Sanjeev Arora Awarded For Innovation In Problem Solving

ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) and Infosys Foundation announced that Sanjeev Arora, 44, of Princeton University, is the recipient of the 2011 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences for his innovative approaches to problem solving.

Arora’s research revolutionised the approach to essentially unsolvable problems that have long bedeviled the computing field, the so-called NP-complete problems. These results have had implications for problems common to cryptography, computational biology, and computer vision among other fields.
The ACM-Infosys Foundation Award, established in August 2007, recognises personal contributions by young scientists and system developers to a contemporary innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent achievements in the computing field. Financial support for the award, which was increased this year to $175,000, is provided by an endowment from the Infosys Foundation.

“With his new tools and techniques, Arora has developed a fundamentally new way of thinking about how to solve problems,” said ACM President Alain Chesnais. “He also demonstrated that when we can’t solve these problems, we understand why this is the case. In particular, his work on the PCP theorem is considered the most important development in computational complexity theory in the last 30 years. He also perceived the practical applications of his work, which has moved computational theory into the realm of real world uses.”

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Arora’s work provides key theoretical concepts for distinguishing between problems that can be approximated efficiently and those that cannot. He played a key role in the development of probabilistically checkable proofs (PCP) that resulted in the PCP theorem, which leads to designs for more secure use of agents common in cloud computing, and for studying human allergic reactions. He also contributed new ways to find approximate solutions to problems. His efforts have inspired other computer theory researchers and helped raise the level of funding for theoretical computer science.

“Infosys is proud to partner with ACM to recognise Dr. Arora’s contributions in computing. His research on approximation algorithms, and the tools he has developed, can help speed the pace of innovation, which is critical in today’s increasingly fast-paced global economy,” said S. D. Shibulal, CEO and Managing Director of Infosys. “The ACM-Infosys Foundation Award underscores our ongoing commitment to support advances in computing sciences, and encourage groundbreaking uses of technology to help build tomorrow’s enterprises.”

Arora was the founding director of the Center for Computational Intractability which addresses the phenomenon that many problems seem inherently impossible to solve on current computational models. The organisation, a joint venture of Princeton University, the Institute for Advanced Study, Rutgers University, and New York University, is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. It is devoted to designing new approaches to fundamental problems in computing as well as other sciences.