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Brown University’s Department of Computer Science (Brown CS) is pleased to announce a new endowed lecture series in honor of An Wang Professor Emeritus of Computer Science Franco Preparata, an esteemed member of the Brown CS faculty who retired a decade ago. To be held annually, this year at 4 PM on October 10 in CIT 368, the Franco Preparata Distinguished Lecture Series will bring prominent scientists to Brown to address timely research in theoretical computer science, an area of particular interest to Franco. This year’s lecture (“From Consensus To Agreement”) will be delivered by Silvio Micali, Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of Algorand Technologies. Silvio is a renowned cryptographer and recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)’s Turing Award.

“Brown CS is thrilled to announce an annual lecture series to honor Franco Preparata, who made pioneering contributions to multiple areas of computer science and engineering, including coding theory, parallel computation, computational geometry, and computational biology,” says Roberto Tamassia, James A. and Julie N. Brown Professor of Computer Science, Department Chair of Brown CS, and proud PhD alum of Franco’s from the time that Franco was a faculty member at the University of Illinois in the 80s. “An endowment was established to offer the Franco Preparata Distinguished Lecture Series in perpetuity, celebrating Franco’s profound and long-lasting legacy of innovative computer science research and education at Brown.”  

Franco’s career spans seven countries and more than a half-century, including twenty-three years with Brown alone. It includes the publication of three books that have been translated into five languages, more than two hundred papers, and seminal contributions to coding theory, computational geometry, design and analysis of algorithms, parallel computing, very-large-scale integration (VLSI) computation, and computational biology. Franco is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the ACM, and the Japan Society for the Advancement of Science. He’s a recipient of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society’s Darlington Prize and the “Laurea honoris causa” in Information Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy. He served on the editorial boards of six premier journals in theoretical computer science.

Franco’s early work was in switching and coding theory. He discovered a class of optimal burst-correcting codes (the Berlekamp-Preparata codes) and the first known class of optimum nonlinear codes, known as Preparata codes. He also contributed to a classical model for fault diagnosis in digital systems, commonly referred to as the Preparata-Metze-Chien model. Franco’s interests evolved towards the design and analysis of algorithms. He made pioneering contributions to computational geometry, notably with his optimal convex hull and point-location algorithms and the use of geometric duality. He made seminal contributions to parallel and VLSI computation, notably the cube-connected cycles architecture (with J. Vuillemin) and wire routing methods. His recent work includes computational metrology and computational biology.  Franco was the visionary founder of Brown’s Center for Computational Molecular Biology, which recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary.

Silvio Micali received his Laurea in Mathematics from the Sapienza University of Rome and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. Since 1983, he has been on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in the Engineering and Computer Science Department, where he is Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering. Silvio’s research interests are in Theory of Computation, Cryptography, Blockchains, Secure Protocols, and Mechanism Design. He is the recipient of the Turing Award for Computer Science, the Gödel Prize for Theoretical Computer Science, and the RSA prize for Cryptography. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Accademia dei Lincei. He is also the founder of Algorand Technologies, a secure and decentralized high-performance blockchain provider.

Remote attendees can join via https://brown.zoom.us/j/92448230979

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.