Rate My Professor Chris Pollett

Christopher J. Pollett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at San Jose State University. He received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego in 1997. His doctoral thesis, titled "Arithmetic Theories with Prenex Normal Form Induction," was completed under the supervision at UCSD. Prior to joining San Jose State University, Pollett held academic appointments at several prestigious institutions, including the Mathematics Department at UCLA, the Computer Science Department at Clark University, the Computer Science Department at Boston University, the Mathematics Department at UCSD, and the Mathematics Department at Caltech. At San Jose State University, he has taken on leadership roles such as Graduate Coordinator and has contributed extensively to departmental administration.

Pollett's research interests include bounded arithmetic, computational complexity, quantum circuits, databases, nonmonotonic logics, neural networks, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, proof theory, logic in general, and web development. He has produced a substantial body of work published in leading journals and conference proceedings. Key publications encompass "A propositional proof system for R_i^2" in Proof Complexity and Feasible Arithmetics, DIMACS Series (1997); "On Proofs about Threshold Circuits and Counting Hierarchies" in Proceedings of the Thirteenth IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (1998); "Structure and Definability in General Bounded Arithmetic Theories" in Annals of Pure and Applied Logic (1999); "On the Complexity of Quantum ACC," Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity (2000); "Ordinal Notations and Well-Orderings in Bounded Arithmetic" in Annals of Pure and Applied Logic (2003); "On the Computational Power of Probabilistic and Quantum Branching Programs" with Farid Ablayev, Aida Gainutdinova, Marek Karpinski, and Cristopher Moore in Information and Computation (2005); and "Circuit Principles and Weak Pigeonhole Variants" with Norman Danner in Theoretical Computer Science (2007). Pollett has served on numerous committees, including the current Recruitment Committee, and previously on the Graduate Curriculum Committee, RTP Committee, PTR Committee, Executive Committee, Software Engineering and Databases Committee, AI Specialty Courses Committee, College Research Committee, CS Colloquium Committee, Committee on Committees, Department Assessment Committee, Programming Algorithms and Theory Committee, Introductory Database Systems Committee, Scholarship Committee, Special Courses Committee, and Undergraduate Curriculum Committee. He also advises master's students through his research supervision program.