Recently it was announced that MIT professors and CSAIL principal investigators Constantinos Daskalakis and Aleksander Madry have been honored with prestigious awards for their work in theoretical computer science.
Daskalakis received one of the Simons Foundation’s 2018 Simons Investigator Awards for mathematics. He was recognized for his research in computation theory, related to topics like game theory, economics, probability theory, statistics and machine learning.
Specifically, the Simons Foundation has honored him for “resolv[ing] long-standing open problems about the computational complexity of the Nash equilibrium, the mathematical structure and computational complexity of multi-item auctions, and the behavior of machine-learning methods such as the expectation-maximization algorithm.”
Madry received the 2018 European Association for Theoretical Computer Science’s Presburger Award for Young Scientists.
Madry has received the Presburger Award for his contributions to the theory of algorithms, including his work on the maximum flow problem in graphs and digraphs, well as his contributions to the k-server problem and the Asymmetric Travelling Salesman problem.
The EATCS wrote that “Aleksander’s results have been celebrated in the community not only because he broke long standing complexity barriers, but because he introduced new and very different techniques to the field which since have successfully been picked up by others.”
