Joined department: 2002

Professor Jeff Vitter is currently the provost and executive vice chancellor at the University of Kansas, where he also holds the position of Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor. His home department at KU is the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and he is a member of the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center (ITTC).

In his research, Prof. Vitter investigates how to manage and process very large amounts of data. He helped pioneer the field of external memory algorithms, where the goal is to develop I/O-efficient algorithms that alleviate the bottleneck between small but fast internal memory and large but slow external storage. His work melds theory and practice to span a number of application areas, including geographic information systems (GIS), databases, computational geometry, data mining, and text indexing. For example, Vitter and colleagues designed an I/O-efficient algorithm to help researchers in the Nicholas School of Environment at Duke compute how water flows and accumulates, based on satellite elevation data. The computation time for processing data from the Appalachian Mountain region was reduced from several days to just a few hours.

Another aspect of Vitter's work involves novel prediction mechanisms based upon principles of data compression and locality; examples include algorithms for caching, prefetching, data streaming, database query optimization, data mining, and resource management in mobile computers. His interest in prediction comes from ongoing work in data compression (in which data can be represented succinctly when the patterns in the data are predictable) and machine learning (in which predictions can be made when prior data can be represented succinctly). Vitter is currently working on compressed indexes for long sequences of symbols, such as text. A recent theoretical breakthrough he worked on showed how to fully compress text and make it self-indexing at the same time. Experiments have shown this compressed suffix array technique to be quite practical.

Vitter has consulted widely and is co-holder of patents in the areas of external sorting, parallel I/O, prediction, and approximate data structures. He proposed the concept and participated in the design of what has become the Purdue University Research Expertise database (PURE) and the Indiana Database for University Research Expertise (INDURE), www.indure.org.

Honors & Awards: Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2009; ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award, 2009; ACM Recognition of Service Award, 2001 and 1998; Fulbright Scholar, 1998; Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 1996; Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 1993; Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, 1986; National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, 1985.