Martin Farach-Colton

Martin Farach-Colton
Farach-Colton at the 2013 White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Big Data Workshop
Alma materJohns Hopkins School of Medicine, MD (1988)
University of Maryland, College Park, PhD (1991)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsNew York University
Thesis String Algorithms for Template Matching  (1991)
Doctoral advisorAmihood Amir

Martin Farach-Colton is an American computer scientist, known for his work in streaming algorithms, suffix tree construction, pattern matching in compressed data, cache-oblivious algorithms, and lowest common ancestor data structures. He is the Leonard J. Shustek Professor of Computer Science and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at New York University.[1] Formerly, he was a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University.[2] He co-founded the storage technology startup company Tokutek.[3]

Early life and education

Farach-Colton is of Argentine descent and grew up in South Carolina. While attending medical school, he met his future husband, with whom he now has twin children.[4] He obtained his M.D. in 1988 from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine[5] and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1991 from the University of Maryland, College Park under the supervision of Amihood Amir.[6]

Research contributions

After completing his Ph.D., he went on to work at Google and co-founded Tokutek.[7] He was program chair of the 14th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2003).[8] The cache-oblivious B-tree data structures studied by Bender, Demaine, and Farach-Colton beginning in 2000 became the basis for the fractal tree index used by Tokutek's products TokuDB and TokuMX.[3]

Awards and honors

In 1996, Farach-Colton was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.[9] In 2021, he was inducted as a SIAM Fellow "for contributions to the design and analysis of algorithms and their use in storage systems and computational biology"[10] and as an ACM Fellow "for contributions to data structures for biocomputing and big data"[11] In 2022, he was inducted as an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to data structures for storage systems".[12] In 2023, he was elected to the Argentine Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Fisicas y Naturales.[13] In 2024, he was inducted as an AAAS Fellow.[14]

In 2012, his paper "The LCA problem revisited" won the Simon Imre Test of Time award at LATIN.[15] In 2016, his paper "Optimizing Every Operation in a Write-optimized File System" won the Best Paper award at FAST.[16] In 2023, his paper "Mosaic Pages: Big TLB Reach with Small Pages" won a Distinguished Paper award as ASPLOS.[17]

Personal life

Farach-Colton is an avid Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner and received a bronze medal at the 2015 World Master Jiu-Jitsu IBJJF Championship.[18] He received his black belt from Russell Kerr in 2018.[19] Farach-Colton has served on several charity boards including the Ali Forney Center, Lambda Legal,[20] and The Trevor Project.[21]

Selected publications

  • Amir, Amihood; Benson, Gary; Farach, Martin (April 1996), "Let sleeping files lie: pattern matching in Z-compressed files" (PDF), Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 52 (2): 299–307, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.45.6476, doi:10.1006/jcss.1996.0023, MR 1393996, S2CID 14465635, archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-08-10, retrieved 2017-09-08.
  • Farach, Martin (1997), "Optimal suffix tree construction with large alphabets", 38th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, FOCS '97, Miami Beach, Florida, USA, October 19-22, 1997, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 137–143, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.45.4336, doi:10.1109/SFCS.1997.646102, ISBN 0-8186-8197-7, S2CID 123355749.
  • Farach, M.; Thorup, M. (April 1998), "String matching in Lempel-Ziv compressed strings", Algorithmica, 20 (4): 388–404, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.45.5484, doi:10.1007/PL00009202, MR 1600834, S2CID 15395909.
  • Bender, Michael A.; Farach-Colton, Martin (2000), "The LCA problem revisited" (PDF), in Gonnet, Gaston H.; Panario, Daniel; Viola, Alfredo (eds.), LATIN 2000: Theoretical Informatics, 4th Latin American Symposium, Punta del Este, Uruguay, April 10-14, 2000, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1776, Springer, pp. 88–94, doi:10.1007/10719839_9, ISBN 978-3-540-67306-4.
  • Charikar, Moses; Chen, Kevin; Farach-Colton, Martin (2004), "Finding frequent items in data streams" (PDF), Theoretical Computer Science, 312 (1): 3–15, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.145.8413, doi:10.1016/S0304-3975(03)00400-6, MR 2045483. Previously announced in ICALP 2002.
  • Bender, Michael A.; Demaine, Erik D.; Farach-Colton, Martin (2005), "Cache-oblivious B-trees", SIAM Journal on Computing, 35 (2): 341–358, CiteSeerX 10.1.1.32.4093, doi:10.1137/S0097539701389956, MR 2191447. Previously announced at FOCS 2000.

References

  1. ^ News, Tandon School of Engineering, NYU, retrieved 2024-04-24.
  2. ^ Professors, Computer Science, Rutgers, retrieved 2022-07-17. Archived on 2022-08-17.
  3. ^ a b Zicari, Roberto V. (October 8, 2012), "Scaling MySQL and MariaDB to TBs: Interview with Martín Farach-Colton", ODBMS Industry Watch.
  4. ^ Farach-Colton, Martin (July 10, 2012), Trevisan, Luca (ed.), "Turing Centennial Post 5: Martin Farach-Colton", in theory.
  5. ^ Usenix FAST
  6. ^ Martin Farach-Colton at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  7. ^ "Alumni Hall Of Fame | UMD Department of Computer Science". www.cs.umd.edu. Retrieved 2021-10-08.
  8. ^ 14th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SIAM, retrieved 2015-07-08.
  9. ^ "Sloan Foundation, Past Fellows". Archived from the original on 2016-11-06. Retrieved 2021-03-31.
  10. ^ SIAM Announces Class of 2021 Fellows, March 31, 2021, retrieved 2021-04-03
  11. ^ ACM Names 71 Fellows for Computing Advances that are Driving Innovation
  12. ^ 2022 NEWLY ELEVATED FELLOWS (PDF), November 22, 2022, archived from the original (PDF) on November 24, 2021, retrieved 2021-11-24
  13. ^ Incorporación del Dr. Martin Farach Colton, October 18, 2023, retrieved 2023-11-28
  14. ^ 2023 AAAS FELLOWS, April 18, 2024, retrieved 2024-04-19
  15. ^ "LATIN". latintcs.org. Retrieved 2021-10-08.
  16. ^ "Best Papers". usenix.org. Retrieved 2021-11-24.
  17. ^ "ASPLOS 2023". asplos-conference.org. Retrieved 2023-11-28.
  18. ^ World Master Jiu-Jitsu IBJJF Championship 2015
  19. ^ Clockwork Jiu Jitsu Instagram
  20. ^ "Martin Farach-Colton". www.aliforneycenter.org. Retrieved 2017-11-07.
  21. ^ "Farach-Colton". www.thetrevorproject.org. Retrieved 2020-09-04.