Alfred Fred Brown

Biography

I am a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at The University of Adelaide. I am also a Chartered Member of the British Computer Society, a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered Scientist and a member of the ACM. I received a PhD from St Andrews University in Scotland, for my work in Persistent Object Systems. My research interests have included programming language design, type systems, data intensive applications, business information systems and bioinformatics.

Research Interest

My research interests have an essentially computer systems focus, that is, I like building useful tools for others to use by applying over 30 years of computer systems experience to interesting problems. Over time, this has included designing and implementing complete programming systems, virtual machines, compilers, garbage collection algorithms and stable storage systems. A more recent example, in the area of bioinformatics, is the interesting challenge of large scale suffix tree construction algorithms. A suffix tree is just a compressed trie of all suffixes (substrings ending at the end of a string) in a string. If you can build one, you can implement solutions to lots of interesting string problems very efficiently. Large scale suffix tree construction is a particularly interesting problem from a systems point of view, as the linear time algorithm exhibits what is effectively random memory access. Random memory access is really bad when things either don't fit into your CPU caches, or worse still don't fit into main memory either.