Greek MIT professor awarded fresh prize
Constantinos Daskalakis, an MIT professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has won the 2018 Grace Murray Hopper Award, by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the body announced on Wednesday.
The ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award is given to the “outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution,” the association said.
ACM will award a total of four technical prizes and Daskalakis will share his with Michael J. Freedman. According to the announcement, those honored were selected “for making contributions that extend the boundaries of research, advance industry, and lay the foundation for technologies that transform society.”
Daskalakis, a professor at MIT, is recognized for his seminal contributions to Theory of Computation and Economics, particularly the Complexity of Nash Equilibrium. Along with his collaborators, Paul Goldberg and Christos Papadimitriou, they have “challenged equilibrium theory by showing that Nash equilibrium is computationally intractable and thus unattainable, in general,” ACM said.
His more recent work has resolved long-standing open problems in multi-dimensional mechanism design, and advanced several other fields, including machine learning, probability theory and statistics, the association added.
The award is accompanied by a prize of 35,000 dollars, provided by Microsoft. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made.
The 2018 recipients will be formally honored at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 15, 2019 in San Francisco.
