Bio:

Mohan Paturi joined the UCSD faculty in 1986 after a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He obtained his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1985. Paturi is a past recipient of the Jacobs School's Teacher of the Year Award. In 2001, he assumed the position of Chair of the Computer Science and Engineering Department. Paturi founded Parity Computing, a San Diego-based digital library and data mining technology company.

As Chair of the department, Professor Paturi's is developing a top computer science and engineering department. His focus is on recruiting exceptional faculty and attracting the best students. He is also establishing a Center for Information Technology Education to deliver IT education for UCSD students, based on the premise that the conceptual and practical understanding of IT is fundamentally necessary for all UCSD students. Paturi can also speak about the extension of computer science into new disciplines, including biology (bioinformatics), economics and management (e-commerce), and psychology/cognitive sciences (computer vision and machine learning). He is developing faculty and courses in these fields, while also building on the department's core strengths in software, systems (including computer security and networking), theory, computer architecture/engineering, and artificial intelligence (including data mining and data integration). In his research, Paturi studies the theoretical underpinnings of computer science, efficient algorithms, and their complexity. He focuses on improved exponential-time algorithms for certain NP-complete (Nondeterministic Polynomial) problems and the interesting connection between efficient algorithms and lower bounds on computational efficiency. Paturi is also an expert in digital libraries, ontologies, and text data mining, and a company he founded (see bio) has created a number of digital libraries for professional societies such as IEEE and ACM. Paturi's other interests include learning theory and machine learning.