Abstract:
Many phenomena in the physical, biological, social and engineering sciences involve information processing at a fundamental level and can be studied through computational models. We will describe examples ranging over statistical physics, quantum information processing, analysis of economic mechanisms and social networks spawned by the Internet, and the regulation of biological processes.
About the Speaker:
Prof. Karp attended Boston Latin School and Harvard University, receiving the Ph.D. in 1959. He started working at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center. In 1968, he became Professor of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Operations Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Apart from a 4-year period as a professor at the University of Washington, he has remained at Berkeley. From 1988 to 1995 and 1999 to the present he has also been a Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, where he leads the Algorithms Group. He is currently also the Director of the Simons Institute for Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley.
Prof. Karp's research interests span operations research, theory of computation, algorithms, and computational biology. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including Lanchester Prize (1977), Fulkerson Prize (1979), A. M. Turing Award (1985), Von Neumann Theory Prize (1990), U.S. National Medal of Science (1996), Harvey Prize (Technion, 1998), Benjamin Franklin Medal (2004), Kyoto Prize (2008), and many honorary degrees. He is a member of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, US National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society and the French Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science.
