The Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing is honored to announce that renowned computer scientist Richard Karp will present this year’s Alberto Apostolico Memorial Lecture on March 13.

Karp’s lecture, The Colorful Connected Subgraph Problem, examines NP-hard problems, a class of problems known for their high level of difficulty. The discussion will detail "a simple, yet fast heuristic algorithm" that can find perfect solutions to NP-hard problems, identify significant patterns, and lead to potential solutions in a variety of contexts including protein-protein interaction networks, social networks, and sensor networks.

Karp, a University Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, is a noted specialist in the field of theoretical computer science. His research revolves around combinatorial algorithms, computational complexity, algorithmic methods in genomics, and computer networking.

He has earned multiple accolades, including the 1985 Turing Award. He is a member of several professional and academic societies, such as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, and the French Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, Karp is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science.

The Alberto Apostolico Memorial Lecture is an annual event hosted by the Georgia Tech College of Computing. The lecture was established by The Mary Kay and James Farley Fund in 2015 to commemorate the life of Professor Alberto Apostolico, of the Schools of Computational Science & Engineering and Interactive Computing, and celebrates seminal works in the field of computer science.

The 2017 Alberto Apostolico Memorial Lecture begins at 11 a.m. in the Klaus Advanced Computing Building, Room 1116.