Santosh Vempala (born 18 October 1971) is a prominent
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the
Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...
. His main work has been in the area of
Theoretical Computer Science
Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory.
It is difficult to circumsc ...
.
Biography
Vempala secured B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 1992 then he attended
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...
, where he received his
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in 1997 under professor
Avrim Blum
Avrim Blum (born 27 May 1966) is a computer scientist. In 2007, he was made a List of Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to learning theory and algorithms." Blu ...
.
In 1997, he was awarded a
Miller Fellowship at Berkeley. Subsequently, he was a professor at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
in the Mathematics Department, until he moved to Georgia Tech in 2006.
Work
His main work has been in the area of
theoretical computer science
Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory.
It is difficult to circumsc ...
, with particular activity in the fields of
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...
s,
randomized algorithm
A randomized algorithm is an algorithm that employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic or procedure. The algorithm typically uses uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the hope of achieving good performan ...
s,
computational geometry
Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems ar ...
, and
computational learning theory
In computer science, computational learning theory (or just learning theory) is a subfield of artificial intelligence devoted to studying the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms.
Overview
Theoretical results in machine learning m ...
, including the authorship of books on random projection
[S. Vempala, ``The Random Projection Method", American Mathematical Society, 2004.] and spectral methods.
[R. Kannan and S. Vempala,``Spectral Algorithms'', Now Publishers Inc., 2009.]
In 2008, he co-founded the Computing for Good (C4G) program at Georgia Tech.
Honors and awards
Vempala has received numerous awards, including a
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
,
Sloan Fellowship
The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States.
...
, and being listed in
Georgia Trend's ''40 under 40''.
He was named Fellow of
ACM "For contributions to algorithms for convex sets and probability distributions" in 2015. He was named a Fellow of the
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
, in the 2022 class of fellows, "for contributions to randomized algorithms, high-dimensional geometry, and numerical linear algebra, and service to the profession".
References
External links
Santosh Vempala's home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Vempala, Santosh
1971 births
Georgia Tech faculty
Living people
Computer science educators
Theoretical computer scientists
Indian emigrants to the United States
Carnegie Mellon University alumni
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Scientists from Visakhapatnam