I am Professor and Chair in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. In Spring of 1995, I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science (now Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. My dissertation, Learning Restricted-Read Branching Programs with Queries, was concerned with the computational aspects of learning branching programs (decision dags). My dissertation advisor was Dr. Vijay Raghavan.
My current research is generally in Machine Learning, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics and Database Systems.
As part of the Mississippi EPSCoR (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research), we are building a data provenance system called PARS (Provenance Archive and Retrieval System). PARS can be used by researchers in the state to archive, share and store provenance information about their research data and processes. We are also collaborating with Dr. Robert Doerksen, UM Medicinal Chemistry, and researchers at University of Southern Mississippi and Jackson State University on a project that uses machine learning techniques to help to better understand certain protein-protein and protein-ligand interactions.
Previously, our group has collaborated with researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center and at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The work at SJCRH was to apply machine learning and data mining techniques to DNA microarray data, mostly Affymetrix. The work was in association with the Hartwell Center for Bioinformatics and Biotechnology at St. Jude's.
For Spring 2016, I am teaching CSci 433: Algorithm and Data Structure Analysis and CSci 502: Fundamental Concepts in Algorithms.