William Perrizo, distinguished professor of computer science, was awarded his fifth U.S. patent on Nov. 16 for his system and method for performing and accelerating cluster analysis of large data sets. The title of the patent is "Method and system for data mining of very large spatial datasets using vertical set inner products."

Perrizo’s expertise is in database systems, data mining, knowledge discovery, distributed database systems, high performance computer systems, communications networks, precision agriculture, bioinformatics and remotely sensed imagery analysis. He has been with the NDSU computer science department since 1973.

Perrizo’s work includes algorithms that allow for significant improvements in processing and analyzing extremely large data sets to help users find the proverbial needle in a data haystack. The algorithms compress the data set to a small fraction of its original size, performing data operations in seconds instead of hours. Information about technology developed by Perrizo that is available for licensing through the NDSU Research Foundation is found at www.ndsuresearchfoundation.org/software. A profile of his career in computer science is available at www.ndsu.edu/ndsu/news/magazine/vol09_issue01/numbers_guy.shtml