Edward Grady "Ed" Coffman Jr. is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

. He began his career as a systems programmer at the

System Development Corporation System Development Corporation (SDC) was a computer software company based in Santa Monica, California. Founded in 1955, it is considered the first company of its kind. History SDC began as the systems engineering group for the SAGE air-defense ...

(SDC) during the period 1958–65. His PhD in engineering at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

in 1966 was followed by a series of positions at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

(1966–69), The

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a Public university, public Commonwealth System of Higher Education, state-related Land-grant university, land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvan ...

(1970–76),

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

(1976–77), and the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

(1977–79). In 1979, he joined the Mathematics Center at

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

where he stayed until his retirement as a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff 20 years later. After a one-year stint at the

New Jersey Institute of Technology {{Infobox university , name = {{nowrap, New Jersey Institute of Technology , image = New Jersey IT seal.svg , image_upright = 0.9 , former_names = Newark College of Engineering (1930–1975)Ne ...

, he returned to

in 2000 with appointments in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

, and

Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information a ...

. He retired from teaching in 2008 and is now a Professor Emeritus still engaged in research and professional activities.

Research

Coffman is best known for his seminal research together with his international collaborations, measured in part by some 150 co-authors in his collection of publications. His work can be found in over 180 articles in technical journals devoted to original research contributions. He published 4 graduate-level text books, and papers in the proceedings of some 250 conferences and workshops, most of these being preliminary versions of journal articles. In his research, Coffman has been a generalist following many parallel paths in engineering and applied mathematics. The directions he has taken have drawn on the tools of combinatorial optimization and the theory of algorithms, along with those of applied probability and stochastic processes. The processes studied include those in the theories of

scheduling A schedule or a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible task (project management), tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order ...

bin packing The bin packing problem is an optimization problem, in which items of different sizes must be packed into a finite number of bins or containers, each of a fixed given capacity, in a way that minimizes the number of bins used. The problem has ma ...

, sequential selection,

graphs Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

, and

dynamic allocation In computer science, manual memory management refers to the usage of manual instructions by the programmer to identify and deallocate unused objects, or garbage. Up until the mid-1990s, the majority of programming languages used in industry supp ...

, along with those in

queueing Queue areas are places in which people queue (first-come, first-served) for goods or services. Such a group of people is known as a ''queue'' (British usage) or ''line'' ( American usage), and the people are said to be waiting or standing ''in ...

, polling, reservation, moving-server, networking, and distributed local-rule systems (e.g.

cellular automata A cellular automaton (pl. cellular automata, abbrev. CA) is a discrete model of computation studied in automata theory. Cellular automata are also called cellular spaces, tessellation automata, homogeneous structures, cellular structures, tessel ...

). His contributions have been divided between mathematical foundations and the design and analysis of

approximation algorithms In computer science and operations research, approximation algorithms are efficient algorithms that find approximate solutions to optimization problems (in particular NP-hard problems) with provable guarantees on the distance of the returned solut ...

providing the basis for engineering solutions to

NP-hard In computational complexity theory, NP-hardness ( non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness) is the defining property of a class of problems that are informally "at least as hard as the hardest problems in NP". A simple example of an NP-hard pr ...

problems. Computer and network engineering applications have been broad in scope; a partial list includes research addressing problems in the scheduling and storage allocation functions of computer

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...

, storage architectures,

data structures In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, a ...

, computer timing problems such as

deadlocks In concurrent computing, deadlock is any situation in which no member of some group of entities can proceed because each waits for another member, including itself, to take action, such as sending a message or, more commonly, releasing a lo ...

and

synchronization Synchronization is the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. For example, the conductor of an orchestra keeps the orchestra synchronized or ''in time''. Systems that operate with all parts in synchrony are said to be synchronou ...

, Internet congestion,

peer-to-peer file sharing Peer-to-peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital media using peer-to-peer (P2P) networking technology. P2P file sharing allows users to access media files such as books, music, movies, and games using a P2P software program tha ...

networks, stream merging,

self-assembly Self-assembly is a process in which a disordered system of pre-existing components forms an organized structure or pattern as a consequence of specific, local interactions among the components themselves, without external direction. When the ...

processes of molecular computing, minimalist algorithms in

sensor networks Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) refer to networks of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors that monitor and record the physical conditions of the environment and forward the collected data to a central location. WSNs can measure environmental c ...

optical burst switching Optical burst switching (OBS) is an optical networking technique that allows dynamic sub-wavelength switching of data. OBS is viewed as a compromise between the yet unfeasible full optical packet switching (OPS) and the mostly static optical circui ...

, and

dynamic spectrum management Dynamic spectrum management (DSM), also referred to as dynamic spectrum access (DSA), is a set of techniques based on theoretical concepts in network information theory and game theory that is being researched and developed to improve the performan ...

cognitive networks In communication networks, cognitive network (CN) is a new type of data network that makes use of cutting edge technology from several research areas (i.e. machine learning, knowledge representation, computer network, network management) to sol ...

. The list expands greatly when including the myriad applications in

industrial engineering and operations research Industrial engineering is an engineering profession that is concerned with the optimization of complex processes, systems, or organizations by developing, improving and implementing integrated systems of people, money, knowledge, information a ...

of Coffman's research in scheduling and bin-packing theory in one and two dimensions. As of November 11, 2015, his works have been cited 13,597 times, and he has an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as winn ...

of 55. Coffman has been active professionally serving on several editorial boards, dozens of technical program committees, setting research agendas in workshops of the

National Research Council National Research Council may refer to: * National Research Council (Canada), sponsoring research and development * National Research Council (Italy), scientific and technological research, Rome * National Research Council (United States), part of ...

, co-founding the

Symposium on Operating Systems Principles In ancient Greece, the symposium ( grc-gre, συμπόσιον ''symposion'' or ''symposio'', from συμπίνειν ''sympinein'', "to drink together") was a part of a banquet that took place after the meal, when drinking for pleasure was acc ...

, and the special interest groups on performance evaluation of both ACM and IFIPS.

Selected publications

* 1964, with

Jules Schwartz Jules I. Schwartz (June 26, 1927 – June 6, 2013) was an American computer scientist chiefly known for his creation of the JOVIAL programming language. He served in the United States Army in both World War II and the Korean War. He attended gr ...

and Clark Weissman. "A General Purpose Time-Sharing System". Spartan Books.http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~egc/e.coffman1.pdf * 1973, with Peter Denning. ''Operating Systems Theory''. Prentice-Hall. * 2022, with Lycee Pierre de Fermat. ''Prof de NSI''. Bernard ONNO.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Coffman, Edward G. Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Theoretical computer scientists Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty 1934 births Living people

Research

Selected publications

See also

References