Paul M.B. Vitanyi - Short biography#
Paul M.B. Vitanyi received his Ph.D. from the Free University of Amsterdam (1978). He is a CWI Fellow at the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, CWI, and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam.
He serves on the editorial boards of Distributed Computing (1987-2003), Information Processing Letters, Theory of Computing Systems, Parallel Processing Letters, International journal of Foundations of Computer Science, Entropy, Information, Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences (guest editor), and elsewhere.
He has worked on cellular automata, computational complexity, distributed and parallel computing, machine learning and prediction, physics of computation, Kolmogorov complexity, information theory, quantum computing, publishing about 200 research papers and some books.
He received a Knighthood (Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw) in 2007 and elected member of the (Academia Europaea) in 2011. Together with Ming Li they pioneered applications of Kolmogorov complexity and co-authored An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and its Applications, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1993 (3rd Edition 2008), parts of which have been translated into Chinese, Russian and Japanese.
Education:
- Master of Science, Technical University of Delft, 1971,
- Phd.D. in Computer Science, Free University of Amsterdam, 1978
Recent distinguished lectures, keynote lectures, invited lectures:
- Plenary talk: 2009 Workshop on Information Theoretic Methods in Science and Engineering, August 17 - 19, 2009, Tampere, Finland.
- Invited talk: 4th International Conference on Logic, Computability and Randomnes, June 29 -July 3rd, 2009, CIRM Luminy, Marseille, France.
- Invited Plenary Speaker: International Conference "Theory and Applications of Models of Computation 2006", 15th - 20th May, 2006, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing
- Invited Keynote Plenary Speaker: The 4th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2005) 31st July - 3rd August, 2005, Hong Kong SAR, China
- Invited Plenary Speaker, Information Beyond Shannon, Orlando, Oct. 27-28, 2005
- Invited Plenary Speaker at the 26th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium, on May 19-20, 2005
- Invited Speaker at the 2005 ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, and 1st Workshop on Reversible Computing, Ischia, Italy, 4-6 May 2005
- Invited Speaker Special Session Complexity of Computation and Algorithms at the Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Santa Barbara, California, in April, 2005
- Invited Speaker ITW2005 - IEEE ITSOC Information Theory Workshop 2005 on Coding and Complexity 29th Aug. - 1st Sept, Rotorua, New Zealand
Paul Vitanyi has supervised 11 PhD students.
