Prof. Patrick H. Madden Director, Optimality Research Group (the BLAC CAD Research Group is now dormant) Associate Professor, Computer Science Dept. Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering State University of New York at Binghamton P.O. Box 6000 Binghamton, NY 13902 Office: Engineering Building, N14 Phone: (607) 777 2943 Fax: (607) 777 4729 URL: http://www.cs.binghamton.edu/~pmadden email: pmadden@acm.org GPG Public Key for pmadden@acm.org

• Research
  • Optimization for NP-hard problems (with applications to VLSI integrated circuit design, protein identification and cryptography).
• Conference Organization and Professional Service
  • ACM/SIGDA chair
  • Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Computer Aided Design
  • ACM/IEEE/EDAC DAC (sponsors committee, executive committee, technical program committee)
  • IEEE ISVLSI 2012 technical program committee.
• Courses and Related Material:
  • CS575, Spring 2012
  • MS and PhD qualifying exams for Algorithms
• Binghamton ACM group
• Professional Activities
• Vita

For a number of years, my research focus was on integrated circuit design, particularly the problems of placement, routing, and interconnect optimization for physical design. The placement contests that occur at ISPD (and now DAC) were triggered in part by my 2001 ISPD paper. While physical design is no long my primary focus, I am still active in the area.

Since 2004, my interest has shifted towards optimization in general, with an emphasis on expanding the range of NP-hard problems that can be solved optimally. While it's unlikely that there will be an efficient solution to all NP-hard problems, it's possible to push at the border between what is tractable and what is intractable. Some of my current research involves protein and peptide identification from mass spectrometer data, which can be viewed as a large, complex, and particularly important optimization problem.

I'm also a vocal skeptic on parallel computing (see the 2007 talk with Dr. Gene Amdahl!). My 2011 ASPDAC paper is the tip of the iceberg.