Steven Skiena

Steven Sol Skiena
Born	(1961-01-30)January 30, 1961
Nationality	United States
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Stony Brook University (1988–present)
Alma mater	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Doctoral advisor	Herbert Edelsbrunner

Steven Sol Skiena (born 1961) is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University.^[1] He is a co-founder and the Chief Science Officer of General Sentiment, a social media and news analytics company.^[2] His research interests include algorithm design and its applications to biology. Skiena is the author of several popular books in the fields of algorithms, programming, and mathematics. The Algorithm Design Manual is widely used as an undergraduate text in algorithms and within the tech industry for job interview preparation.^[3]

Skiena has worked on algorithmic problems in synthetic biology, and, in particular, issues of optimal gene design for a given protein under various constraints. In collaboration with virologist Eckard Wimmer, he has worked to computationally design synthetic viruses for use as attenuated vaccines.^[4] Their Synthetic Attenuated Virus Engineering (SAVE) approach has been validated in flu^[5] and experiments with other viruses are ongoing. A popular account of this work appears in Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazare's Natural Computing.^[6]

Skiena played a role in the conception of the Apple iPad. In 1988, Skiena and his team won a competition run by Apple to design the Computer of the Year 2000^[7] Their design, a tablet featuring a touch screen, GPS, and wireless communications was similar in many regards to the iPad of 2010.^[8]

Bibliography

• Skiena, Steven; Ward, Charles (2013). Who’s Bigger: Where Historical Figures Really Rank. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1107041370. 
• Skiena, Steven (2010). The Algorithm Design Manual (2nd ed.). Springer Science+Business Media. ISBN 1-849-96720-2. 
• Skiena, Steven; Revilla, Miguel (2003). Programming Challenges (1st ed.). Springer Science+Business Media. ISBN 0-387-00163-8. 

• Skiena, Steven (2001). Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win (Outlooks) (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00962-6. 

• Pemmaraju, Sriram; Skiena, Steven. Computational Discrete Mathematics: Combinatorics and Graph Theory with Mathematica (1st ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-12146-9. 

References