by J. Martin Eidsath
Daily Lobo
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has selected UNM Assistant Professor David Bader to serve a three-year term as a distinguished speaker for the institute’s Computer Society.
Bader, an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, said he is honored to have been selected for the speaker program.
The institute is the world’s largest professional organization with 377,000 members, according to the organization’s Web site. The Computer Society is the largest society inside the institute and is made up of 100,000 members.
The Computer Society Distinguished Lecturer Program includes about 40 speakers appointed for three-year terms. The program draws about two-thirds of its speakers from academia and another one-third from industry. Each year about 12 new speakers are selected.
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The speakers are authorities in their respective fields and travel to various institute’s Computer Society chapters to present material in connection with their current research.
Christos Christodoulou, UNM Electrical and Computer Engineering Department chairman, said that Bader’s selection will mean “tremendous visibility for UNM.” He added that the institute’s selection of Bader “means that people have recognized his contribution to the field” and it will help him “build a national reputation.”
As a distinguished speaker, Bader makes himself available for speaking requests by any chapter of the Computer Society to speak about a topic of his selection. The institute will reimburse Bader for up to $700 in travel expenses per speaking trip, according to Computer Society program guidelines.
Bader said he plans to limit his travel to about once a month to avoid interference with his teaching schedule.
He said he already has some topics from his own research that he plans to speak about.
Bader recently collaborated on a project that sought to trace the evolutionary past of Campanulaceae, a family of bell-shaped flowers. In order to map the flower’s history from its genetic code, a computer algorithm was needed that could calculate inversion distance of certain gene permutations. Bader said “it’s bizarre to go from something with genes to these weird combinatorics problems.”
Bader worked with Bernard Moret, of the UNM Computer Science Department and Mi Yan, a UNM graduate student, and published a paper presenting a fast linear-time algorithm that was used to process the flower’s genetic data.
Bader has received other honors for his work, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. As part of the CAREER program, Bader works on developing algorithms for shared memory systems. These parallel computing systems are becoming more and more important as high-performance computing shifts heavily toward parallel processing, Bader said.
Bader said he feels that computers are moving away from the traditional model of a single PC and toward a cluster arrangement with more and more cores on the same silicon. This means that these new algorithms will play an important role in future computing problems.
Bader said that Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, authored a paper during his academic career having to do with a problem in combinatorics relevant to his own research. He jokes that he “is doing what Bill Gates might have been doing had he stayed in academia.”
