Steven Sol Skiena (born January 30, 1961) is a Computer Scientist and Distinguished Teaching Professor of

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 ...

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's ...

. He is also Director of AI Institute at Stony Brook. He was co-founder of General Sentiment, a social media and news analytics company, and served as Chief Science Officer from 2009 until it shut down in 2015. His research interests include

algorithm design In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing c ...

and its applications to

biology Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...

. Skiena is the author of several popular books in the fields of algorithms, programming, and mathematics. ''The Algorithm Design Manual'' is widely used as an undergraduate text in algorithms and within the tech industry for job interview preparation. In 2001, Skiena was awarded the IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award "for outstanding contributions to undergraduate education in the areas of algorithms and discrete mathematics and for influential textbook and software." Skiena has worked on algorithmic problems in

synthetic biology Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a multidisciplinary area of research that seeks to create new biological parts, devices, and systems, or to redesign systems that are already found in nature. It is a branch of science that encompasses a broad ran ...

, and, in particular, issues of optimal gene design for a given protein under various constraints. In collaboration with virologist

Eckard Wimmer Eckard Wimmer (born 22 May 1936) is a German American virologist, organic chemist and distinguished professor of molecular genetics and microbiology at Stony Brook University. He is best known for his seminal work on the molecular biology of p ...

, he has worked to computationally design synthetic viruses for use as

attenuated vaccine An attenuated vaccine (or a live attenuated vaccine, LAV) is a vaccine created by reducing the virulence of a pathogen, but still keeping it viable (or "live"). Attenuation takes an infectious agent and alters it so that it becomes harmless or less ...

s. Their Synthetic Attenuated Virus Engineering (SAVE) approach has been validated in flu and experiments with other viruses are ongoing. A popular account of this work appears in Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazare's ''Natural Computing.'' Skiena played a role in the conception of the

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

iPad The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating s ...

. In 1988, Skiena and his team won a competition run by Apple to design the ''Computer of the Year 2000''. Their design, a tablet featuring a touch screen, GPS, and wireless communications was similar in many regards to the iPad as released by Apple in 2010.

Bibliography

* * * * * *Review of ''Computational Discrete Mathematics'': Martha Patricia Niño Mojica (2005), ''Leonardo'

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Skiena, Steven 1961 births Living people American computer scientists Stony Brook University faculty University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign alumni Computer science educators Synthetic biologists