Franco P. Preparata (born December 1935) is a computer scientist, the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He is best known for his 1985 computational geometry book with Michael Shamos, for many years the standard textbook in the field, but Preparata has worked in many other areas of computer science: his initial work was on coding theory, and his 1981 paper in distributed computing describing the cube-connected cycles computer communications network is still highly cited, as is his 1967 paper on fault diagnosis. His 1991 paper with Zhou and Kang on interconnection delays in VLSI was awarded the 1993 Darlington Best Paper Award by the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society[1], and he has attracted media coverage[2] for his more recent work in computational biology.

Preparata was born in Italy in December, 1935.[3] He received a doctorate from the University of Rome in 1959. After a postdoctorate at CNR and several years of working in industry he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1965, where he stayed for many years, advising 16 Ph.D. students there.[4] He received his Italian Libera Docenza in 1969. In 1991, Preparata moved from Illinois to Brown University where he has remained active in research and student advising. In 1997, the University of Padova awarded Preparata an honorary doctorate. Preparata is an ACM Fellow[5], an IEEE Fellow[6], and a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science.

Selected bibliography

* Preparata, Franco P.; Metze, G.; Chien, R. T. (1967). "On the Connection Assignment Problem of Diagnosable Systems". IEEE Transactions on Electronic Computers EC-16 (6): 848–854. doi:10.1109/PGEC.1967.264747.​

* Preparata, Franco P.; Shamos, Michael I. (1985). Computational Geometry, Monographs in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-3540961314.

* Preparata, Franco P.; Vuillemin, Jean (1981). "The cube-connected cycles: a versatile network for parallel computation". Communications of the ACM 24 (5): 300–309. doi:10.1145/358645.358660.​

* Zhou, D.; Preparata, Franco P.; Kang, Sung Mo (1991). "Interconnection delay in very high-speed VLSI". IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems 38 (7): 779–790. doi:10.1109/31.135749.​

Notes

1. ^ CAS Society award descriptions and Darlington Award past recipient list on the IEEE web site.
2. ^ Brown Researchers Use Wildcards To Develop Better Way To Sequence DNA, ScienceDaily, October 19, 2000.
3. ^ Date calculated from the December, 2005 date of his 70th birthday listed on the Franco Fest web site.
4. ^ List of Preparata's students from the Franco Fest web site.
5. ^ ACM Fellows Award citation: Franco Preparata
6. ^ IEEE Region 1 Fellows L-Z.

Links

* Preparata's home page and curriculum vitae at Brown.

* Franco Fest 2006, a conference held in honor of Preparata's 70th birthday.