John Reif
Encyclopedia
John H. Reif is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 academics, and Professor of Computer Science at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, who has made contributions to large number of fields in computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

: ranging from algorithms and computational complexity theory
Computational complexity theory
Computational complexity theory is a branch of the theory of computation in theoretical computer science and mathematics that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty, and relating those classes to each other...

 to robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

 and to game theory
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...

.

Biography

John Reif received a B.S. (magna cum laude) from Tufts University in 1973, a M.S. from Harvard University in 1975 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977.

From 1983 to 1986 he was Associate Professor of Harvard University, and since 1986 he has been Professor of Computer Science at Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

. Currently he holds the Hollis Edens Distinguished Professor, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

.

John Reif is President of Eagle Eye Research, Inc., which specializes in defense applications of DNA biotechnology. He has also contributed to bringing together various disjoint research communities working in different areas of nano-sciences by organizing (as General Chairman) annual Conferences on "Foundations of Nanoscience: Self-assembled architectures and devices" (FNANO) for last 7 years.

He has been awarded Fellow of the following organizations: American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...

, IEEE, ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

, and the Institute of Combinatorics.

Research contributions

John Reif has made contributions to large number of fields in computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

: ranging from algorithms and computational complexity theory
Computational complexity theory
Computational complexity theory is a branch of the theory of computation in theoretical computer science and mathematics that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty, and relating those classes to each other...

 to robotics
Robotics
Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

 and to game theory
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...

. He developed efficient randomized algorithms and parallel algorithms for a wide variety of graph, geometric
Computational geometry
Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems are also considered to be part of computational...

, numeric, algebraic, and logical problems. His Google Scholar H-index is 51.

In the area of robotics, he gave the first hardness proofs for robotic motion planning
Motion planning
Motion planning is a term used in robotics for the process of detailing a task into discrete motions....

 as well as efficient algorithms for a wide variety of these problems.

He also has led applied research projects: parallel programming languages (Proteus System for parallel programming), parallel architectures (Blitzen, a massively parallel machine), data compression (massively parallel loss-less compression hardware), and optical computing (free-space holographic routing). His papers on these algorithmic topics can be downloaded here.

Research in nanoscience

More recently, he has centered his research in nanoscience and in particular DNA nanotechnology
DNA nanotechnology
DNA nanotechnology is a branch of nanotechnology which uses the molecular recognition properties of DNA and other nucleic acids to create designed, artificial structures out of DNA for technological purposes. In this field, DNA is used as a structural material rather than as a carrier of genetic...

, DNA computing
DNA computing
DNA computing is a form of computing which uses DNA, biochemistry and molecular biology, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies. DNA computing, or, more generally, biomolecular computing, is a fast developing interdisciplinary area...

, and DNA nanorobotics
Nanorobotics
Nanorobotics is the emerging technology field of creating machines or robots whose components are at or close to the scale of a nanometer . More specifically, nanorobotics refers to the nanotechnology engineering discipline of designing and building nanorobots, with devices ranging in size from...

. In the last dozen years his group at Duke has designed and experimentally demonstrated in the lab a variety of novel self-assembled DNA nanostructures and DNA lattices, including the first experimental demonstrations of molecular scale computation and patterning using DNA assembly. His group also experimentally demonstrated various molecular robotic devices composed of DNA, including one of the first autonomous unidirectional DNA walker that walked on a DNA track. He also has done significant work on controlling errors in self-assembly and the stochastic analysis of self-assembly.

Publications

He is the author of over 200 publications. A selection:

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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