TITLE:

 My Research Journey So Far

 Desh Ranjan
 New Mexico State University

ABSTRACT:

In this talk, I will present an overview of my research
in computer science over the last 20 years.

My research journey began with my graduate work at Cornell University in
structural complexity theory - a field that tries to answer very fundamental
questions about what can be computed with limited  resources.  These questions
also happen to be notoriously hard e.g. the P vs. NP question. Towards the end
of my Ph.D. dissertation, I became keenly interested in exploring the  power of
randomness in computation. Together with colleagues at Max Planck  Institute, I
explored the notion of negative dependence among random variables which is
often useful in analysis of probabilistic algorithms. While I was an assistant
professor at NMSU, I was approached by colleagues who were working with
parallel implementations of logic programming systems who felt that their
system was superior to others but had no ``proof''. Working together with
these colleagues, I was able to formalize the problems that needed to be solved
for efficient implementations of ``parts'' of the system and actually  design
better algorithms and prove lower bounds for solving these problems. I spent my
sabbatical year at Iowa State University familiarizing myself with the research
challenges in the very exciting field of Bioinformatics and Computational
Biology. Since then I, and my students, have been  involved in designing
efficient algorithms in the field as well as developing software tools to
assist biologist in genomic data analysis. While at NMSU, I also had the
privilege of doing some research in computational aspects of graph theory with
Dr. Frank  Harary. In my talk, I will summarize the results that I was able to
obtain in my research in these fields.

BIO:

Desh Ranjan is currently a professor and the head of the computer  science
department at New Mexico State University where he has been a faculty member
since 1993. He is also the Director of the NMSU Center for Bioinformatics. He
received his Ph.D. and M.S.  degrees from Cornell University in 1992 and 1990
respectively, working under the guidance of Turing award winner Dr. Juris
Hartmanis. Prior to that he received his BS in computer  science from Indian
Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He did his post- doctoral work (1992-93) with
Dr. Kurt Mehlhorn at the Max Planck Institute in  Germany and was a visiting
professor at Iowa State University (2000-2001). He  received the NMSU award for
a distinguished research career in 2007 and  "Millionaire Researcher" award in
2008. His research interests include computational  complexity, efficient
algorithm design, randomness in computation and  computational biology.