Troy, N.Y. — Petros Drineas, assistant professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Drineas will use the projected five-year, $400,000 grant to investigate novel computational algorithms for analyzing complex datasets with applications in health and medicine, computer science, and social sciences.

Drineas is collaborating with researchers working on problems in genetics, cancer diagnostics, and internet search engines to develop dataset analysis tools that will be useful for specific problems. For example, he is collaborating with genetics researchers at Yale University School of Medicine to develop computer programs that analyze genetic data from samples of human populations around the world. Drineas is also working with biomedical engineers at University of Texas at Austin to interpret gene expression data in an effort to identify which pathways are active during different phases of the cell cycle.

Drineas’ research focuses on how datasets change over time. He is exploring data randomization techniques that accelerate the computational process by reducing sampling size and still maintaining the quality of results.

“Professor Drineas recognizes that advances in scientific applications are dependent on the development of computational tools that address the specific needs of fields such as genetics,” said Omkaram “Om” Nalamasu, vice president for research at Rensselaer.

The CAREER Award is given to faculty members at the beginning of their careers and is one of NSF's most competitive and prestigious awards, placing emphasis on high-quality research and novel education initiatives.

Drineas is currently co-organizing the “Workshop on Algorithms for Modern Massive Data Sets,” to be held at Stanford University in June 2006 and sponsored by NSF, the Stanford University Computer Forum, and Yahoo! Research. He has recently served as visiting assistant professor at Sandia National Laboratories and visiting researcher at Yahoo! Research. He earned a master’s and doctorate in computer science from Yale University and a bachelor’s and master’s in computer engineering from University of Patras in Greece. He joined the Rensselaer faculty in 2003. 

Computer Science at Rensselaer
Rensselaer's Computer Science Department provides a comprehensive program in software systems, programming languages, computer hardware systems, data structures and algorithms, and computation. Research conducted by faculty and graduate students includes work in bioinformatics, computer vision, data science, database systems, robotics, software engineering, pervasive computing and networking, theoretical computer science, grid computing, and computational science and engineering.