Biography

Venkatesan Guruswami is a Chancellor's Professor in the Department of EECS, Senior Scientist at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, and Professor of Mathematics at UC Berkeley. He received his B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1997, and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, both in Computer Science. He was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley during 2001-02 and previously held faculty positions in Computer Science at the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University prior to moving to his current position in January 2022.

Guruswami's research interests span many areas of theoretical computer science and related mathematics, including error-correction, approximate optimization, randomness in computing, and computational complexity. His work on list error-correction has led to codes with minimum possible redundancy for correcting any desired fraction of worst-case errors. His recent works include notable progress on polar codes, deletion-correcting codes, codes for cloud storage, and constraint satisfaction problems.

Prof. Guruswami has served the theory of computing community in several leadership roles. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM and editor for TheoretiCS, and was previously editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Computation Theory and on the editorial boards of SIAM Journal on Computing, JACM, and IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He is Vice Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing and a moderator for arXiv cs.IT. He has served as program committee chair for the CCC, FOCS and ISIT conferences, and is a former president of the Computational Complexity Foundation.

Prof. Guruswami is the recipient of a Simons Investigator award, the Presburger Award, Packard and Sloan Fellowships, the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, and an IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award. He was an invited speaker at the 2010 International Congress of Mathematicians. He is a fellow of the ACM (2017) and the IEEE (2019).

Education

  • 2001, PhD, Computer Science, MIT

Awards, Memberships and Fellowships