Efros and O’Donnell Awarded Okawa Foundation Grants
It’s been a bit of a whirlwind lately, with four trips in the last couple of weeks. Right now I’m in Tucson, Arizona for a meeting with the data management team of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). There are interesting tidbits to report from each of these events, which I’ll try to do in the next few articles. For now, however, I’d like to focus on the recent trip to San Francisco, where I attended an awards ceremony for Ryan O’Donnell (CS) and Alexei Efros (Robotics and CS). They were among 11 researchers honored with Okawa Foundation grants.
The Okawa grant program focuses primarily on up-and-coming researchers who are conducting basic, long-term research. Here at CMU, even though they haven’t been here all that long yet, many of us are already in awe of Alexei and Ryan. Just this past year, Alexei and his student, James Hays, developed one of the most interesting demonstrations of large-scale image mining, IMG2GPS. This system compares an image against a large database of images in order to estimate its geolocation. You can check out the latest sample results here. Last year, you may recall that Alexei was also honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Ryan has made several seminal contributions, particularly in the area of hardness of approximation. He showed in a recent series of papers that the current best 0.878… approximation factor known for the classic Max-Cut problem is in fact the best factor achievable by any polynomial-time algorithm, under a well-known conjecture in complexity theory. Ryan’s publications are many and have been making a big impact, and this year he was invited to give a special tutorial at the STOC conference — quite an honor and the only theory tutorial on the program this year.
The ceremony, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in downtown San Francisco, was a really nice affair. (I don’t often see our junior faculty wearing suits! ;-) I was lucky to have my wife join me. (Anupam Gupta gave us a couple of really great restaurant recommendations!) Matt Mason and his wife also were in attendance.
The Okawa Foundation is named after the late Isao Okawa, who was the founder of CSK Corporation. The Foundation supports basic research and technology development in information and telecommunications, with the mission of promoting the advanced information society of the future.
Way to go, Alexei and Ryan!
Peter Lee @ October 15, 2008