Christopher Whidden

PhD Student

Faculty of Computer Science
6050 University Avenue
Halifax, NS
Canada B3H 1W5

whidden@cs.dal.ca

Research Interests

• Fixed-parameter Algorithms
• Computational Biology
• NP-hardness

Education

October 2009: Master of Computer Science (MCSc), Dalhousie University, Canada

• Thesis: A Unifying View on Approximation and FPT of Agreement Forests
• Supervisor: Norbert Zeh

May 2008: Bachelor of Computer Science (BCSc) with Co-op and First Class Honours, Dalhousie University, Canada

• Thesis: Sorting by Transpositions: Fixed-parameter Algorithms and Structural Properties
• Supervisor: Norbert Zeh

Publications

Chris Whidden, Robert Beiko and Norbert Zeh. (2010). Fast FPT Algorithms for Computing Rooted Agreement Forests: Theory and Experiments. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms, SEA 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6049, pp. 141-153. Springer-Verlag (2010). The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.

Chris Whidden and Norbert Zeh. (2009). A Unifying View on Approximation and FPT of Agreement Forests. Algorithms in Bioinformatics: 9th International Workshop, WABI 2009, Philadelphia, USA, September 12-13, 2009. Proceedings. 390-402. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.

Vlado Keselj, Haibin Liu, Norbert Zeh, Christian Blouin, and Chris Whidden. (2009). Finding optimal parameters for edit distance based sequence classification is NP-hard. Proceedings of the KDD'09 Workshop on Statistical and Relational Learning in Bioinformatics, StReBio'09. 17-21.

Tony Abou-Assaleh, Chris Whidden, Vlado Keselj, Hathai Tanta-ngai, and Nick Cercone. (2007). DalTREC 2007 QA System Jellyfish: Experiments with Integration of Lucene and GATE, and Improved Usage of WordNet and Qrel. In The Sixteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2007), Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.

Tony Abou-Assaleh, Nick Cercone, Jon Doyle, Vlado Keselj, and Chris Whidden. (2005). DalTREC 2005 QA System Jellyfish: Mark-and-Match Approach to Question Answering. In The Fourteenth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2005) Proceedings, Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.

Technical Reports

Chris Whidden, Robert G. Beiko and Norbert Zeh. (2010). Fast FPT Algorithms for Computing Rooted Agreement Forests: Theory and Experiments. Dalhousie FCS Technical Report CS-2010-03.

Chris Whidden and Norbert Zeh. (2009). A Unifying View on Approximation and FPT of Agreement Forests. Dalhousie FCS Technical Report CS-2009-02.

Chris Whidden. (2007). Utilizing Automatic Coreference Resolution with the Jellyfish Question Answering System. Dalhousie FCS Technical Report.

Chris Whidden. (2005). Simple and Effective Question Processing using Regular Expressions and WordNet. Dalhousie FCS Technical Report.

Software