Brian Lucena

Assistant Professor

Mathematics Department

The American University of Cairo

Research Interests

- Graph Theory / Treewidth

- Graphical Probability Models / Artificial Intelligence

- Information Theory

- Applications to Molecular/Evolutionary Biology

Publications

B. Lucena, Sparse Obstructions and Exact Treewidth Determination, (submitted January 2006).

B. Lucena and D. Haussler, Counterexample to a Claim about the Reconstruction of Ancestral Character States, Systematic Biology, vol. 54, no.4, pp. 693-695, August 2005.

B. Lucena and I. Kontoyiannis, Filtering: A Case for Noisier Data, IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW2005), Rotorua, New Zealand, August 2005.

I. Kontoyiannis and B. Lucena, Mutual Information, Synergy, and Some Curious Phenomena for Simple Channels, IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT2005), Adelaide, Australia, September 2005.

B. Lucena, A New Lower Bound for Tree-Width using Maximum Cardinality Search, SIAM J. Disc. Math, vol. 16, no. 3, pp.345-353, 2003.

B. Lucena, Dynamic Programming, Tree-width, and Computation on Graphical Models, Brown University Ph.D. Thesis, 2002.

Brief Biography

I received my A.B. from Harvard University in 1996 and my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Brown University (Divison of Applied Mathematics) in 1998 and 2002 respectively. My thesis advisor was Stuart Geman. I spent the next three years on an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Washington (Statistics Dept), UC-Santa Cruz (Computer Science Dept.), and UC-Berkeley (Computer Science/ Statistics Dept.). I joined the faculty of the Mathematics Department of the American University in Cairo (AUC) in August 2005.