Research

Boosting solutions to complex search and analysis problems

Professor Lumsdaine

Many problems in data analysis involve large complex graphs. Examples include analyzing the relationships between different chemical compounds and biological pathways that facilitate communication among genes, molecules and cells that are important in the drug discovery business, studying the complex networks that exist in website links and optimizing the routes in data networks to improve bandwidth and reduce contention.

Professor Lumsdaine is the leader of the team that has produced the Boost Graph Library, which is the gold standard for open source software for solving graph analysis problems. Boost provides a standardized generic interface for traversing graphs. Part of the Boost Graph Library is a generic interface that allows access to a graph's structure, but hides the details of the implementation. This is an ``open'' interface in the sense that any graph library that implements this interface will be interoperable with the BGL generic algorithms and with other algorithms that also use this interface.

The Boost Graph Library is part of a larger project to promote the use of Generic Programming style in many areas of data analysis.