CSAIL Students Honored For Outstanding Doctoral Theses

Six CSAIL students were recently named winners of the George M. Sprowls Award for the best doctoral theses in computer science. A committee consisting of CSAIL Principal investigators Daniel Jackson, Antonio Torralba, Costis Daskalakis, Dana Moshkovitz and Nickolai Zeldovich selected the award-winning theses, with help from CSAI Principal Investigators Bill Freeman, Tommi Jaakkola, Leslie Kaelbling, Manolis Kellis, and Tomas Lozano-Perez.
 
Seven theses from EECS were selected for this year’s Sprowls Award, six of which came from CSAIL students.
 
Aleksander Madry, supervised by Michel Goemans and Jon Kelner, was recognized for “From Graphs to Matrices, and Back: New Techniques for Graph Algorithms”; Ankur Moitra, supervised by Tom Leighton, was recognized for “Vertex Sparsification and Universal Rounding Algorithms”; Jelani Nelson, supervised by Erik Demaine and Piotr Indyk, was recognized for “Sketching and Streaming High-Dimensional Vectors”; Dan Roy, supervised by Leslie Kaelbling, was recognized for “Computability, Inference and Modeling in Probabilistic Programming”; Shubhangi Saraf, supervised by Madhu Sudan, was recognized for “The Method of Multiplicities”; and Rohit Singh, supervised by Bonnie Berger, was recognized for “Algorithms for the Analysis of Protein Interaction Networks.”
 
Additionally, Madry’s thesis was nominated for the annual ACM dissertation award competition.