Venkat Guruswami to Join CMU Faculty

News

I am truly pleased to announce that Venkatesan Guruswami will be joining the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department, effective July 1, 2009. One of the most important researchers in theoretical computer science today, Venkat’s work connects with a large number of people here, including core theorists (such as Manuel Blum, Steven Rudich, and Ryan O’Donnell) and algorithms researchers (such as Avrim Blum, Danny Sleator, and Anupam Gupta). His research interests also intersect with a wide range of other faculty members, such as Gary Miller, John Lafferty, Guy Blelloch, Lenore Blum, and more.

Venkat has been spending this past academic year with us as a visiting professor.  Prior to that, he spent a year at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study, and has been a member of the faculty at the University of Washington for the past several years. He received his PhD from MIT, under the direction of Madhu Sudan. Venkat’s PhD thesis, “List Decoding of Error-Correcting Codes,” won the 2002 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Competition. This groundbreaking work was highlighted by the NSF as follows:

After more than 30 years of work on Reed-Solomon codes, we found that we could recover more errors,” Sudan said. “Just the fact that everyone had it wrong after all those years is surprising. The difference seems small, but it turns out to have practical repercussions.”

For his breakthrough, Sudan received the 2002 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, awarded by the International Mathematical Union for outstanding contributions in the mathematical aspects of information science. That same year, Guruswami received the Association for Computing Machinery’s award for the best doctoral dissertation in computer science and engineering.

Venkat’s work is beautiful and yet has significant practical implications in a range of areas, from wireless communications, storage devices, language processing, and machine learning. As John Lafferty (faculty member in both the Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department) says, “Venkat has done incredibly beautiful and deep work in coding theory. We’re extremely fortunate to have him at CMU, and he adds a whole new dimension to our department.”

Venkat Guruswami is Manuel Blum’s academic great-grandson.  Manuel was Umesh Vazirani’s thesis advisor, who in turns was Madhu Sudan’s thesis advisor. Madhu Sudan was Venkat Guruswami’s advisor.

I’m just thrilled that Venkat will be joining our department. I think he will take our already strong theory group to new heights, and along the way elevate the entire department.

Peter Lee @ May 3, 2009