Professor of Computer Science
Joined department in 2002
University of Notre Dame (1977)
Stanford University (1980)
In his research, Professor Jeff 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, Professor 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). Professor 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 the technique to be quite practical.
Honors & Awards: Fellow, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, 1986; Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 1993; Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 1996; National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award 1985; Fulbright Scholar, 1998; Recognition of Service Award, ACM, 1998 and 2001.
