http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/madani/academics.html
I am now in search of a topic to pursue my PhD on. For my PhD. qualifier, I studied the problem of quickly finding approximately matching clones in a restriction mapping experiment. I came up with an interesting algorithm to speed up the process and analyzed some of the tradeoffs. I think that the ideas behind the algorithm are general enough to define a general scheme for approximate matching in other contexts. I was advised mainly by professor Larry Ruzzo , and also by professor Karp.
Recenlty, professors Oren Etzioni, Steve Hanks, Tao Jiang and I began investigating a fairly new problem: the metacrawler's problem! We introduced a few optimization models and came up with approximation algorithms under those models.