Dennis Shasha

Prof, Computer Science Dept

Department of Computer Science
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
New York University

Postal Address

251 Mercer Street
New York, NY 10012, U.S.A.

Phones
212.998.3086/212.998.3078 (voice)   212.995-4123 (fax)

Email (the best way to reach me)

shasha@cs.nyu.edu

Photo

Research

I do research in biological computing (including experimental design), pattern recognition and querying in trees and graphs, pattern discovery in time series, cryptographic file systems, and database tuning. See Research Activity in brief. If you want a truly stimulating reading experience, try my resume in pdf.
For excerpts of my book (with journalist Cathy Lazere) of biographies of great computer scientists, see Out of Their Minds: the lives and discoveries of 15 great computer scientists (book published by Copernicus/Springer Verlag).
In 2010, we published Natural Computing a book about the ongoing synthesis between computing and biology. Here is a little video preview (you will have to poke around to find it)
I also have had the pleasure of writing a mathematical puzzle column for Dr. Dobb's Journal whose readers are very sharp and continue to write the Puzzling Adventures Column for Scientific American . The puzzle-writing has led to six books about a mathematical detective named Dr. Ecco. Try them if you dare.
Professionally, I have written two books about database tuning. The second, co-authored with Philippe Bonnet, appears in May, 2002 and is called Database Tuning: principles, experiments, and troubleshooting techniques (published by Morgan Kaufmann). You can find the slides from our Sigmod and VLDB 2002 presentations here.
More recently, I have written a book with my excellent PhD student Yunyue Zhu entitled High Performance Discovery in Time Series: techniques and case studies published by Springer Verlag Publishers in June 2004.
With the extremely energetic Jason Wang and other colleagues, I have helped co-edit two books in bioinformatics:
1. Pattern Discovery in Biomolecular Data: Tools, Techniques, and Applications Jason Wang, Bruce Shapiro, and Dennis Shasha (Eds.) Oxford University Press, November, 1999.
2. Data Mining in Bioinformatics J. T. L. Wang, M. J. Zaki, H. T. T. Toivonen and D. Shasha (eds.), 350 pages, Springer-Verlag, August 2004.
In my work with biologists, I find myself needing statistics. Because I find that academic statistics books tend to make the subject overly complex and lay statistics books tend to gloss assumptions (e.g. about normality) Manda Wilson and I have written a short book entitled Statistics is Easy! that uses a resampling approach to statistics (thus avoiding distribution assumptions) and explains most of the concepts using counting. The book also contains a link to python code that implements the statistics we discuss in the book. Please take a look at an excerpt.
Because I was so fascinated by the Russian students we've had at NYU, I have co-authored with Marina Shron (a playwright born in St. Petersburg), Red Blues: voices from the last wave of Russian immigrants . Here is an excerpt from that book.
Here is a link to the technical reports offered by the department. (You won't find much of my stuff there, since I usually go straight for conference publications.) NYU Computer Science Tech Reports

My family consists of Karen (my wife who is a multimedia artist), Cloe (born 1988, who is the inspiration for my puzzle character Liane and Tyler (born 1994, once an aspiring food chemist with a rather irreverent view of the water cycle).

Here is a brief biography of Alfred Shasha, my father. Inspired by that story and by others like it, Tamar Morad, my brother Robert Shasha, and I wrote a book of oral histories called Iraq's Last Jews.

Galina Miklosic has decided to do a Belorussian translation of this page for his own amusement.