Santosh Vempala

Santosh Vempala

Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Santosh Vempala is Frederick Storey II Chair of Computing in the School of Computer Science, with courtesy appointments in the schools of Mathematics and Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE). He served as the founding director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center (2006-2011), and is currently the director of GT's oldest interdisciplinary PhD program --- Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization. His research interests include algorithms, randomness, high-dimensional geometry, brain and computing-for-good (C4G). He graduated from CMU in 1997 advised by Avrim Blum and was on the MIT Math faculty until 2007 except for a year as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley. Vempala is a generally excitable fellow, especially when a phenomenon that appears complex from one perspective turns out to be simple from another. In recent years, he has been trying to understand the limits of sampling and optimization algorithms and building a computational theory of brain.

Program Visits

Summer Cluster: AI, Psychology, and Neuroscience, Summer 2024, Visiting Scientist
Foundations of Data Science, Fall 2018, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer
The Brain and Computation, Spring 2018, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer
Foundations of Machine Learning, Spring 2017, Visiting Scientist and Program Organizer
Algorithmic Spectral Graph Theory, Fall 2014, Visiting Scientist
Fields
Theory of algorithms, Foundations of Data Science, Theory of Brain