John Pfaltz
Emeritus Professor of Computer Science
Office: Rice Hall, Room 203
Phone: (434) 982-2222
Fax: (434) 982-2214
Email:
pfaltz@cs.virginia.edu
Home Page:
John Pfaltz
Department of Computer Science
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Virginia
85 Engineer's Way,
P.O. Box 400740
Charlottesville,
Virginia 22904-4740
Areas Of Interest
Databases and parallel computing, discrete math, anti-matroid closure-spaces
Biographical Sketch
John Pfaltz received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Maryland in 1969. He joined the University of Virginia as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in 1968, becoming an Associate Professor in 1970 and a Professor in 1982. He has directed nine Ph.D. theses, and is author or co-author of two books and over 40 papers. John Pfaltz retired and is still active in research as Emeritus Professor.
Research
Pfaltz led the development of ADAMS, an Advanced Data Management System. The ADAMS system uses suffix-based notation and was designed to manage large scientific databases in a distributed memory, parallel processing environment. His current emphasis is on closure systems and their applications to computer science. These closure systems provide a formal mechanism for studying the nature of discrete systems which underlie the foundations of computer science. Closure spaces permit the definition of complete and closed functions on discrete systems, which fill the role of "continuous" functions over continuous manifolds.
Selected Publications
- Jordan Surfaces in Discrete Antimatroid Topologies, Ralph Kopperman and J. L. Pfaltz, International Workshop on Combinatorial Image Analysis (IWCIA), Auckland, New Zealand, December 2004, pp. 334-350.
- A Category of Discrete Closure Systems, J. L. Pfaltz, Spatial representation: Discrete vs. Continuous Computational Models, Dagstuhl Seminar 04351, August 2004.
- A Category of Discrete Partially Ordered Sets, J. L. Pfaltz, Mid-Atlantic Algebra Conf. George Mason University, Fairfax VA, November 2004.
- Closed Set Mining of Biological Data, J. L. Pfaltz and C. M. Taylor BIOKDD 2002, Workshop on Data Mining in Bioinformatics, at SIGKDD 2002, Edmonton, Alberta, July 2002, pp. 43-48.
- Transformations of Concept Graphs: An Approach to Empirical Induction, J. L. Pfaltz, International Workshop on Graph Transformation and Visual Modeling Techniques (GTVMT), Satellite Workshop of ICALP 2001, Crete, Greece, July 2001, pp. 320-326.