Charles Eric Leiserson (born 1953) is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(M.I.T.). He specializes in the theory of

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

and

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

Education

Leiserson received a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in computer science and mathematics from

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

in 1975 and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

degree in computer science from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

in 1981, where his advisors were Jon Bentley and H. T. Kung. Leiserson's dissertation, ''Area-Efficient VLSI Computation'', won the first

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is awarded annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to the authors of the best doctoral dissertations in computer science and computer engineering. The award is accompanied by a prize of US$20,000 a ...

in 1982.

Work career

He joined the faculty of the

in 1981, where he eventually became the Edwin Sibley Webster

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department.Charles Leiserson: BIO
from mit.edu, last accessed on 9 February 2024. Preceding this, he was associate director and Chief Operating Officer of the

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

and principal of the Theory of Computation research group. He lists himself as faculty director of the MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator, which is designed to make fundamental advances in artificial intelligence to improve Department of the Air Force operations while also addressing broader societal needs.

Thinking Machines

During the 1980s, Leiserson was on leave from M.I.T. at

Thinking Machines Corporation Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and Danny Hillis, W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at th ...

, where he invented the fat-tree interconnection network, a hardware-universal interconnection network used in many supercomputers, including the

Connection Machine The Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers sold by Thinking Machines Corporation. The idea for the Connection Machine grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann arch ...

CM5, for which he was network architect.

VLSI and caching methods

He helped pioneer the development of VLSI theory, including the retiming method of digital optimization with James B. Saxe and

systolic array In parallel computer architectures, a systolic array is a homogeneous network of tightly coupled data processing units (DPUs) called cells or nodes. Each node or DPU independently computes a partial result as a function of the data received fro ...

s with H. T. Kung. He conceived of the notion of

cache-oblivious algorithm In computing, a cache-oblivious algorithm (or cache-transcendent algorithm) is an algorithm designed to take advantage of a processor cache without having the size of the cache (or the length of the cache lines, etc.) as an explicit parameter. An ...

s, which are algorithms that have no tuning parameters for cache size or cache-line length, but nevertheless use cache near-optimally.

Cilk programming language

He developed the

Cilk Cilk, Cilk++, Cilk Plus and OpenCilk are general-purpose programming languages designed for multithreaded parallel computing. They are based on the C and C++ programming languages, which they extend with constructs to express parallel loop ...

language for multithreaded programming, which uses a provably good work-stealing algorithm for scheduling. His bio lists two internationally recognized chess playing programs based on Cilk, the StarSocrates and the Cilkchess. :See

for details on the programming language Following this, he was founder and chief technology officer of the Cilk Arts, Inc. startup, developing Cilk-based technology for multicore computing applications. The company was acquired by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

in 2009, upon which Leiserson initiated the open source OpenCilk movement. Leiserson received multiple research awards in 2013 and 2014 for the Cilk work (see below).

Akamai

He was formerly director of research and director of system architecture for

Akamai Technologies Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American company specialized in content delivery networkJ. Dilley, B. Maggs, J. Parikh, H. Prokop, R. Sitaraman, and B. Weihl. (CDN), cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and cloud services. It is headquartered in ...

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

, a company that developed content distribution networks in the late 1990s. The company grew out of the research made at M.I.T., and where his Ph.D. student Robert Blumofe was Executive Vice President.

Textbooks

Leiserson coauthored the standard algorithms textbook ''

Introduction to Algorithms ''Introduction to Algorithms'' is a book on computer programming by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ron Rivest, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein. The book is described by its publisher as "the leading algorithms text in universities w ...

'' together with Thomas H. Cormen, Ronald L. Rivest, and

Clifford Stein Clifford Seth Stein (born December 14, 1965), a computer scientist, is a professor of industrial engineering and operations research at Columbia University in New York, NY, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Computer Scien ...

. Leiserson mentions this was elected the "Best 1990 Professional and Scholarly Book in Computer Science and Data Processing" by the

Association of American Publishers The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is the national trade association of the American book publishing industry. AAP lobbies for book, journal and education publishers in the United States. AAP members include most of the major commercial ...

Awards and honors

*1981 Fannie and John Hertz Foundation’s Doctoral Thesis Award. *1982

for his Ph.D. thesis, ''Area-Efficient VLSI Computation'' *1985

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

awarded him

Presidential Young Investigator Award The Presidential Young Investigator Award (PYI) was awarded by the National Science Foundation of the United States Federal Government. The program operated from 1984 to 1991, and was replaced by the NSF Young Investigator (NYI) Awards and Preside ...

. *2007 elected Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, the highest recognition at MIT for undergraduate teaching. *2013 Paris Kanellakis Award from ACM, with his PhD student Robert D. Blumofe, for "contributions to robust parallel and distributed computing", in particular the work-stealing scheduling and the Cilk research. *2014 Taylor L. Booth Education Award from the

IEEE Computer Society IEEE Computer Society (commonly known as the Computer Society or CS) is a technical society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) dedicated to computing, namely the major areas of hardware, software, standards and people ...

"for worldwide computer science education impact through writing a best-selling algorithms textbook, and developing courses on algorithms and parallel programming." *2014 Ken Kennedy Award from ACM-IEEE Computer Society for his "enduring influence on parallel computing systems and their adoption into mainstream use through scholarly research and development." He was also cited for "distinguished mentoring of computer science leaders and students." ACM, IEEE Computer Society Recognize Charles E. Leiserson for Advances in Parallel Computing Systems
press release from acm.org on 12 September 2014. *Elected as

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membe ...

(ACM), the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a United States–based international nonprofit with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsib ...

(AAAS), the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office ...

(IEEE), and the

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific soci ...

(SIAM).

Personal life

His father was Mark Leiserson, a professor of economics at

.Mark Leiserson: Noted international economist
obituary from Yale University on 30 August 2002.

References

External links

Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Leiserson, Charles American theoretical computer scientists Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty 2006 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Living people Researchers in distributed computing Yale University alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni 1953 births American chief technology officers