The Georgia Institute of Technology is celebrating its 243rd commencement with approximately 850 undergraduate and graduate students at the Fox Theatre at 7 p.m.

Richard Lipton, the Frederick G. Storey Chair in Computing in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science, will address graduates from the Institute’s six colleges and 29 schools.

Prior to joining the College of Computing faculty in 2000, Lipton held faculty appointments at Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University.

In addition to his computer science academic appointments, Lipton  was the founding director of a computer science laboratory for the Panasonic Corporation and is currently a chief consulting scientist at Telcordia (formerly Bellecore).

Lipton’s research is primarily, but not exclusively, focused on theory. In a recent paper on the power of automata-based proof systems, he explored a way to address the NP=co-NP questions that considered the length of proofs of tautologies in various proof systems. In this joint work, Lipton and his research partner considered proof systems defined by the appropriate classes of automata. He found that in general, starting from a given class of automata, it was possible to define a corresponding proof system in a natural way.

One new and more powerful proof system was based on the class of push down automata. In this work, Lipton presented an exponential lower bound for oblivious read-once branching programs that resulted in a proof system more powerful than oblivious regular resolution.

Lipton has also made important contributions in the areas of program testing, software engineering and most recently DNA computing. This latter area combines molecular biology and computer science. It is generally acknowledged that Lipton was one of the original pioneers in the field of DNA computing.

A Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Guggenheim Fellow, Lipton holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Case Western Reserve University and a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University.