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John E. Savage
Professor of Computer ScienceContact Information
Box 1910Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
Email: jes at cs.brown.edu
Personal home page:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~jes/
Research Areas
| Nanocomputing |
| Design and Analysis of Algorithms |
| Parallel Computing |
| Theory of Computation |
Research Topics or Projects
| Nanoelectronic Computing |
| PARED - Parallel Adaptive Unstructured Computation |
| The Design and Analysis of Dynamic Processes: A Stochastic Approach |
Courses Taught
About John
Tell us a little about your background: educational, professional, personal, etc.
I was educated as a coding, communication, and information theorist at MIT but became a theoretical computer scientist in order to understand why decoders for error correcting codes were so much more bigger than encoders. The result was a series of papers and a book (Complexity of Computing, 1976) that demonstrated that the size and depth of a circuit are key measures of the computational complexity of the function that is computed by the circuit. Circuit complexity is now a principal topic in theoretical computer science.
After completing my PhD at MIT, I worked for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. Within three years I was off to Brown as an engineering faculty member. In the early 1970s it became apparent to Andy van Dam and Peter Wegner, who were in Applied Math, and me that we should pool our resources and form the Program in Computer Science. By the late 1970s we saw that we needed to have departmental status if we were going to obtain the resources needed to ensure that Brown could take advantage of this new, exploding research area called "computer science." Starting a new department was a challenge to all of us. Some of us had to serve as chair. Andy was our first chair and I was the second, serving from 1985 to 1991. Recruiting a high quality faculty was our first priority, which we did very successfully and continue to do today. Outside of Computer Science but within Brown I have served on many faculty committees and as chair of many key committees. At the professional level I have served on several editorial boards and committees as well as a member of the visiting committee for the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, my undergraduate and graduate department, which was a great deal of fun. On the personal side, my wife and I have four children all of whom graduated from Brown and are leading interesting and happy lives. We have traveled with them on sabbatical leaves to the Netherlands, France, and England.What do you focus on in your research? Any recent advances?
I do research on computational nanotechnology, the I/O efficiency of multicore chips, and coded computation. The latter involves adding redundancy to data so that if errors occur during a computation, they can be corrected. I have written papers on each of these topics in the last few years.
What do you like teaching classes about?
I like to teach courses that involve models of computation and related analysis. I'm a big believer in developing good models from which one can derive important limitations on computation through analysis. My last book, Models of Computation, published in 1998, deals with this topic.
How did you become interested in computer science?
As explained above, I became a computer scientist (by accident) in order to understand why decoders for error correcting codes, as seen in practice, were so much more complex than the encoders that added redundancy to messages.
What is your favorite thing about Brown?
I very much like the atmosphere at Brown. Faculty, students and staff are generally happy being here. They are all nice, pleasant and intelligent people. It's fun to be around them.
Any hobbies or passions?
I enjoy exploring ideas. I read extensively in science and have many friends who are scientists with whom I exchange ideas. At one time, I did the same with friends in economics.
All publications by John E. Savage
| Page Owner: John E. Savage | Last Modified: Mon Oct 5 12:12:15 2009 |