Brown CS News

The Department of Computer Science will bid a fond farewell to Professor Franco Preparata on Thursday, December 5, 2013. Preparata will become Professor Emeritus in 2014, and to commemorate this occasion, he will give a lecture entitled "Revisiting Half a Century of Computer Science: A Farewell Conversation" at 4:00 pm in CIT 368. A reception will follow. Live streaming will be available.

"The department is grateful to Franco for his research and educational leadership. We have greatly benefited from his strategic vision and academic wisdom," said Chair Roberto Tamassia. "Please join us in thanking Franco and celebrating his distinguished career."

Professor Preparata joined Brown's Computer Science Department in 1991 as the An Wang Professor of Computer Science, after serving 25 years on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During his career, he has contributed to various disciplines: switching theory, coding theory, algorithmics, parallel computation, and computational biology. He is one of the founders of the field of computational geometry and introduced computational biology at Brown in 1995. He has published over 200 papers and three textbooks, which have been translated in multiple languages.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the ACM. He received the Darlington Prize from the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He was a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science. He received the "Laurea honoris causa" in Information Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy.