Richard Lipton

Richard Jay Lipton (born September 6, 1946) is an American computer scientist who is Associate Dean of Research, Professor, and the Frederick G. Storey Chair in Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

He has worked in computer science theory, cryptography, and DNA computing.

In 1968, Lipton received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from Case Western Reserve University.

In 1973, he received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University; his dissertation, supervised by David Parnas, is entitled On Synchronization Primitive Systems.

After graduating, Lipton taught at Yale 1973–1978, at Berkeley 1978–1980, and then at Princeton 1980–2000.

In 1980, along with Richard M. Karp, Lipton proved that if SAT can be solved by Boolean circuits with a polynomial number of logic gates, then the polynomial hierarchy collapses to its second level.

Showing that a program P has some property is a simple process if the actions inside the program are uninterruptible.

However, when the action is interruptible, Lipton showed that through a type of reduction and analysis, it can be shown that the reduced program has that property if and only if the original program has the property.

If the reduction is done by treating interruptible operations as one large uninterruptible action, even with these relaxed conditions properties can be proven for a program P. Thus, correctness proofs of a parallel system can often be greatly simplified.

Lipton studied and created database security models on how and when to restrict the queries made by users of a database such that private or secret information will not be leaked.

For example, querying a database of campaign donations could allow the user to discover the individual donations to political candidates or organizations.

If given access to averages of data and unrestricted query access, a user could exploit the properties of those averages to gain illicit information.

These queries are considered to have large "overlap" creating the insecurity.

By bounding the "overlap" and number of queries, a secure database can be achieved.

Richard Lipton with Andrew Tomkins introduced a randomized online interval scheduling algorithm, the 2-size version being strongly competitive, and the k-size version achieving O(log), as well as demonstrating a theoretical lower-bound of O(log).

This algorithm uses a private-coin for randomization and a "virtual" choice to fool a medium adversary.

Being presented with an event the user must decide whether or not to include the event in the schedule.

The 2-size virtual algorithm is described by how it reacts to 1-interval or k-intervals being presented by the adversary:

Again, this 2-size algorithm is shown to be strongly-competitive.

The generalized k-size algorithm which is similar to the 2-size algorithm is then shown to be O(log)-competitive.

Lipton showed that randomized testing can be provably useful, given the problem satisfied certain properties.

Proving correctness of a program is one of the most important problems presented in computer science.

Typically in randomized testing, in order to attain a 1/1000 chance of an error, 1000 tests must be run.

However Lipton shows that if a problem has "easy" sub-parts, repeated black-box testing can attain cr error rate, with c a constant less than 1 and r being the number of tests.

Therefore, the probability of error goes to zero exponentially fast as r grows.

This technique is useful to check the correctness of many types of problems.

In the area of game theory, more specifically of non-cooperative games, Lipton together with E. Markakis and A. Mehta proved the existence of epsilon-equilibrium strategies with support logarithmic in the number of pure strategies.

Furthermore, the payoff of such strategies can epsilon-approximate the payoffs of exact Nash equilibria.

The limited (logarithmic) size of the support provides a natural quasi-polynomial algorithm to compute epsilon-equilibria.

Lipton and J. Naughton presented an adaptive random sampling algorithm for database querying which is applicable to any query for which answers to the query can be partitioned into disjoint subsets.

Unlike most sampling estimation algorithms—which statically determine the number of samples needed—their algorithm decides the number of samples based on the sizes of the samples, and tends to keep the running time constant (as opposed to linear in the number of samples).

DeMillo, Lipton and Perlis criticized the idea of formal verification of programs and argued that

Chandra, Furst and Lipton generalized the notion of two-party communication protocols to multi-party communication protocols.

They proposed a model in which a collection of processes have access to a set of integers (a_0, ) except one of them, so that P_i is denied access to a_i.

These processes are allowed to communicate in order to arrive at a consensus on a predicate.

They studied this model's communication complexity, defined as the number of bits broadcast among all the processes.

Since 1996, Lipton has been the chief consulting scientist at Telcordia.

In 1999, Lipton was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for the application of computer science theory to practice.

Since 2000, Lipton has been at Georgia Tech.

While at Princeton, Lipton worked in the field of DNA computing.