John E. Hopcroft
Cornell University
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Primary Section: 34, Computer and Information Sciences Membership Type:
Emeritus
(elected 2009)
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Research Interests
As a theoretical computer scientist, I am interested in the mathematics supporting access to information. The range of data available in digital form, the social networks, and the sensor networks available today give us unprecedented access to information and raise many issues. I am interested in creating the science base that will support activities such as search engines, ranking, tracking communities in social networks and the flow of ideas in scientific literature, collaborative filtering, extracting information from unstructured data, and related topics. Underlying research areas include large random graphs, high dimensional data, dimension reduction, random walks, learning theory, compressed sensing and clustering. An important area in these activities is the use of random algorithms which with high probability will give the correct answer. The use of randomness allows efficient algorithms for data sets that are much larger than ever considered before.
