Michael E. Palmer

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science, California Institute of Technology, June, 1997

B.S., Physics, Yale University, June, 1991

Work Experience

Stanford University, Department of Biological Sciences, Palo Alto, CA (October 2005 to present)

Visiting Scholar to laboratory of Professor Marc Feldman.

Harvard University, School of Public Health, Department of Epidemiology, Boston, MA (January 2003 to June 2005, half time)

Visiting Scientist to laboratory of Associate Professor Marc Lipsitch.

Inktomi Corporation (March 1996 to March 2001)

Chief Technology Officer, Search Division (June 2000 to March 2001)

Developed technology and marketing strategy for Search Division. Met current and prospective customers to access needs and communicate future product directions; presented on behalf of Inktomi at public conferences.

Development Manager, Directory Engine Service (1998 to June 2000)

The Directory Engine service complemented the Web Search service with an automatically classified hierarchical directory of web pages. The Directory Engine group (approx. 12 members total, 3 with PhDs) was responsible for: classification algorithms, relevance ranking algorithms, editorial tools, and production software and hardware for the Directory Engine service.

Programming and Operations (March 1996 to 1998)

Programming work on early versions of Inktomi crawler, indexer. Operation of early Inktomi crawler, indexer. Design and programming of initial document classification algorithm for Directory Engine product (above).

Silicon Graphics, Inc., Mountain View, CA. Part time consulting (1994-1995)

Developed interactive parallel volume rendering demo RendAsunder, which ran on SGI’s Power Challenge Array, a parallel supercomputer. Demo allowed users to “fly” through a 2GB human body volumetric dataset. Presented at conferences in Europe and the US.

Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge, MA. (Summer 1990)

Developed massively parallel evolving Genetic Algorithms on the Connection Machine, work resulted in journal paper in Complex Systems (below).

Intel Scientific Computers, Beaverton, OR. (Summer 1989)

Developed working prototype of parallel RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) system for Intel’s ISPC/2 parallel supercomputer.

Publications

Refereed Journal Papers

Palmer, M.E. and Lipsitch, M. "The Influence of Hitchhiking and Deleterious Mutation Upon Asexual Mutation Rates," Genetics, 173: 461–472 (May 2006). DOI:10.1534/genetics.105.049445

Palmer, M.E., Totty, B., and Taylor, S. "Ray Casting on Shared-Memory Architectures: Memory Hierarchy Considerations in Volume Rendering," IEEE Concurrency, 6(1):20-35, Spring, 1998.

Taylor, Watts, Rieffel and Palmer. "The Concurrent Graph: Basic Technology for Irregular Problems", IEEE Parallel and Distributed Technology, 4(2):15-25, Summer 1996.

Palmer, M.E. and Smith, S.J. "Improved Evolutionary Optimization of Difficult Landscapes: Control of Premature Convergence through Scheduled Sharing," Complex Systems, Vol 5 (1991), pp. 443-458.

Refereed Conference Papers

Palmer, M.E., Taylor, S., and Totty, B. "Exploiting Deep Parallel Memory Hierarchies for Ray Casting Volume Rendering," The 1997 Symposium on Parallel Rendering, pp 15-22,115-116. Phoenix, AZ. ACM SIGGRAPH, 1997.

Palmer, M.E., Taylor, S., and Totty, B. "Interactive Volume Rendering on Clusters of Shared-Memory Multiprocessors," Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics '95, Pasadena, CA. Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., 1995.

Palmer, M.E. and Taylor, S. "Rotation Invariant Partitioning for Concurrent Scientific Visualization," Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics '94, Kyoto, Japan. Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., 1994.

Palmer, M.E. "The Airplane Finder Project, or An Attention-Focusing Neural Network for Pattern Recognition on Clusterable Data Spaces," Proceedings of the 1990 Long Island I.E.E.E. Student Conference on Neural Networks. pp. 45-48. Editor, Frank P. Li. N.Y.I.T. (Winner, Best Undergraduate Paper.)

Other Publications

Palmer, M.E. Exploiting Parallel Memory Hierarchies for Ray Casting Volumes, Ph.D. Thesis, California Institute of Technology, 1997.

Palmer, M.E. Scientific Visualization of Unstructured Volumetric Data on Concurrent Architectures, Master's Thesis, California Institute of Technology, 1993.