Research Interests

I am primarily interested in distributed algorithms for solving optimization problems. Much of my past work has focused on problems from the biological sciences, including linkage analysis problems from statistical genetics, and protein structure prediction techniques. I have also worked on parallel search algorithms such as A*, αβ-minimax, Davis-Loveland-Putnam, and applications of these algorithms to both standard AI problems and economic problems such as combinatorial auction winner determination.

More recently, I have been interested in solving optimization problems in computational epidemiology, such as optimal location placement for sentinel surveillance, optimal vaccination strategies, and so on.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications

Using Computer Vision and Depth Sensing to Measure Healthcare Worker-Patient Contacts and Personal Protective Equipment Adherence within Hospital Rooms  (with J.Y. Chen, J.F. Cremer, K. Zarei and P.M. Polgreen) Open Forum Infectious Diseases, 3:1 (Winter 2016).

Network Models, Patient Transfers and Infection Control (with P.M. Polgreen) Clinical Infectious Diseases, 63:7 (August 2016).

Network Position and Health Care Worker Infections (with P.M. Polgreen and T.L. Tassier) Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination (September 2015).

Outpatient Blood Pressure Monitoring Using Bi-Directional Text Messaging (with C.A. Anthony, L.A. Polgreen, J.P. Chounramany, E.D. Foster, C.J. Goerdt, M.L. Miller, M.Suneja, B.L. Carter and P.M. Polgreen) Journal of the American Society of Hypertension (January 2015).

Vaccination Games with Peer Effects in a Heterogeneous Population (with T.L. Tassier and P.M. Polgreen)Administrative Sciences, 5 (January 2015).

Electronic Recognition of Hand-Hygiene Technique and Duration (with V. Galluzzi, T. Herman, D.J. Shumaker, D.R. Macinga, J.W. Arbogast, E.M. Segre and P.M. Polgreen) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 35:10 (October 2014).

Do Peer Effects Improve Hand Hygiene Adherence Among Healthcare Workers? (with M.N. Monsalve, S.V. Pemmaraju, G.W. Thomas, T. Herman and P.M. Polgreen) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 35:10 (October 2014).

How Many Suffice? A Computational Framework for Sizing Sentinel Surveillance Networks (with G. Fairchild, P.M. Polgreen, E. Foster and G. Rushton) International Journal of Health Geographics, 12:56 (December 2013).

Healthcare Worker Contact Networks and the Prevention of Hospital-Acquired Infections (with D.E. Curtis, C.S. Hlady, G. Kanade, S. Pemmaraju and P.M. Polgreen) PLoS One (December 2013).

Using Sensor Networks to Study the Effect of Peripatetic Healthcare Workers on the Spread of Hosptial-Acquired Infections (with T. Hornbeck, D. Naylor, G. Thomas, T. Herman and P.M. Polgreen) Journal of Infectious Diseases, 206:10 (November 2012) pp 1549–1557.

Primary Stroke Centers Should be Located Using Maximal Coverage Models for Optimal Access (with E.C. Leira, G. Fairchild, G. Rushton, M.T. Froehler and P.M. Polgreen) Stroke, 43 (July 2012), pp 2417–2422.

Monitoring Hand Hygiene via Human Observers: How Should We Be Sampling? (with J. Fries, G. Thomas, T. Herman, K. Ellingson and P.M. Polgreen) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 33:7 (July 2012), pp 689–695.

KELVIN: A Software Package for Rigorous Measurement of Statistical Evidence in Human Genetics (with V.J. Vieland, Y. Huang, S.C. Seok, J. Burian, U. Catalyruk, J. O'Connell and W. Valentine-Cooper) Human Heredity, 72:4 (December 2011).

The Use of Twitter to Track Levels of Disease Activity and Public Concern in the U.S. during the Influenza A H1N1 Pandemic (with A. Signorini and P.M. Polgreen) PLoS ONE, 6:5 (May 4, 2011).

Method for Automated Monitoring of Hand Hygiene Adherence without Radio-Frequency Identification(with P.M. Polgreen, C.S. Hlady, M.A. Severson and T.Herman) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 31:12 (December 2010), pp 1294–1297.

Using Social Networks to Prioritize Vaccination Strategies for Healthcare Workers (with P.M. Polgreen, T. Tassier and S. Pemmaraju) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 31:9 (September 2010), pp 893–900.

A Mobile Handheld Computing Application for Recording Hand Hygiene Observations (with C.S. Hlady, M.A. Severson and P.M. Polgreen) Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, 31:9 (September 2010), pp 975–977.

Optimizing Influenza Sentinel Surveillance at the State Level (with P.M. Polgreen, E. Chen, M. Harris, M. Pentella and G. Rushton), American Journal of Epidemiology, 170 (November 2009), pp 1300–1306.

An Optimal Multiprocessor Combinatorial Auction Solver (with S. Yang and B. Codenotti), Computers and Operations Research, 36:1 (January 2009), pp 149–166.

Mapping Autism Risk Loci Using Genetic Linkage and Chromosomal Rearrangements (Autism Genome Project), Nature Genetics 39:3 (March 2007), pp. 319–328.

Privacy-Preserving Database Union (with A. Wildenberg, V. Vieland and Y. Zhang), Privacy in Statistical Databases Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4032 (December 2006), pp. 266–276.

Approximation of Multipoint Likelihoods Using Flanking Marker Data: A Simulation Study (with A. George, L. Mangin, C. Bartlett, M. Logue, V. Vieland), BMC Genetics (December 2005), pp. S44.

Nagging: A Scalable, Fault-Tolerant, Paradigm for Distributed Search (with S. Foreman, G. Resta and A. Wildenberg), Artificial Intelligence 140:1–2 (September 2002), pp. 71–106.

A Structured Pattern Matching Approach to Shotgun Sequence Assembly (with S. Kim), Journal of Computational Biology 6:2, (Spring 1999), pp. 163–186.

Nagging: A Distributed, Adversarial Search-Pruning Technique Applied to First-Order Inference (with D.B. Sturgill), Journal of Automated Reasoning 19:3 (December 1997), pp. 347–376.

Exploratory Analysis of Speedup Learning Data Using Expectation Maximization (with G.J. Gordon and C.P. Elkan), Artifical Intelligence 85:1–2 (August 1996), pp.301–319.

A High Performance Explanation-Based Learning Algorithm (with C.P. Elkan), Artificial Intelligence 69:1–2 (September 1994), pp.1–50.

Bounded-Overhead Caching for Definite-Clause Theorem Proving (with D. Scharstein), Journal of Automated Reasoning 11:1 (August 1993), pp. 83–113.

A Critical Look at Experimental Evaluations of EBL (with C.P. Elkan and A. Russell), Machine Learning 6:2, Kluwer Academic (March 1991), pp. 183–196.