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 ...

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 ...

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 projectionS. 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