O’Donnell, von Ahn Win Sloan Fellowships
Two Carnegie Mellon Computer Science professors, Ryan O’Donnell and Luis von Ahn, have been awarded 2009 Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships. Three CMU CS alumni also won fellowships. They are Shuchi Chawla (a Ph.D. alumnus now on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin), Eugene Ng (also a Ph.D. alumnus, a faculty member at Rice University), and Steve Zdancewic (a B.S. alumnus, on the faculty at Penn State UPenn).
Ryan has rapidly become one of the most important young researchers in computer science theory, 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. Last year he was invited to give a tutorial at the STOC conference, based on his more recent work on fourier analysis of boolean functions.
Luis von Ahn is extremely well known for his groundbreaking establishment of the field of Human Computation, which makes use of computing technology to marshal the resources of millions of people to solve hard problems and make computers smarter. He has received a long list of major awards, including the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship. Recently, he received seed funding from the Heinz Endowments and the Fine Foundation, leading to the development of both Games With a Purpose (gwap.com) and new developments in language translation via human computation.
Both Ryan and Luis are fantastic, popular teachers and, on a personal note, just great, fun people to have around, always the consummate “good citizens” looking for ways to make our department better for everyone.
Congratulations, Ryan and Luis!
Peter Lee @ February 17, 2009