Thomas Anantharaman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (January 2008)

Thomas S. Anantharaman is a computer statistician specializing in Bayesian inference approaches for NP complete problems. He is best known for his work with Feng-hsiung Hsu from 1985-1990 on the Chess playing computers ChipTest and Deep Thought at Carnegie Mellon University which led to his 1990 PhD Dissertation: "A Statistical Study of Selective Min-Max Search in Computer Chess". This work was the foundation for the IBM chess-playing computer Deep Blue which beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Thomas Ananthraman obtained a B.Tech. degree in Electronics in 1982. He got (in 1977) IIT-JEE rank (AIR) # 2 ! He could have got admission to any IIT & branch, but as per his father's advice, he joined IT-BHU. (His father Tanjore R. Anantharaman was a Rhodes scholar, world renowned metallurgist and in the faculty of meta dept. and director of IT-BHU.) Thomas went to USA and joined Carnegie Mellon University as a PhD student where he worked on the chess playing computers ChipTest and DeepThought with Feng-hsiung Hsu. Thomas received his PhD degree in 1990 and joined the field of biotechnology and Feng-hsiung Hsu joined IBM to design the Deep Blue IBM super-computer, which defeated Gary Kasparov in the historic chess match.

In 1985, Carnegie Mellon University graduate students Feng-hsiung Hsu, Thomas S. Anantharaman, Murray Campbell and Andreas Nowatzyk used spare chips they'd found to put together a chess-playing machine that they called ChipTest. By 1987, the machine, integrating some innovative ideas about search strategies, had become the reigning computer chess champion. A successor, Deep Thought, using two special-purpose chips, plus about 200 off-the-shelf chips, working in parallel, achieved grandmaster-level play. [1].

Following this work, Thomas focused his attentions into the field of biostatistics and the application of Bayesian methods to the analysis of single molecule Optical Mapping technologies. Currently he is working as Senior Bioinformatics Software Engineer at Opgen, Inc, Madison, Wisconsin.

  • Anantharaman T, Mishra B, Schwartz D (1999). "Genomics via optical mapping. III: Contiging genomic DNA.". Proc Int Conf Intell Syst Mol Biol: 18–27. PMID 10786282. 
  • Anantharaman TS, Mishra B, Schwartz D (1997). "Genomics via optical mapping. II: Ordered restriction maps.". J Comput Biol 4 (2): 91–118. PMID 9228610. 
  • Nicole T. Perna, Guy Plunkett III, Valerie Burland, Bob Mau, Jeremy D. Glasner, Debra J. Rose, George F. Mayhew, Peter S. Evans, Jason Gregor, Heather A. Kirkpatrick, György Pósfai, Jeremiah Hackett, Sara Klink, Adam Boutin, Ying Shao, Leslie Miller, Erik J. Grotbeck, N. Wayne Davis, Alex Lim, Eileen T. Dimalanta, Konstantinos D. Potamousis, Jennifer Apodaca, Thomas S. Anantharaman, Jieyi Lin, Galex Yen, David C. Schwartz, Rodney A. Welch and Frederick R. Blattner (2001). "Genome sequence of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli O157:H7". Nature 409: 529–533. doi:10.1038/35054089. PMID 11206551. 
 This Indian biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.