Steven Skiena, PhD is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science and the Interim Director of the AI Innovation Institute at Stony Brook University.  His research interests include data science, bioinformatics, and algorithms.  He is the author of six books, including "The Algorithm Design Manual,"  "The Data Science Design Manual," and "Who's Bigger: Where Historical Figures Really Rank," and over 200 technical papers. 

Skiena received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois under Herbert Edelsbrunner in 1988.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a current and former Fulbright scholar, and recipient of the University of Virginia Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award (WahooWa!), the ONR Young Investigator Award and the IEEE Computer Science and Engineer Teaching Award.  His paper on the DeepWalk approach to graph representation learning received the ten-year Test of Time Award at KDD 2024.