Patrick H. Madden

UCLA Computer Science Dept.

4561 Boelter Hall

Los Angeles, CA 90095

office: 310-206-2279

fax: 310-UCLA-CSD

http://cadlab.cs.ucla.edu/~pickle

pickle@cs.ucla.edu

Quickcam image from the Palatine, in Rome

I recently finished my PhD in Computer Science, with my work being done in the UCLA VLSI CAD LAB, which is in the CS Department. My advisor was Prof. Jason Cong. I have accepted a faculty position at SUNY Binghamton, and will be moving there in the fall. In the mean time, I'll be working on my start-up company, IKM, and I'm preparing a talk on my global router for the Design Automation Conference.

For the first two weeks of August, I'll be going a quick vacation in Peru, including a 4-day hike up the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Unfortunately, my trusty PowerBook 145 (a stone-age Mac laptop) has taken a tumble, and I won't be able to use it with my Quickcam. I'm thinking about getting a new digital camera (and a new laptop), but it's just not going to be as much fun. My only alternative is to get out the duct tape, and try to fix the PowerBook.

My main research interests are in VLSI CAD, with a particular focus on routing problems. Many VLSI CAD problems are NP-Hard in nature, and we have to resort to heuristic methods to find solutions. I'm interested in finding cost functions and formulations that improve the performance of the heuristic methods. While VLSI CAD problems are quite practical, there are some theoretical issues that should be considered. More detail is given on my current research page.

In addition to VLSI CAD problems, I'm also interested in real-time 3D rendering, software engineering, network-based computing, and unusual programming languages.

In the commercial world, I've consulted or worked for a variety of companies. I was with two startup companies that did oil-field automation; we built distributed databases, wireless radio networks, and autonomous remote computers, but there wasn't much money in that (at least in 1988). More recently, I've worked on a CD-ROM multimedia game for a major publisher, and occasionally do consulting for a developer of tools for web commerce.