Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Dr. Louis Petingi obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1991 from Stevens Institute of Technology (New Jersey, USA) in the fields of Extremal Graph Theory and Network Reliability. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the College of Staten Island (City University of New York). He has recently introduced a new network reliability measure, the Diameter-Constrained Network Reliability (DCR) that determines the probability that a communication network meet delay constraints among a set of participating nodes, given that the set of edges fail independently with known probabilities. Classical network reliability models are based on the existence of end-to-end paths between network nodes, not taking into account the length of these paths. For many applications this is inadequate because the connection will only be established or attain the required quality if the distance between the participating nodes does not exceed a given value (e.g., broadcasting, wireless networks). The DCR of a communication network not only considers the underlying topology, but it also imposes a bound on the diameter, which is the maximum distance between the nodes of the network.
With respect to optimization problems in Graph Theory, Dr. Petingi has achieved international recognition for introducing new techniques to characterize graphs with maximum number of spanning trees among competing topologies with equal number of vertices and edges. This problem has been tackled without much success by many well-known Graph Theorists since the 1960’s because of its applicability in the design of reliable networks.
Dr, Petingi is a permanent faculty member of City University of New York Graduate Center and he has obtained several research grants. He is a member of the ACM, and the New York Academy of Sciences.