Microsoft Research New England 10th Anniversary Symposium – Panel: The Usefulness of Long-Term Thinking (aka Theory)

This panel will discuss the role of long-term thinking and theory in research: how does it fit into the big picture, and when is it most useful? The panel is moderated by Robbert Dijkgraaf, who is the director of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Speaker Bios

Senior Researcher Nicole Immorlica

Director and Leon Levy Professor Robbert Dijkgraaf
Robbert Dijkgraaf, Director of the Institute for Advanced Study and Leon Levy Professor since July 2012, is a mathematical physicist who has made significant contributions to string theory and the advancement of science education. His research focuses on the interface between mathematics and particle physics. In addition to finding surprising and deep connections between matrix models, topological string theory, and supersymmetric quantum field theory, Dijkgraaf has developed precise formulas for the counting of bound states that explain the entropy of certain black holes. For his contributions to science, Dijkgraaf was awarded the Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands, in 2003. He was named a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 2012 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Past President (2008–12) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and past Co-Chair (2009–17) of the InterAcademy Council, Dijkgraaf is a distinguished public policy adviser and passionate advocate for science and the arts. Many of his activities––which have included frequent appearances on television, a monthly newspaper column in NRC Handelsblad, several books for general audiences, and the launch of the science education website Proefjes.nl––are at the interface between science and society. In 2017, Princeton University Press published The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge in which Dijkgraaf and IAS founding Director Abraham Flexner articulate how essential basic research and original thinking are to innovation and societal progress, a belief that has informed the mission of the Institute for nearly ninety years.

Professor Matt Jackson
Matthew O. Jackson is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute and a senior fellow of CIFAR. He was at Northwestern University and Caltech before joining Stanford, and received his BA from Princeton University and PhD from Stanford. Jackson’s research interests include game theory, microeconomic theory, and the study of social and economic networks, on which he has published many articles and the books Social and Economic Networks and The Human Network. He teaches an online course on networks and co-teaches two others on game theory. Jackson is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Game Theory Society Fellow, and an Economic Theory Fellow, and his other honors include the von Neumann Award of the Rajk Laszlo College, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Social Choice and Welfare Prize, and the B.E.Press Arrow Prize.

Senior Researcher Yael Tauman Kalai
I joined Microsoft Research New England in 2008 after being an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech and a postdoc at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and Microsoft Research in Redmond. I graduated from MIT, working in cryptography under the superb supervision of Shafi Goldwasser. I was also extremely fortunate to have the guidance of Adi Shamir for my master’s degree.

My main research interests are Cryptography, the Theory of Computation, and Security & Privacy.

Professor Madhu Sudan
Madhu Sudan got his Bachelors degree from IIT Delhi in 1987 and his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1992. Between 1992 and 2015, Madhu Sudan spent time at IBM Research (Research Staff Member 1992-1997), at MIT (Associate Professor 1997-2000, Professor 2000-2011, Fujitsu Chair Professor 2003-2011, CSAIL Associate Director 2007-2009, Adjunct Professor 2011-2015), and at Microsoft Research (Principal Researcher, 2009-2015).

He has been at Harvard since October 2015.

Madhu Sudan’s research interests revolve around theoretical studies of communication and computation. Specifically his research focusses on concepts of reliability and mechanisms that are, or can be, used by computers to interact reliably with each other. His research draws on tools from computational complexity, which studies efficiency of computation, and many areas of mathematics including algebra and probability 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.

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. He is also the recipient of the 2014 Infosys Foundation Prize in Mathematical Sciences. Madhu Sudan is a fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, the AMS and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a Radcliffe Fellow from 2003-2004.

Professor Eva Tardos
Eva Tardos is a Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, was Computer Science department chair 2006-2010. She received her BA and PhD from Eotvos University in Budapest. She joined the faculty at Cornell in 1989. Tardos’s research interest is algorithms and algorithmic game theory. She is most known for her work on network-flow algorithms, approximation algorithms, and quantifying the efficiency of selfish routing. She has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards including the Packard Fellowship, the Goedel Prize, Dantzig Prize, Fulkerson Prize, and the IEEE Technical Achievement Award. She is editor editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM, and was editor in the past of several other journals including the SIAM Journal of Computing, and Combinatorica, served as problem committee member for many conferences, and was program committee chair for SODA’96, FOCS’05, and EC’13.

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
Nicole Immorlica, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Matt Jackson, Yael Tauman Kalai, Madhu Sudan, Eva Tardos
Affiliation:
Microsoft Research, Institute for Advanced Study, Stanford University, Harvard, Cornell University