Distinguished Lecture

The Role of the Scientific Method in Software Development

April 03, 2007

This talk argues for a return to the scientific method as an essential ingredient for future success in algorithm design and in software development. The talk is centered on the behavior of algorithms for finding a path from a source to a destination in a graph, an operation that is critical in a broad variety of applications, from statistical physics to combinatorial optimization to image processing. Numerous elementary algorithms can find a path in time proportional to the number of edges in the graph, but the basic performance characteristics of these algorithms are actually poorly understood. Developing such understanding leads to the discovery of new approaches that are dramatically more effective than those in common use. This example illustrates that software developers and algorithm designers who depend upon theoretical results instead of scientific studies to evaluate algorithms are taking risks and missing opportunities.

Presenter Bio

Bob Sedgewick, Princeton University

Robert Sedgewick is the William O. Baker Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where he has been on the faculty since 1985 and was the founding Chair of the Department of Computer Science. Prof. Sedgewick received the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1975, served on the faculty at Brown University from 1975 to 1985, and has held visiting research positions at Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA, Institute for Defense Analyses, Princeton, NJ, and INRIA, Rocquencourt, France. He is a member of the board of directors of Adobe Systems. Prof. Sedgewick's research interests include mathematical analysis of algorithms, design of data structures and algorithms, and program visualization. He has published widely in these areas and is the author of several books, including a widely-used series of textbooks on algorithms that has sold over one-half million copies. He is currently working with Kevin Wayne on a new introductory computer science text and with Philippe Flajolet on a new graduate text on analytic combinatorics, both scheduled to appear in 2007.

Close