Office of the Provost and
Executive Vice President for Academics

Meet the Provost

Jeffrey S. Vitter was confirmed as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics at Texas A&M University on August 1, 2008. Before coming to Texas A&M, he served six years as the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science and Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

After earning a bachelor's degree in mathematics with highest honors from the University of Notre Dame in 1977 and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 1980, he began his academic career as assistant professor of computer science at Brown University in 1980 where he progressed through the faculty ranks and served in various leadership roles. From 1993 to 2002, Dr. Vitter was the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He served as chair of the Department of Computer Science at Duke from 1993-2001 and as co-director and a founding member of Duke's Center for Geometric and Biological Computing from 1997-2002. While serving on the faculty at Duke, he earned an M.B.A. from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke in 2002. His home town is New Orleans, Louisiana.

Dr. Vitter serves on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association, where he co-chairs the government affairs committee. He is a member of the board of advisors for the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans, where he previously served as adjunct faculty member. He has served as chair of ACM SIGACT, the Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory of the world's largest computer professional organization, the Association for Computing Machinery. He has served on the executive council of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, as well as on various review committees. Sabbatical sites have included Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley; Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (I.N.R.I.A.) in Rocquencourt, France; Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey; and I.N.R.I.A. in Sophia Antipolis, France.

Dr. Vitter has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, a Fulbright Scholar, and an IBM Faculty Development Awardee. He has over 250 book, journal, and conference publications; his Google Scholar h-index is 54. He authored the book Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory (now Publishers, 2008), which covers the I/O field he helped found. He has also coauthored the books Efficient Algorithms for MPEG Video Compression (Wiley & Sons, 2002) and Design and Analysis of Coalesced Hashing (Oxford University Press, 1987). He is coeditor of the collections External Memory Algorithms and Algorithm Engineering and co-holder of patents in the areas of external sorting, parallel I/O, prediction, and approximate data structures. Editorial board memberships have included Algorithmica, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Theory of Computing Systems (formerly Mathematical Systems Theory: An International Journal on Mathematical Computing Theory), and SIAM Journal on Computing; in addition, he has edited several special issues.

One theme in Dr. Vitter's research and teaching is how to alleviate the I/O bottleneck between fast internal memory and slow external storage (such as disk) that can occur when processing massive data sets. He is credited as a founder of the field of external memory algorithms. He has pioneered the development of efficient external memory algorithms in several domains, including geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial databases, sorting, text and string indexing, matrix computations, graph traversal, range search, data mining, and a variety of computational geometry and combinatorial problems. A related interest is how to take advantage of parallel disks or parallel hierarchical memories, in which communication with each parallel memory device can occur simultaneously. He is involved in algorithm engineering using the TPIE system (Transparent Parallel I/O programming Environment). Another aspect of Dr. Vitter's work involves novel machine learning and prediction mechanisms based upon data compression and locality, using the principle that the more compressible a sequence is, the more predictable it is. Examples include algorithms for caching, prefetching, data streams, database query optimization, data mining, and resource management in mobile computers. He introduced the important use of wavelets in database applications and through that work was co-recipient of the 2009 SIGMOD Test of Time award. He has worked on efficient approaches to image, video, and text compression. He currently works on compressed data structures for searching, where the goal is to use a small amount of space equal to the entropy of the input data, yet still achieve fast search time. Previously, fast data structures for text indexing (such as suffix trees and suffix arrays) required several times more space than the data being indexed! Other interests include randomized, parallel, and incremental algorithms for computational geometry, graphics, random sampling, and random variate generation.

More information about Dr. Vitter's work, an online publication catalog, and his full curriculum vitæ can be found on his computer science and engineering web page.

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