Constructing phylogenetic (or evolutionary) trees from
biological data is a classical problem in biology, and it still is
a major challenge today. Most realistic formulations of the
problem, which take errors into account, give rise to hard
computational problems. In this survey paper we
concentrate on {\em quartet based} tree reconstruction methods. We
briefly describe the general tree reconstruction problem, and
discuss the motivation for using quartet based reconstruction.
We then turn to the computational complexity of
this reconstruction task. Finally, we give a high level description
of some algorithms and heuristics for constructing trees from
quartets.
Benny Chor recieved the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees
in Mathematics from
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1980 and 1981,
respectively, and
the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Massachusetts
Institute
of Technology in 1985. During the years 1985--1986 he was a
Postdoctorate Fellow in the Computer Science Laboratory,
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and in Aiken Computation Laboratory,
Harvard University. In 1987 he joined the Computer Science
Department at the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology.
His research interests include randomized techniques,
cryptography, and computational biology.