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Daniel P. Lopresti

Associate Professor

Computer Science & Engineering
Lehigh University
19 Memorial Drive West
Bethlehem, PA 18015-3084 USA

Phone:	(610) 758-5782
Fax:	(610) 758-4096
Email*:

Office:	Packard Lab 404B
Hours:	by appointment

Daniel Lopresti received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton in 1987. After completing his doctorate, he joined the Computer Science Department at Brown and taught courses ranging from VLSI design to computational aspects of molecular biology. He went on to help found the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory, and later also served on the research staff at Bell Labs.

In 2003, Dr. Lopresti joined the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Lehigh where he is working to build a research group examining fundamental algorithmic and systems-related questions in pattern recognition, bioinformatics, and security. Dr. Lopresti is co-director of the Lehigh Pattern Recognition Research (PatRec) Lab.

Recent News of Note

Electronic Voting

I filed a key affidavit in the case of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People State Conference of Pennsylvania ("NAACP-SCP"), Election Reform Network, Richard Brown, Angel Coleman, and Genevieve Geis vs. Pedro A. Cortés, Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and Chet Harhut, Commissioner, Bureau of Commissions, Elections and Legislation, Pennsylvania Department of State. Click here to read my affidavit and click here to read the full complaint. The question at hand concerns the distribution of emergency paper ballots when 50% or more of the electronic voting machines in a given precinct have failed. The case was decided in our favor by Judge Harvey Bartle III on October 29, 2008. Click here and here to read media coverage of the decision.

Click here for an overview talk on e-voting that I gave at a Friends of the Lehigh Libraries symposium on October 23, 2008.

On May 12, 2008, I appeared in a panel discussion on WFMZ 69's "Business Matters" hosted by Tony Iannelli with Stacy Sterner, Ken Kraft, Santa Bannon-Shillea, and Alan Brau. To view details about the show, click here.

The PERFECT Project
Also of note, we have been awarded an NSF CyberTrust grant to study issues surrounding the reliable processing of voting records, including paper ballots. Investigators on the project include George Nagy from RPI, Elisa Barney Smith from Boise State, Chris Borick from Muhlenberg, and Ziad Munson and myself from Lehigh. PERFECT is an acronym that stands for "Paper and Electronic Records For Elections: Cultivating Trust." Click here for the PERFECT project website.

We have acquired examples of two full-face electronic voting systems manufactured by Danaher and Sequoia. These systems match those used in several PA counties, and were purchased from government surplus auctions on the web. For more information and media coverage, click below:

"Major New Investigation of Electronic Voting Machines (press release)", OpEdNew.com, March 4, 2007.
"Dems take aim at vote flaws", The Morning Call Online, March 6, 2007.
"eVoting in the News! (op-ed)", phillyBurbs.com, March 7, 2007.

For other past news on the e-voting issue, click here.

Bioinformatics

Along with colleagues from Biological Sciences and Chemical Engineering, I lead a student research team developing techniques for searching large genetic databases for evidence of RNA editing events. This activity was part of Lehigh's Biosystems Dynamics Summer Institute which was recently funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Click here for more details on the project.

* My email address is expressed in image format to make it more difficult for "bots" to harvest it for spam purposes.