Clifford Stein conducts research in the design and analysis of efficient algorithms and in combinatorial optimization. He is particularly interested in the design of algorithms for hard-to-solve problems, arising in areas such as network design and scheduling. He designs algorithms for a variety of applications ranging from scheduling problems that arise in computer systems to problems that arise in industrial manufacturing facilities. His research includes both the rigorous mathematical analysis of algorithms and the algorithm engineering needed to design efficient implementations. He is particularly interested in the algorithmic issues involved in energy usage, such as managing the work in a data center in an energy efficient manner. He is also the co-author of the popular textbook, Introduction to Algorithms, which has sold over 500,000 copies and been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Stein is particularly interested in the design of approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems and on designing online algorithms, which handle the case when the necessary data arrives over time. His work has included many advances in the field of scheduling, which considers the allocation of resources over time, and in network and graph algorithms.
Stein received a BSE in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1987 and a PhD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, chair of the Steering Committee for the Annual Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, and has received a Career grant and a Sloan Fellowship.
