Daniel Sleator

Last updated
Daniel Sleator
Born10 December 1953 (1953-12-10) (age 70)
Alma mater University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Stanford University
ChildrenLeon Sleator
Awards Paris Kanellakis Award (1999)
Scientific career
Fields Computer science
Institutions Carnegie Mellon University
Doctoral advisor Robert Tarjan

Daniel Dominic Kaplan Sleator (born 10 December 1953) is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, United States. In 1999, he won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Award (jointly with Robert Tarjan) for the splay tree data structure. [2]

Contents

He was one of the pioneers in amortized analysis of algorithms, early examples of which were the analyses of the move-to-front heuristic, [3] and splay trees. [4] He invented many data structures with Robert Tarjan, such as splay trees, link/cut trees, and skew heaps.

The Sleator and Tarjan paper on the move-to-front heuristic [3] first suggested the idea of comparing an online algorithm to an optimal offline algorithm, for which the term competitive analysis was later coined in a paper of Karlin, Manasse, Rudolph, and Sleator. [5] Sleator also developed the theory of link grammars, and the Serioso music analyzer for analyzing meter and harmony in written music.

Personal life

Sleator was born to William Warner Sleator, Jr., a professor of physiology and biophysics, and Esther Kaplan Sleator, a pediatrician who did pioneering research on attention deficit disorder (ADD). [6] He is the younger brother of William Sleator, who wrote science fiction for young adults.

Sleator commercialized the volunteer-based Internet Chess Server into the Internet Chess Club despite outcry from fellow volunteers. The ICS has since become one of the most successful internet-based commercial chess servers.

From 2003 to 2008, Sleator co-hosted the progressive talk show Left Out on WRCT-FM with Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science faculty member Bob Harper.

He is also an active member of the competitive programming platform Codeforces. [7]

Related Research Articles

In computer science, a double-ended queue is an abstract data type that generalizes a queue, for which elements can be added to or removed from either the front (head) or back (tail). It is also often called a head-tail linked list, though properly this refers to a specific data structure implementation of a deque.

A splay tree is a binary search tree with the additional property that recently accessed elements are quick to access again. Like self-balancing binary search trees, a splay tree performs basic operations such as insertion, look-up and removal in O(log n) amortized time. For random access patterns drawn from a non-uniform random distribution, their amortized time can be faster than logarithmic, proportional to the entropy of the access pattern. For many patterns of non-random operations, also, splay trees can take better than logarithmic time, without requiring advance knowledge of the pattern. According to the unproven dynamic optimality conjecture, their performance on all access patterns is within a constant factor of the best possible performance that could be achieved by any other self-adjusting binary search tree, even one selected to fit that pattern. The splay tree was invented by Daniel Sleator and Robert Tarjan in 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Tarjan</span> American computer scientist and mathematician

Robert Endre Tarjan is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the discoverer of several graph theory algorithms, including his strongly connected components algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. Tarjan is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ron Rivest</span> American cryptographer

Ronald Linn Rivest is a cryptographer and computer scientist whose work has spanned the fields of algorithms and combinatorics, cryptography, machine learning, and election integrity. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

In computer science, a Fibonacci heap is a data structure for priority queue operations, consisting of a collection of heap-ordered trees. It has a better amortized running time than many other priority queue data structures including the binary heap and binomial heap. Michael L. Fredman and Robert E. Tarjan developed Fibonacci heaps in 1984 and published them in a scientific journal in 1987. Fibonacci heaps are named after the Fibonacci numbers, which are used in their running time analysis.

In computer science, a disjoint-set data structure, also called a union–find data structure or merge–find set, is a data structure that stores a collection of disjoint (non-overlapping) sets. Equivalently, it stores a partition of a set into disjoint subsets. It provides operations for adding new sets, merging sets, and finding a representative member of a set. The last operation makes it possible to find out efficiently if any two elements are in the same or different sets.

The Algorithm BSTW is a data compression algorithm, named after its designers, Bentley, Sleator, Tarjan and Wei in 1986. BSTW is a dictionary-based algorithm that uses a move-to-front transform to keep recently seen dictionary entries at the front of the dictionary. Dictionary references are then encoded using any of a number of encoding methods, usually Elias delta coding or Elias gamma coding.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paris Kanellakis</span> American computer scientist (1953–1995)

Paris Christos Kanellakis was a Greek American computer scientist.

A pairing heap is a type of heap data structure with relatively simple implementation and excellent practical amortized performance, introduced by Michael Fredman, Robert Sedgewick, Daniel Sleator, and Robert Tarjan in 1986. Pairing heaps are heap-ordered multiway tree structures, and can be considered simplified Fibonacci heaps. They are considered a "robust choice" for implementing such algorithms as Prim's MST algorithm, and support the following operations :

The k-server problem is a problem of theoretical computer science in the category of online algorithms, one of two abstract problems on metric spaces that are central to the theory of competitive analysis. In this problem, an online algorithm must control the movement of a set of kservers, represented as points in a metric space, and handle requests that are also in the form of points in the space. As each request arrives, the algorithm must determine which server to move to the requested point. The goal of the algorithm is to keep the total distance all servers move small, relative to the total distance the servers could have moved by an optimal adversary who knows in advance the entire sequence of requests.

Competitive analysis is a method invented for analyzing online algorithms, in which the performance of an online algorithm is compared to the performance of an optimal offline algorithm that can view the sequence of requests in advance. An algorithm is competitive if its competitive ratio—the ratio between its performance and the offline algorithm's performance—is bounded. Unlike traditional worst-case analysis, where the performance of an algorithm is measured only for "hard" inputs, competitive analysis requires that an algorithm perform well both on hard and easy inputs, where "hard" and "easy" are defined by the performance of the optimal offline algorithm.

A link/cut tree is a data structure for representing a forest, a set of rooted trees, and offers the following operations:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kurt Mehlhorn</span> German computer scientist (born 1949)

Kurt Mehlhorn is a German theoretical computer scientist. He has been a vice president of the Max Planck Society and is director of the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science.

Amos Fiat is an Israeli computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University. He is known for his work in cryptography, online algorithms, and algorithmic game theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Karlin</span> American computer scientist

Anna R. Karlin is an American computer scientist, the Microsoft Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington.

In computer science, Iacono's working set structure is a comparison based dictionary. It supports insertion, deletion and access operation to maintain a dynamic set of elements. The working set of an item is the set of elements that have been accessed in the structure since the last time that was accessed . Inserting and deleting in the working set structure takes time while accessing an element takes . Here, represents the size of the working set of .

In computer science, the order-maintenance problem involves maintaining a totally ordered set supporting the following operations:

In combinatorial mathematics and theoretical computer science, heavy-light decomposition is a technique for decomposing a rooted tree into a set of paths. In a heavy path decomposition, each non-leaf node selects one "heavy edge", the edge to the child that has the greatest number of descendants. The selected edges form the paths of the decomposition.

In computer science, an optimal binary search tree (Optimal BST), sometimes called a weight-balanced binary tree, is a binary search tree which provides the smallest possible search time (or expected search time) for a given sequence of accesses (or access probabilities). Optimal BSTs are generally divided into two types: static and dynamic.

Codeforces is a website that hosts competitive programming contests. It is maintained by a group of competitive programmers from ITMO University led by Mikhail Mirzayanov. Since 2013, Codeforces claims to surpass Topcoder in terms of active contestants. As of 2019, it has over 600,000 registered users. Codeforces along with other similar websites are used by some sport programmers, like Gennady Korotkevich, Petr Mitrichev, Benjamin Qi and Makoto Soejima, and by other programmers interested in furthering their careers.

References

  1. American Men and Women of Science, Thomson Gale, 2004
  2. Citation for Sleator and Tarjan Kanellakis Award Archived 2012-02-11 at the Wayback Machine
  3. 1 2 Sleator, Daniel D.; Tarjan, Robert E. (1985), "Amortized efficiency of list update and paging rules" (PDF), Communications of the ACM , 28 (2): 202–208, CiteSeerX   10.1.1.367.6317 , doi:10.1145/2786.2793, S2CID   2494305
  4. Sleator, Daniel D.; Tarjan, Robert E. (1985), "Self-Adjusting Binary Search Trees" (PDF), Journal of the ACM , 32 (3): 652–686, doi:10.1145/3828.3835, S2CID   1165848
  5. Karlin, Anna R.; Manasse, Mark S.; Rudolph, Larry; Sleator, Daniel D. (1988), "Competitive snoopy caching", Algorithmica , 3 (1): 79–119, doi:10.1007/BF01762111, MR   0925479, S2CID   33446072
  6. Fox, Margalit (August 6, 2011). "William Sleator, Fantasy Writer for Young Adults, Dies at 66". The New York Times . Retrieved 2011-08-07.
  7. "Darooha". Codeforces. Retrieved 2020-04-13.