth of the University's 1 million student credit hours. Dr. Vitter was responsible for overseeing the discovery, learning, engagement, and diversity activities of the College of Science's seven academic departments: Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics. Dr. Vitter led the collaborative development of two strategic plans for the College, which established a dual focus of excellence in the core departments as well as in multidisciplinary collaborations. The College grew by 60 faculty members during his tenure, several hired under the innovative COALESCE faculty hiring program targeting College-wide priorities. He also launched a comprehensive study of the undergraduate program, which resulted in an innovative outcomes-based College curriculum approved by the faculty and implemented in 2007. Several programs in the College are ranked among the very best nationally. A summary of strategic initiatives and accomplishments can be found in his expanded biography or in his curriculum vitæ. From 1993 to 2002, Dean Vitter was the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He served as chair of the Department of Computer Science at Duke from 1993-2001 and as co-director and a founding member of Duke's Center for Geometric and Biological Computing from 1997-2002. As chair, he led the Department to significant improvements in stature—characterized by a top-20 ranking, stellar faculty hires, a dynamic strategic plan, a departmental culture of inclusiveness, comprehensive curriculum redesign, administrative reorganization, substantial increases in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, creation of a successful industry partners program, and a rise in sponsored research expenditures to 250% of initial level. Previously from 1980-1993, he progressed through the faculty ranks and served in various leadership roles at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. His educational degrees include a B.S. with highest honors in Mathematics in 1977 from the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana; a Ph.D.in Computer Science under Don Knuth in 1980 from Stanford University in Stanford, California; and an M.B.A. in 2002 from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His home town is New Orleans, Louisiana (as everyone who knows him knows!). Dean Vitter sits on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association, where he co-chairs the Government Affairs Committee, and he serves on the Board of Advisors for the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans and the Visiting Committee of the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (I.N.R.I.A.) in Rocquencourt, France. He has served as Chair of ACM SIGACT, the Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory of the world's largest computer professional organization, the Association for Computing Machinery. He has served on the Executive Council of the EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science), as well as on various review committees. Sabbatical sites have included Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley; (I.N.R.I.A.) in Rocquencourt, France; Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey; and I.N.R.I.A. in Sophia Antipolis, France. Dean Vitter has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, a Fulbright Scholar, and an IBM Faculty Development Awardee. He has over 250 book, journal, and conference publications reflecting the areas of interest described in his research summary; his Google Scholar h-index is 49. He is coauthor of the books Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory (now Publishers, 2008), Efficient Algorithms for MPEG Video Compression (Wiley & Sons, 2002), and Design and Analysis of Coalesced Hashing (Oxford University Press, 1987),coeditor of the collections External Memory Algorithms and Algorithm Engineering, and co-holder of patents in the areas of external sorting, parallel I/O, prediction, and approximate data structures. Editorial board memberships have included Algorithmica, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Theory of Computing Systems (formerly Mathematical Systems Theory: An International Journal on Mathematical Computing Theory), and SIAM Journal on Computing; in addition, he has edited several special issues. RESEARCH INTERESTSIn his research, Jeff Vitter seeks to exploit the rich interdependence between theory and practice in computer science. His work in algorithm design and analysis spans several application areas. The challenge in each case is to design algorithms that are both provably efficient and practical to implement. One theme in Dean Vitter's research is how to alleviate the input/output (I/O) bottleneck between fast internal memory and slow external storage (such as disk) that can occur when processing massive data sets. He has worked on efficient external memory algorithms in several domains, including geographic information systems (GIS), spatial databases, sorting, text and string indexing, matrix computations, graph traversal, range searching, data mining, and a variety of geometric and combinatorial problems. A related interest is how to take advantage of parallel disks or parallel hierarchical memories, in which communication with each parallel memory device takes place simultaneously. His group is involved in algorithm engineering using the TPIE system (Transparent Parallel I/O programming Environment). Another aspect of Dean Vitter's work involves novel machine learning and prediction mechanisms based upon data compression and locality, using the principle that the more compressible a sequence is, the more predictable it is. Examples include algorithms for caching, prefetching, data streams, database query optimization, data mining, and resource management in mobile computers. He has worked on efficient approaches to image, video, and text compression. He currently works on compressed data structures for searching, where the goal is to use a small amount of space equal to the entropy of the input data, yet still achieve fast search time. Previously, fast data structures for text indexing (such as suffix trees and suffix arrays) required several times more space than the data being indexed! Other interests include randomized, parallel, and incremental algorithms for computational geometry, graphics, random sampling, and random variant generation. Several of Dean Vitter's recent publications, including a manuscript on external memory algorithms, in which the focus is on I/O, and a book on efficient algorithms for MPEG video compression, are available electronically via his online publication library. The full list of his publications appears in his curriculum vitæ. AWARDS
Notre Dame Scholar, University of Notre Dame, 1973-1977 EXPERIENCE
Assistant Computer Performance Analyst, Standard Oil Company of California, San Francisco, CA (summers), 1976-1977 PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES AND SERVICE
Referee for numerous journals and series.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONSJ. S. Vitter and W. C. Chen. Design and Analysis of Coalesced Hashing, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1987. J. S. Vitter and P. Krishnan. "Optimal Prefetching via Data Compression," Journal of the ACM, 43(5) September 1996, 771-793. D. T. Hoang and J. S. Vitter. Efficient Algorithms for MPEG Video Compression, Wiley Series in Telecommunications and Signal Processing, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, 2002. R. Grossi and J. S. Vitter. "Compressed Suffix Arrays and Suffix Trees with Applications to Text Indexing and String Matching," SIAM Journal on Computing, 35(2), 2005, 378-407. J. S. Vitter. Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory, Series on Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science, now Publishers, Hanover, MA, 2008. PERSONAL LINKS
|
| ||||
| ||||