Eli Upfal

Eli Upfal is a professor of computer science at Brown University, where he was also the department chair from 2002 to 2007. Prior to joining Brown in 1998, he was a researcher and project manager at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California, and a professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Upfal's research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms. In particular he is interested in randomized algorithms, probabilistic analysis of algorithms, and computational statistics, with applications ranging from combinatorial and stochastic optimization to routing and communication networks, computational biology, and computational finance. He has published over 200 research papers in scientific journals and conferences. He is co-author of a popular textbook, Probability and Computing: Randomized Algorithms and Probabilistic Analysis (with M. Mitzenmacher, Cambridge University Press 2005), and holds 13 US patents. His patents related to sequencing by hybridizations (with F. Preparata) were licensed to GeneSpectrum Inc., a bio-tech startup (acquired by NABsys inc. in 2006).