Award by Sanjeev Arora

2014-08-29

azim58 - Award by Sanjeev Arora

ACM and the Infosys Foundation have named Sanjeev Arora the recipient of
the 2011 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences for his
innovative approaches to problem solving. Arora's research revolutionized
the approach to essentially unsolvable problems that have long bedeviled
the computing field, the so-called NP-complete problems. These results
have had implications for problems common to cryptography, computational
biology, and computer vision, among other fields. Arora, the Charles
Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, is an
ACM Fellow, and won the Gödel Prize for both 2001 and 2010, as well as
the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1995. He was the founding director
of the Center for Computational Intractability, which addresses the
phenomenon that many problems seem inherently impossible to solve on
current computational models.

"With his new tools and techniques, Arora has developed a fundamentally
new way of thinking about how to solve problems," said ACM President
Alain Chesnais. "...In particular, his work on the PCP theorem is
considered the most important development in computational complexity
theory in the last 30 years. He also perceived the practical applications
of his work, which has moved computational theory into the realm of real
world uses."
The ACM-Infosys Foundation Award, established in August 2007, recognizes
personal contributions by young scientists and system developers to a
contemporary innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent achievements
in the computing field. Financial support for the award, which was
increased this year to $175,000, is provided by an endowment from the
Infosys Foundation.
Read more in the ACM press release.

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