Email: jsv "at" tamu.edu
Phone: +1 979.862.4875
Office: 315C HRBB (H. R. Bright Building)
Website: http://www.cse.tamu.edu/people/faculty/vitter/
M.B.A., Duke University, 2002
Ph.D., computer science, Stanford University, 1980
B.S., mathematics (with highest honors), University of Notre
Dame, 1977
Jeff Vitter is professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. From 2008–2009, he served as provost and executive vice president for academics at Texas A&M, where he had the responsibility of chief academic officer for a university of roughly 2,700 faculty members, 5,500 staff, 48,000 students, and an annual budget of $1.2 billion, comprising the Mays Business School, Dwight Look College of Engineering, George Bush School of Government and Public Service, and the Colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Architecture, Education and Human Development, Geosciences, Liberal Arts, Science, and Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. He also oversaw the academic mission of Texas A&M University in Doha, Qatar. In collaboration with deans and faculty, Dr. Vitter successfully launched a number of important recruiting efforts and far-reaching initiatives, including those dealing with faculty start-up allocations, multidisciplinary priorities, balanced scorecard reviews and recognition, and diversity. Most significantly, he initiated and led the campus-wide development of the Academic Master Plan — with Roadmaps in Teaching-Learning, Research, and Engagement, along with overarching enablers. It forms the strategic plan that will guide Texas A&M to the destination set out 10 years ago in Vision 2020 as a top-10 comprehensive public university.
From 2002–2008, Dr. Vitter served as the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of the College of Science and Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. As dean, he was the chief academic officer and administrator of the College of Science. In approximate terms, the College of Science comprised 325 faculty members, 550 staff members, 1,000 graduate students, and 2,800 undergraduate majors, with an annual budget of $130 million. The courses offered by the college accounted for about a quarter of the university's 1 million student credit hours. Dr. Vitter was responsible for overseeing the discovery, learning, engagement, and diversity activities of the College of Science's seven academic departments: Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Computer Sciences, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics. National rankings for departments and programs include information security (CERIAS) (#1), analytical chemistry (#2), information technology/information systems (CERIAS) (#2), computational science (#5), computer science (#9 and #19), statistics (#10), computer systems (#16 and #17), software engineering (#17), programming languages (#18), applied mathematics (#19), chemistry (#22), mathematics (#26), physics (#35), biological sciences (#42), and earth science (#43). In addition, the group in structural biology is internationally renowned.
The College of Science has primary oversight over the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), one of the world's leading centers in information security. CERIAS involves faculty from six colleges on campus, and it trains one-fourth of all the information security PhDs in the country. The College of Science is a strategic partner with fellow colleges at Purdue in several other university centers, including the Purdue Climate Change Research Center (PCCRC), the Center for Structural Biology, the Center for Sensing Science and Technology (CSST), the Computing Research Institute (CRI), the Center for Research and Engagement in Science and Mathematics Education (CRESME), and the I-STEM educational resource network, as well as the centers in Discovery Park, Purdue's hub of interdisciplinary centers. The college initiated the Purdue Science Journalism Laureates program as a way to recognize the world's leading science and technology communicators and to celebrate the important role they play in educating the public; the program is now an annual university program.
Dr. Vitter led the college in its strategic planning and assessment. The college's 2003–2008 strategic plan provides the framework and direction for the college to reach and sustain preeminence through a dynamic process of improvement and evaluation. The college grew by two major new buildings (CS, SB) and 60 faculty members and instituted a research faculty track. It developed ways to recruit faculty and staff more effectively and at the same time to increase diversity by means of building large and diverse candidate pools, improving filtering mechanisms, and identifying traits that lead to excellence. At the heart of the vision is a dual philosophy of advancing multidisciplinary collaborations as well as excellence in the core disciplines. Through a bottom-up process, the faculty identified seven multidisciplinary priorities that coalesce important contributions from multiple disciplines in the college and university to explore profound societal challenges. These seven "COALESCE I" areas are complemented by core excellence in the seven departments, including world-renowned programs in structural biology, analytical chemistry, statistics, computer science, information security, and applied mathematics.
In 2007, as part of the COALESCE II initiative, the College Hiring Priorities Committee (CHPC) collected vision papers and met with colleagues across campus, culminating in an all-day college-wide retreat on May 9, 2007 devoted to discussion and vetting of these vision papers. Part of the plan is already taking effect: In September 2007, the college allocated a number of multidisciplinary faculty positions, including joint searches with six other colleges, to complement and leverage cooperative hiring plans developed by science departments and by others across campus.
In January 2008, the college officially kicked off work on its current strategic plan. Much preparation work was done the preceding year, including the multidisciplinary planning process led by the CHPC; extensive surveys of faculty, staff, undergraduate students, and graduate students; and focus groups of key constituencies such as the Dean's Leadership Council, alumni, and high school teachers. A steering committee and four Pillar groups — on discovery, learning, engagement, and diversity — led the discussions. The college hosted campus-wide town hall meetings in April 2008 for further midcourse input. The strategic plan was drafted in Summer 2008 and formally approved in Fall 2008.
Dr. Vitter reorganized the dean's office into a proactive team of talented associate deans and directors with targeted areas of responsibility in academic affairs, research, undergraduate education, graduate education, diversity, international programs, advancement, corporate relations, advising, recruiting, K–12 outreach, and information technology. He initiated the annual faculty and staff awards ceremony to recognize individuals for their dedication and excellence in advising, mentoring, engagement, leadership, and multidisciplinary initiatives, as well for years of service. The offices of diversity and K–12 outreach play important engagement roles in improving educational opportunities and building pathways to higher education. Programs include diversity awareness training, leadership development, recruitment of faculty role models, mentoring, and improving the overall environment. Dr. Vitter proposed the LEAD (Learning through Experience and Awareness in Diversity) program for student diversity awareness after participating in a multiday diversity seminar during his first year at Purdue. He worked with his fellow deans and administrators to fund a pilot program, which was successful and subsequently adopted and expanded by the university's Diversity Resource Office. The K–12 outreach group is a national model for teacher partnerships and plays an important role in CRESME. The K–12 outreach group has directly impacted over a half million students and 7,000 teachers in Indiana, and it has conducted more than 2,600 school visits.
Dr. Vitter formed an undergraduate education task force to undertake the first comprehensive review of the college curriculum since its formation over 40 years ago; the goal was to ensure that all science students are well prepared as lifelong learners for successful and productive careers. With broad college-wide participation and working with the Undergraduate Education Policy and Curriculum Committee, the task force identified six key educational outcomes and designed an innovative and flexible curriculum and a set of experiences to meet them. After a successful pilot for selected undergraduate programs, the full curriculum was approved by the college faculty in April 2007 and went into effect for the 2007–2008 academic year. More than half of science students currently graduate with research or internship experience, and their participation in study abroad more than doubled in the three years. The new curriculum has incentives for further growth of these important experiences.
The College of Science recently celebrated its centennial — 100 years of imagination and innovation — and is working toward worldwide impact during its next 100 years. To help marshal needed resources, Dr. Vitter created a comprehensive office for advancement and strategic relations to coordinate fundraising, corporate relations, alumni and donor relations, and communications. The college recently opened the beautiful $22 million Lawson Computer Science Building and $33 million Hockmeyer Structural Biology Building. In addition, science faculty were involved in several new buildings in Discovery Park. In corporate relations, the college inaugurated a vibrant Science Business Partners Program, which provides corporations a common portal for mutually beneficial interactions in the college and across campus. One good example is the Geo-Mathematical Imaging Group, a consortium of major energy companies working with leading scientists across campus. The College of Science's new magazine Insights and monthly e-newsletter Science@Purdue reflect our consistent message that Purdue science is making a real difference for Indiana and our global society.
From 1993–2002, Dr. Vitter held a distinguished professorship at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he was the Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of Computer Science. He served at Duke as chair of the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences from 1993–2001 and as co-director and a founding member of Duke's Center for Geometric and Biological Computing from 1997–2002. As chair, he led the department to significant improvements in stature — characterized by a top-20 ranking, stellar faculty hires, dynamic strategic plans, a departmental culture of inclusiveness, curriculum redesign, administrative reorganization, substantial increases in both the undergraduate and graduate programs, creation of a successful industry partners program, and rise in sponsored research expenditures to 250% of previous level. From 1980–1993, he progressed through the faculty ranks and served in various leadership roles at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. His educational degrees include a B.S. with highest honors in mathematics in 1977 from the University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, Indiana; a Ph.D. in computer science under Don Knuth in 1980 from Stanford University in Stanford, California; and an M.B.A. in 2002 from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. His hometown is New Orleans, Louisiana (as everyone who knows him knows!). He and his wife Sharon have three children.
Dr. Vitter serves on the Board of Advisors for the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans. From 2000–2009, Dr. Vitter served on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), where he continues to co-chair the Government Affairs Committee. 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 EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science), as well as on various visiting and review committees. Sabbatical sites have included the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley; INRIA in Rocquencourt, France; Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris; Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey; and INRIA in Sophia Antipolis, France.
Dr. Vitter has been named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, a Fulbright Scholar, and an IBM Faculty Development Awardee. He has over 280 book, journal, conference, and patent publications reflecting his research interests described below. His Google Scholar h-index is 55. His book Algorithms and Data Structures for External Memory (now Publishers, 2008) covers the I/O field that he helped found. He 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. His 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. He has consulted widely and is co-holder of patents in the areas of external sorting, parallel I/O, prediction, and approximate data structures. He proposed the concept and participated in the design of what has become the Purdue University Research Expertise database (PURE) and the Indiana Database for University Research Expertise (INDURE), www.indure.org.
In his research, Jeff Vitter seeks to exploit the rich interdependence between computing theory and practice. Dr. Vitter has pioneered the development of important subfields dealing with massive data. He is perhaps best known as a founder of the field of external memory algorithms, which focuses on alleviating the I/O bottleneck between fast internal memory and slow external storage (such as disks). The goal is to design algorithms that exploit locality of reference and parallelism in order to reduce I/O costs, which is important in a variety of data-intensive applications. His recent book serves as a reference for the field. He has developed paradigms in several domains for efficient algorithms using external memory and hierarchical memory. His approach for utilizing parallel disks (in which communication with each disk can occur simultaneously) using the notion of read/write duality has led to state-of-the-art methods for sorting. He has contributed to algorithm engineering via the TPIE system (Transparent Parallel I/O programming Environment) developed by a former student.
A second key aspect of massive data where Dr. Vitter plays a leadership role is compressed data structures. The goal is to operate directly upon compressed representations of data, yet still achieve fast response time. The wavelet tree data structure he co-developed (not to confuse with wavelets discussed two paragraphs below) is an elegant structure for coding sequences of characters from a multicharacter alphabet; it has become a key component in modern indexing and compression. Until this century, fast data structures for text indexing (such as suffix trees and suffix arrays) required much more space than the data being indexed! Based upon a recursive decomposition of the suffix array, Dr. Vitter and colleagues invented the compressed suffix array, which is substantially smaller — the first fast index provably shown to use only linear space, and then later the first ever whose size per character was provably shown to be asymptotic (i.e., with constant of proportionality 1) to the higher-order entropy of the text. The index can even reconstruct the original text in a random access manner, and thus the original text can be discarded. The net effect is that the text can be completely replaced by an index structure that has the size of compressed text but can be queried quickly.
In a third aspect of massive data, Dr. Vitter is a leading figure in the data compression community, noted for his analytical bent and influence. He has done fundamental work on data compression for text, images, and video. A provably efficient algorithm for adaptive Huffman coding bears his name. With a former student, Dr. Vitter developed and analyzed fast and practical methods for arithmetic coding. They invented the FELICS algorithm for lossless image compression; it was subsequently implemented in hardware as part of NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It introduced a low-cost prediction framework that influenced algorithms ultimately adopted into the Lossless JPEG standard. In video compression, Dr. Vitter and his group proposed the paradigm of minimizing the combined measure of rate plus distortion to significantly improve motion estimation coding; this rate-distortion optimization has been incorporated into the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard's reference encoder, used widely in the computing and communications industry.
Fourth, Dr. Vitter and collaborators were the first in the database and systems communities to apply wavelets and compression techniques as key tools for summarizing, approximating, and predicting data. Wavelets have since become heavily used in database optimization, data warehousing, data streams, image processing, and data mining. For his work on wavelets for approximating high-dimensional aggregates, he and his coauthor were the recipients of the 2009 ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award, which recognizes the SIGMOD paper from 10 years earlier that has had the most impact in the following decade in terms of research, products, and methodology. Dr. Vitter has co-developed novel machine learning and prediction mechanisms based upon data compression, using the principle that the more compressible a sequence is, the more predictable it is. His universal prediction algorithms for online prefetching are provably asymptotically optimal (i.e., with constant of proportionality 1). They predict as well as special-purpose methods tuned to the characteristics of the sequence. His learning work includes algorithms for prefetching, caching, data streams, database query optimization, data mining, and power management in mobile computers.
Beginning with his thesis on coalesced hashing, a search method used widely in practice, Dr. Vitter has made many contributions to the analysis of algorithms, using mathematical analysis and asymptotics to derive precise estimates for resource requirements. He has also done much work involving randomized, parallel, and incremental algorithms for a variety of problems in computational geometry, combinatorial optimization, graphics, random sampling, and random variate generation.
The full list of Dr. Vitter's publications and funding appears in his curriculum vitæ. Several of his recent publications, including a book on algorithms and data structures for external memory, in which the focus is on I/O efficiency, and a book on efficient algorithms for MPEG video compression, are available electronically via his online publication library. Alternatively, they're available via anonymous ftp at ftp.cs.duke.edu in directory pub/jsv/Papers.
