DATE: April 07, 2009

CONTACT: Brian Dean, 864-656-5866
bcdean@clemson.edu

WRITER: Hannah Sykes, 864-656-2061
hsykes@clemson.edu

Clemson computing professor receives NSF CAREER Award

CLEMSON — Brian Dean, a professor in the School of Computing at Clemson University, has been awarded a National Science Foundation CAREER grant to research and develop more efficient algorithms for a wide range of computational problems.

The grant, totaling $400,000, will fund Dean’s project, “CAREER: Algorithmic Aspects of Ordinal Matching Problems.”

Dean’s research will focus on a class of computational problems known as matching problems, such as assigning students to classes, directing traffic to Web servers or matching donor kidneys between families participating in an organ-exchange network. His goal is to develop simpler and more efficient algorithms for computing solutions to these problems in which most of the participants are assigned to one of their highest-preferred alternatives.

One example, Dean said, is the process of making housing assignments to college students.

“Incoming college freshmen may specify their preferences over dorm rooms by indicating their first, second and third choices,” he said. “What is the best approach to use for assigning students to empty dorm rooms and how efficiently can this be implemented on a computer so it runs as quickly as possible?”

Dean and the students in his lab are working to understand the mathematical foundations underlying these problems as well as evaluating the performance of potential solutions in practice.

Dean is the associate director of the USA Computing Olympiad, an organization that promotes interest in computer science among pre-college students by providing online training materials and programming contests. For the educational part of his CAREER grant, Dean has proposed expanding the program to middle and early high school students “in order to get them excited about computing as a potential area of study.”

Dean received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2008, he received the Clemson University College of Engineering and Science Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Sciences.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organizations. The award description states the activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of integrated contributions to research and education.