Brenda Baker

Brenda Sue Baker is an American computer scientist. She is known for Baker's technique for approximation algorithms on planar graphs, for her early work on duplicate code detection, and for her research on two-dimensional bin packing problems.
Baker did her undergraduate studies at Radcliffe College. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1973; her dissertation concerned automata theory and formal languages, and was supervised by Ronald V. Book. Later she worked at Bell Laboratories, becoming a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff there.
Baker married another Bell Labs computer scientist, Eric Grosse, who would later become Google's Vice President for Security & Privacy Engineering. Their son, Roger Baker Grosse, is also a computer science researcher.

Selected publications

• Baker, Brenda S.; Book, Ronald V. (1972), "Reversal-bounded multi-pushdown machines", Conference Record of 13th Annual Symposium on Switching and Automata Theory, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE), pp. 207–211, doi:10.1109/SWAT.1972.21 .
• Baker, Brenda S.; Coffman, E. G., Jr.; Rivest, Ronald L. (1980), "Orthogonal packings in two dimensions", SIAM Journal on Computing, 9 (4): 846–855, doi:10.1137/0209064, MR 592771 
• Baker, Brenda S.; Grosse, Eric; Rafferty, Conor S. (1988), "Nonobtuse triangulation of polygons", Discrete and Computational Geometry, 3 (2): 147–168, doi:10.1007/BF02187904, MR 920700 .
• Baker, Brenda S. (1994), "Approximation algorithms for NP-complete problems on planar graphs", Journal of the ACM, 41 (1): 153–180, doi:10.1145/174644.174650, MR 1369197 .
• Baker, Brenda S. (1995), "On finding duplication and near-duplication in large software systems", Proceedings of 2nd Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE), pp. 86–95, doi:10.1109/wcre.1995.514697 .