Selim G. Akl (Ph.D.,

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Univer ...

, 1978) is a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professo ...

at Queen's University in the Queen's School of Computing, where he leads the Parallel and Unconventional Computation Group. His research interests are primarily in the area of

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

design and analysis, in particular for problems in

parallel computing Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different f ...

and unconventional computing.

Activities

Akl is currently Director of the School of Computing at Queen's University. He is

editor in chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The highest-ranking editor of a publication may also be titled editor, managing ...

of ''Parallel Processing Letters'' published by

World Scientific Publishing World Scientific Publishing is an academic publisher of scientific, technical, and medical books and journals headquartered in Singapore. The company was founded in 1981. It publishes about 600 books annually, along with 135 journals in various f ...

in 1991 and an editor of several major

computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...

journals including: *''International Journal of Unconventional Computing'' (Old City Publishing; 2011) *''Computational Geometry'' (Elsevier; 1993) *''International Journal of Parallel, Emergent, and Distributed Systems'' (Taylor and Francis; 2004) Akl is the founding editorial board member of ''International Journal of High Performance Computing and Networking'' (Inderscience Publishers; 2003 ), and a past editor of ''Journal of Cryptology'' (Springer-Verlag; 1988–1991), ''Information Processing Letters'' (North-Holland; 1989–1999), and ''Parallel Algorithms and Applications'' (Taylor and Francis; 1991–2004).

Current research

Recently Akl created "Quantum Chess". The purpose of Quantum Chess is not to make the game more difficult; rather, by adding the unpredictability of quantum physics to chess, humans and computers are put on a level playing field, as they both face the same difficulties posed by the weirdness of the quantum. Alice Wismath, an undergraduate summer student, wrote a program implementing one of the many versions that Akl proposed in his article ''On the Importance of Being Quantum'' in September's Parallel Processing Letters article. Akl has claimed that the notion of universality in computation is false. Akl asserts that no machine can claim universality since there will always be a larger set of problems that such a machine cannot solve. Akl has described the non-universality in computation in more detail.

Conferences

Akl chaired the 2007 International Conference on Unconventional Computation that took place in

Kingston, Ontario Kingston is a city in Ontario, Canada. It is located on the north-eastern end of Lake Ontario, at the beginning of the St. Lawrence River and at the mouth of the Cataraqui River (south end of the Rideau Canal). The city is midway between Tor ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...

Publications

Akl is the author of several textbooks in the areas of

and

computational geometry Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems ar ...

:
Parallel Sorting Algorithms
(Academic Press, 1985)
The Design and Analysis of Parallel Algorithms
(Prentice Hall, 1989)

(Prentice Hall, 1997). He is also the co-author o
Parallel Computational Geometry
(Prentice Hall, 1993)
Adaptive Cryptographic Access Control
(Springer, 2010), Applications of Quantum Cryptography (LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2018) an
From Parallel to Emergent Computing
(CRC Press, 2019). His book on Parallel Computational Geometry is considered to be the definitive work on the subject.

Awards and recognition

Akl won the 2004 and 2007 Howard Staveley Award for Teaching Excellence. He received the Queen's University Prize for Excellence in Research in 2005 and the Queen's University Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision in 2012. He served as Director of the Queen's School of Computing (2007 - 2017). In 2018, Akl was the recipient of a CS-Can/Info-Can Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science.

External links

Selim Akl's Official Home Page

Queen's University School of Computing

* ttp://www.cs.queensu.ca/uc07/ International Conference on Unconventional Computation 2007

References

McGill University alumni Queen's University at Kingston faculty Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Canadian computer scientists {{Improve categories, date=November 2020