On April 5, MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Ronitt Rubinfeld was named a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. Rubinfeld, the MIT EECS Edwin Sibley Webster Professor, was honored by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation based on her “prior achievement and exceptional promise” within computer science.
An early example of Rubinfeld’s work in algorithms is her 1990 paper, “Self-testing/correcting with applications to numerical problems.” Written alongside Michael Luby and Manuel Blum, the paper introduced self-testing and self-correction to assess the correctness of computer programs. This inspired sublinear-time algorithms, which only need to sample a small portion of large datasets to approximate solutions in algebra, geometry, graph theory, and optimization problems. Rubinfeld’s work won a 30-year Test-of Time award at the 2022 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), having also contributed to further studies on interactive proofs by providing a linearity test that is now a key element of constructions of probabilistically checkable proofs, which is a mathematical argument that can be checked by reading only a fixed number of bits of the proof.
Rubinfeld's subsequent work developed techniques for analyzing and processing massive data sets in sublinear time. She has developed algorithms that can perform tasks such as estimation, counting, sampling, and testing of properties of data, while using only a small fraction of the data. Her work on property testing of distributions has been influential in developing algorithms and techniques for analyzing and characterizing probability distributions over discrete domains in sample-efficient manner.
The Guggenheim fellowship is one of many awards for Rubinfeld, including an ONR Young Investigator Award in 1993, a Cornell College of Engineering Teaching Award in 1996, Sloan Foundation research fellowship in 1996, an MIT Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2018, and an MIT Seth J. Teller Award for Excellence, Inclusion, and Diversity in 2019. She was also an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2006, as well as being named a fellow of the ACM in 2014, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS).
