Mikhail Atallah

Atallah received his bachelor's degree from the American University of Beirut in 1975. He then moved to Johns Hopkins University for his graduate studies, earning a master's degree in 1980 and a Ph.D. in 1982 under the supervision of S. Rao Kosaraju. Since that time he has been a member of the Purdue University faculty.^[1][2]

In 2001, Atallah co-founded Arxan Technologies, Inc., a provider of internet anti-piracy and anti-tampering software, and in 2007, he became its chief technology officer.^[3]

Atallah has published over 200 papers on topics in algorithms and computer security.^[4]

Atallah's thesis work was on the subject of parallel algorithms,^[2] and he continued working in that area as a faculty member. Algorithmic research by Atallah includes papers on parallel and dynamic computational geometry,^[5] finding the symmetries of geometric figures,^[6] divide and conquer algorithms,^[7] and efficient parallel computations of the Levenshtein distance between pairs of strings.^[8] With his student Marina Blanton, Atallah is the editor of the Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook (CRC Press, 2nd ed., 2009, ISBN 978-1-58488-818-5).

Atallah's more recent research has been in the area of computer security. His work in this area has included techniques for text-based digital watermarking.^[9][10] and the addition of multiple guard points within software as an anti-piracy measure.^[11]

In 2006, Atallah was elected as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his "contributions to parallel and distributed computation".^[12] He has been a fellow of the IEEE since 1997.^[1][13] Previously he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1985.^[14]