Madhu Sudan, Principal Researcher

Madhu Sudan got his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1992, and joined MSR in May 2009 after stints in IBM Research (1992-1997) and MIT (1997-2009) where he was the Fujitsu Professor of EECS and Associate Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Madhu Sudan's research lies in the fields of computational complexity theory, algorithms and coding theory. He is best known for his works on probabilistic checking of proofs, and on the design of list-decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes. His current research interests include semantic communication and property testing. In 2002, Madhu Sudan was awarded the Nevanlinna Prize, for outstanding contributions to the mathematics of computer science, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. Read more...

Ce Liu, First-Year Post-Doc
Ce Liu just joined MSRNE as a postdoc researcher right after he obtained his PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the BS degree in automation and the ME degree in pattern recognition from the Department of Automation, Tsinghua University in 1999 and 2002, respectively. From 2002 to 2003, he worked at Microsoft Research Asia as an assistant researcher. His research interests include computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning. He has published more than 20 papers in the top conferences and journals in these fields. He received a Microsoft Fellowship in 2005, the outstanding student paper award at the Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in 2006, a Xerox Fellowship in 2007, the best student paper award at IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in 2009.

Hamid Nazer Zadeh, First-Year Post-Doc
Former Ph.D. student in operations research at Stanford university, under supervision of professors Amin Saberi and Ashish Goel. Before joining Stanford, Hamid received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Sharif University, Tehran. His research interests include Internet markets, game theory, approximation algorithms, and stochastic optimization. Read more...

Prasad Raghavendra, First-Year Post-Doc
Prasad Raghavendra received his Phd in Computer Science at University of Washington under the supervision of Venkatesan Guruswami. His research interests include areas of theoretical computer science such as approximation algorithms and inapproximability results for NP-hard optimization problems, error correcting codes, metric embeddings and computational learning. He is the recipient of the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards at STOC 08. In his free time, he likes to travel, hike and watch tons of movies and shows.

Alexander (Sasha) Sherstov, First-Year Post-Doc

Alexander (Sasha) Sherstov earned his Ph.D. in computer science in August 2009 at the University of Texas at Austin under the direction of Adam Klivans. He has broad research interests in theoretical computer science, including complexity theory (communication complexity, circuit complexity, and analytic models of complexity), computational learning theory, and quantum computing. In particular, he is interested in the study of these questions from the standpoint of mathematical analysis, e.g., duality theory, matrix analysis, and approximation theory.

Raissa D'Souza, University of California at Davis
Raissa D'Souza is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Computer Science at the University of California at Davis, as well as an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research focuses on mathematical models of self-organization, phase transitions and the structure and function of networked systems. Her current interest is developing methods to enhance or delay the onset of phase transitions in random graphs as well as using random graphs to model statistical properties of interacting networks, such as congruence between social networks and technical artifacts in Open Source Software, the interplay of genetic-regulatory and protein-interaction networks in biological systems, and diffusion of ideas and viruses through distinct communities. Raissa received a PhD in Statistical Physics from MIT, was a Postdoc at Bell Labs and then a Postdoc in the Theory Group at MSR. She will be with the New England Lab until November 10th.

Sham Kakade, Toyota Technological Institute/Wharton
Sham will be joining the Department of Statistics at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania as an associate professor this Jan (He recently left the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago). His research interests are in artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithmic game theory, and computational finance, with particular interests at the intersection of statistical learning and game theory. Though much of his work is mathematical, he is also actively pursuing applications to computer vision, natural language processing, and speech. Sham will be with the New England Lab until December.

Ran Raz, Weizmann Institute
Ran Raz is a Professor of Math and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science. He received is PhD in 1992 from the Hebrew University and after a short post-doc at Princeton University joint the Weizmann Institute in 1994. His main research area is complexity theory, with emphasis on proving lower bounds for computational models. More specifically, he is interested in Boolean and arithmetic circuit complexity, communication complexity, propositional proof theory, probabilistically checkable proofs, quantum computation and communication, and randomness and derandomization. Ran will be with the New England lab through December.

Joe Silverman, Brown

Joe Silverman is a professor of mathematics at Brown University. His primary research interests are number theory, especially the arithmetic theory of elliptic curves and higher dimensional algebraic varieties, theoretical cryptography, discrete dynamical systems, and interactions between these areas. Joe received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1982 and was a Moore Instructor at M.I.T. and an associate professor at Boston University before moving to Brown in 1988. He is the author of seven books, including two books on the arithmetic of elliptic curves that won the American Mathematical Society Sloan prize, and he has written more than 100 research papers. Joe will be at the New England lab until the end of January 2010. 

Michael Grubb, Harvard University

Michael Grubb is an Assistant Professor of Applied Economics in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. Michael Grubb has received a BS in Engineering and a BS in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, 2000, an M.Phil. in Economics at Oxford, 2002, and a Ph.D. in Business Administration (Economics) at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2007. Michael Grubb's research interests are in applied microeconomic theory, industrial organization, and behavioral economics. His recent research topics include: optimal pricing to overconfident consumers, reputational concerns regarding disclosure, and tax-advantaged employee benefits. Michael Grubb will be with the New England lab until December.

Avinatan Hassidim, MIT

Avinatan is an MIT research fellow in the xQIT program. He graduated from the Hebrew University under the supervision of Michael Ben-Or, without ever entering the campus on weekdays. Last year, he also co-founded Meterlive, which won the Mobile track in the MIT 100K competition. Avinatan is interested in using TCS to better model the real world. He is fascinated by what quantum computing can say about quantum mechanics, and what mechanism design can say about human behavior. He will be with the New England Lab until January 2010.

Michael Mitzenmacher, Harvard University

Michael Mitzenmacher is a Professor of Computer Science in the
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.
He graduated summa cum laude with a degree in mathematics and computer science from Harvard in 1991. After studying
math for a year in Cambridge, England, on the Churchill Scholarship, he obtained his Ph. D. in computer science at U.C. Berkeley in 1996. He then worked at Digital Systems Research Center until joining the Harvard faculty in 1999. Michael has authored or co-authored over 100 conference and journal publications on a variety of topics, including Internet algorithms, hashing, load-balancing, erasure codes, error-correcting codes, compression, bin-packing, and power laws. His work on low-density parity-check codes shared the 2002 IEEE Information Theory Society Best Paper Award. His textbook on probabilistic techniques in computer science, co-written with Eli Upfal, was published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press. Michael will be with the New England lab through December 2009.

Markus Mobius, Harvard

Markus Mobius is Associate Professor of economics at Harvard University and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His main research interests lie in social networks, with a particular focus on cooperation and trust in social networks. He does both theoretical and experimental research (mainly field experiments). Markus received his PhD from MIT in 2000 and previously earned an M.Phil in economics and a B.A. n mathematics from Oxford University. He and his wife Tanya Rosenblat live in Ames, Iowa and have two daughters. Markus will be with the New England Lab until June 2010.  

Peter Winkler, Dartmouth

Peter Winkler is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, and Albert Bradley Third Century Professor in the Sciences, at Dartmouth College. His mathematical interests include combinatorics, probability, and the theory of computing. Formerly Director of Fundamental Mathematics Research at Bell Labs, he holds a dozen patents in computing, cryptology, holography, optical networking and marine navigation. He is also the author of two collections of mathematical puzzles, a portfolio of compositions for ragtime piano, and a novel introducing cryptographic techniques for the game of bridge. Peter will be visiting the lab through December 2009.

Zvika Brakerski, Intern

Zvika Brakerski is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, under the supervision of Shafi Goldwasser. He received his MSc degree from Tel-Aviv University under the supervision of Boaz Patt-Shamir. His main research interests are foundations of computer science and in particular foundations of cryptography.

Xin Li, Intern
Xin Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, under the supervision of David Zuckerman. His research interests include the use of randomness in computation, especially extractors and pseudo-randomness, distributed computing, coding theory and complexity theory. He received his BS and MS degrees from Tsinghua University.