CS professor Sariel Har-Peled receives Test of Time Award at SOTC 2024

CS professor Sariel Har-Peled won a Test of Time Award at  STOC 2024 for the 2004 paper "On Coresets for 𝑘k-Means and 𝑘k-Median Clustering," written with Soham Mazumdar. The 56th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2024,) sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory, was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 24 - 28, 2024. The paper, published at STOC 2004 was recognized as seminal. The awards committee stated the paper’s results “sparked a long line of research yielding refinements and improvements - furthermore, the ideas introduced in this paper have had profound impact, from both theoretical and practical perspectives, in new models, such as streaming as well as several distributed models of computation."

Har-Peled, the Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering, has been cited 3,128 times for 174 publications from 1996-2023. While at The Grainger College of Engineering, he published 119 papers in computational geometry and, generally, approximation algorithms. Har-Peled has written that those algorithms “output a result which is close to, but not necessarily, optimal. This flexibility buys you a lot in simplicity and efficiency. On a somewhat more philosophical level, the question is, what is the crucial information you need to solve a problem? And how do you find this crucial information?” His 2011 book, Geometric Approximation Algorithms, was inspired by a collection of class notes. He explained that a “theory of geometric approximation algorithms has emerged. These algorithms tend to be simple, fast, and more robust than their exact counterparts.”

Mazumdar obtained a master’s degree in computer science in 2004 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and was a software engineer at Facebook and an early engineering lead at Google. He is the co-founder and CEO of WisdomAI.