Selim Akl

Last updated

Selim G. Akl (Ph.D., McGill University, born 1978) is a professor at Queen's University in the Queen's School of Computing, where he leads the Parallel and Unconventional Computation Group. [1] His research interests are primarily in the area of algorithm design and analysis, in particular for problems in parallel computing and unconventional computing.

Contents

Activities

Akl is currently Director of the School of Computing at Queen's University. He is editor in chief of Parallel Processing Letters published by World Scientific Publishing in 1991 [2] and an editor of several major computing journals including:

Akl is the founding editorial board member of International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking (Inderscience Publishers; 2003 ), [6] and a past editor of Journal of Cryptology (Springer-Verlag; 1988–1991), Information Processing Letters (North-Holland; 1989–1999), and Parallel Algorithms and Applications (Taylor and Francis; 1991–2004).

Current research

Recently[ when? ] Akl created "Quantum Chess". [7] The purpose of Quantum Chess is not to make the game more difficult; rather, by adding the unpredictability of quantum physics to chess, humans and computers are put on a level playing field, as they both face the same difficulties posed by the weirdness of the quantum. Alice Wismath, an undergraduate summer student, wrote a program implementing one of the many versions that Akl proposed in his article On the Importance of Being Quantum in September's Parallel Processing Letters article. [8]

Akl has claimed that the notion of universality in computation is false. [9] Akl asserts that no machine can claim universality since there will always be a larger set of problems that such a machine cannot solve. Akl has described the non-universality in computation in more detail. [10]

Conferences

Akl chaired the 2007 International Conference on Unconventional Computation that took place in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. [11]

Publications

Akl is the author of several textbooks in the areas of parallel computing and computational geometry:

He is also the co-author of Parallel Computational Geometry (Prentice Hall, 1993), Adaptive Cryptographic Access Control (Springer, 2010), Applications of Quantum Cryptography (LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2018) and From Parallel to Emergent Computing (CRC Press, 2019).

His book on Parallel Computational Geometry is considered to be the definitive work on the subject. [12]

Awards and recognition

Akl won the 2004 and 2007 Howard Staveley Award for Teaching Excellence. [13] He received the Queen's University Prize for Excellence in Research in 2005 [14] and the Queen's University Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision in 2012. [15] He served as Director of the Queen's School of Computing (2007 - 2017). In 2018, Akl was the recipient of a CS-Can/Info-Can Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science. [12]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quantum computing</span> Technology that uses quantum mechanics

A quantum computer is a computer that takes advantage of quantum mechanical phenomena.

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 geometry. While modern computational geometry is a recent development, it is one of the oldest fields of computing with a history stretching back to antiquity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theoretical computer science</span> Subfield of computer science and mathematics

Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, formal language theory, the lambda calculus and type theory.

Bio-inspired computing, short for biologically inspired computing, is a field of study which seeks to solve computer science problems using models of biology. It relates to connectionism, social behavior, and emergence. Within computer science, bio-inspired computing relates to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Bio-inspired computing is a major subset of natural computation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timothy M. Chan</span> Canadian computer scientist

Timothy Moon-Yew Chan is a Founder Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He was formerly Professor and University Research Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Canada.

Unconventional computing is computing by any of a wide range of new or unusual methods. It is also known as alternative computing.

Joseph Frederick Traub was an American computer scientist. He was the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He held positions at Bell Laboratories, University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and Columbia, as well as sabbatical positions at Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, California Institute of Technology, and Technical University, Munich.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Godfried Toussaint</span> Canadian computer scientist (1944–2019)

Godfried Theodore Patrick Toussaint was a Canadian computer scientist, a professor of computer science, and the head of the Computer Science Program at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He is considered to be the father of computational geometry in Canada. He did research on various aspects of computational geometry, discrete geometry, and their applications: pattern recognition, motion planning, visualization, knot theory, linkage (mechanical) reconfiguration, the art gallery problem, polygon triangulation, the largest empty circle problem, unimodality, and others. Other interests included meander (art), compass and straightedge constructions, instance-based learning, music information retrieval, and computational music theory.

In computability theory, super-recursive algorithms are a generalization of ordinary algorithms that are more powerful, that is, compute more than Turing machines. The term was introduced by Mark Burgin, whose book "Super-recursive algorithms" develops their theory and presents several mathematical models. Turing machines and other mathematical models of conventional algorithms allow researchers to find properties of recursive algorithms and their computations. In a similar way, mathematical models of super-recursive algorithms, such as inductive Turing machines, allow researchers to find properties of super-recursive algorithms and their computations.

Lateral computing is a lateral thinking approach to solving computing problems. Lateral thinking has been made popular by Edward de Bono. This thinking technique is applied to generate creative ideas and solve problems. Similarly, by applying lateral-computing techniques to a problem, it can become much easier to arrive at a computationally inexpensive, easy to implement, efficient, innovative or unconventional solution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cristian S. Calude</span>

Cristian Sorin Calude is a Romanian-New Zealander mathematician and computer scientist.

Tensor software is a class of mathematical software designed for manipulation and calculation with tensors.

<i>Parallel Processing Letters</i> Academic journal

Parallel Processing Letters is a journal published by World Scientific since 1991. It covers the field of parallel processing, including topics such as design and analysis of parallel and distributed algorithms, parallel programming languages and parallel architectures and VLSI circuits.

<i>Information Processing Letters</i> Academic journal

Information Processing Letters is a peer-reviewed scientific journal in the field of computer science, published by Elsevier. The aim of the journal is to enable fast dissemination of results in the field of information processing in the form of short papers. Submissions are limited to nine double-spaced pages.

Natural computing, also called natural computation, is a terminology introduced to encompass three classes of methods: 1) those that take inspiration from nature for the development of novel problem-solving techniques; 2) those that are based on the use of computers to synthesize natural phenomena; and 3) those that employ natural materials to compute. The main fields of research that compose these three branches are artificial neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems, fractal geometry, artificial life, DNA computing, and quantum computing, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph S. B. Mitchell</span> American computer scientist and mathematician

Joseph S. B. Mitchell is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is Distinguished Professor and Department Chair of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Research Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University.

The concept of biological computation proposes that living organisms perform computations, and that as such, abstract ideas of information and computation may be key to understanding biology. As a field, biological computation can include the study of the systems biology computations performed by biota the design of algorithms inspired by the computational methods of biota, the design and engineering of manufactured computational devices using synthetic biology components and computer methods for the analysis of biological data, elsewhere called computational biology or bioinformatics.

In quantum computing, quantum supremacy or quantum advantage is the goal of demonstrating that a programmable quantum computer can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time, irrespective of the usefulness of the problem. The term was coined by John Preskill in 2012, but the concept dates back to Yuri Manin's 1980 and Richard Feynman's 1981 proposals of quantum computing.

References

  1. ↑ "Parallel Home Page". research.cs.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  2. ↑ Akl, Selim G. (2016). "Editorial Note". Parallel Processing Letters. 26 (1): 1601001. doi:10.1142/s0129626416010015. ISSN   0129-6264.
  3. ↑ "IJUC editorial board". 2011-07-28. Archived from the original on 2011-07-28. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  4. ↑ Computational Geometry.
  5. ↑ "International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems". www.tandfonline.com. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  6. ↑ "International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking (IJHPCN) - Inderscience Publishers". www.inderscience.com. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  7. ↑ "Quantum physics adds twist to chess | CBC News". CBC. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  8. ↑ AKL, SELIM G. (2010). "On the Importance of Being Quantum". Parallel Processing Letters. 20 (3): 275–286. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.174.5566 . doi:10.1142/s0129626410000223. ISSN   0129-6264.
  9. ↑ Akl, Selim G. "Even accelerating machines are not universal" (PDF). Queen's University.
  10. ↑ "Recent Research Projects". research.cs.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  11. ↑ "Unconventional Computation 2007 - UC '07 - 6th International Conference on Unconventional Computation". research.cs.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2018-11-06.
  12. 1 2 "Selim G. Akl • CS-Can / Info-Can". CS-Can / Info-Can. Retrieved 2019-02-20.
  13. ↑ "Awards". www.cs.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2019-02-20.
  14. ↑ "Prizes for Excellence in Research | Office of the Vice-Principal (Research)". www.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2019-02-20.
  15. ↑ "Awards". www.cs.queensu.ca. Retrieved 2019-02-20.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.