Gad Landau
Gad Menahem Landau (born 1954) is an Israeli computer scientist noted for his contributions to combinatorial pattern matching and string algorithms and is the founding department chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Haifa.His solution was the first to combine suffix trees and lowest common ancestor queries, and has since inspired many extensions of this technique to other problems.The footprints of Landau's research can be found in almost every subarea of string algorithms, including his foundational work on dynamic programming algorithms for the edit distance[5] problem, his numerous papers on modeling digitized images and 2D matching,[6] incremental sequence alignment,[7][8][9] and recently, his work on jumbled pattern matching[10] and compressed text[11][12][13] algorithms.He was instrumental in the application of pattern matching techniques to the area of computational biology, working on problems in several diverse areas such as DNA and RNA comparison,[14][15] clustering,[16] haplotype inference,[17] protein secondary structure prediction,[18] and tandem repeats.Apart from these, Landau was also involved in community and civic activities, and served as a member of the Haifa city council from 2008 until 2013.