Charles E. Leiserson
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT
Charles E. Leiserson received the B.S. degree in computer
science and mathematics from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut,
in 1975 and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1981. In 1981, he joined the
faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge,
Massachusetts. He is now Professor of Computer Science and
Engineering in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science and member of the Theory of Computation research
group in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. He holds the
positions of Director of System Architecture, Director of Research,
and Network Architect at Akamai Technologies, Inc. of Cambridge,
Massachusetts. He is the Director of the Computer Science Program of
the Singapore-MIT Alliance, a distance-education initiative in which
students in Singapore take MIT classes.
Prof. Leiserson's research centers on developing theoretical
principles of parallel and distributed computing, especially as they
relate to engineering reality. Prof. Leiserson pioneered the
development of VLSI theory and has written many papers on VLSI
algorithms, graph layout, and computer-aided design. His
contributions include the divide-and-conquer method of graph layout
and the retiming method for optimizing digital circuitry. Prof.
Leiserson has been a leader in the development of parallel computing.
As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, he wrote the first paper on
systolic architectures with his advisor H.T. Kung. While a Corporate
Fellow of Thinking Machines Corporation, he designed and led the
implementation of the network architecture for the Connection Machine
Model CM-5 Supercomputer, which incorporates the fat-tree
interconnection network he developed at MIT. He has designed and
engineered many parallel algorithms, including ones for matrix linear
algebra, graph algorithms, optimization, and sorting.
Prof. Leiserson's recent research has focused on dynamic,
asynchronous parallel computing. His Cilk multithreaded language
features a provably good work-stealing scheduler that guarantees the
efficient execution of user programs. He and his research group
designed and implemented the StarTech, Socrates, and Cilkchess
parallel chess-playing programs, which have won numerous prizes in
international competition. A team of Cilk programmers led by Prof
Leiserson won First Prize in the 1998 ICFP Programming Contest
sponsored by the International Conference on Functional Programming,
in which Cilk was declared to be ``the programming language of choice
for discriminating hackers.'' His Cilk work also inspired the
creation of efficiently implementable distributed-memory consistency
models, as well as ``cache-oblivious'' algorithms which exploit
available processor caches efficiently without any tuning of
cache-dependent parameters.
Prof. Leiserson's academic work has won many awards. His Ph.D.
dissertation, Area-Efficient VLSI Computation, which deals
with the design of systolic systems and with the problem of
determining the VLSI area of a graph, won the first ACM Doctoral
Dissertation Award in 1981, as well as the Fannie and John Hertz
Foundation Doctoral Thesis Award. In 1985 he received a Presidential
Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. Three
of his papers have received awards from the IEEE International
Conference on Parallel Processing. His textbook, Introduction
to Algorithms, coauthored with Ronald L. Rivest and Thomas
H. Cormen, was named Best 1990 Professional and Scholarly Book
in Computer Science and Data Processing by the Association of
American Publishers. The textbook, now in its second edition with an
additional coauthor, Clifford Stein, is currently the leading textbook
on computer algorithms.
Prof. Leiserson is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and SIAM. A
dedicated teacher, Prof. Leiserson has directly supervised 20
Ph.D. students and over 50 master's and bachelor's students.