Ravindran Kannan

Professor
Ravindran Kannan
ரவீந்திரன் கண்ணன்
Ravindran Kannan Prix Knuth 2011
Born (1953-03-12) 12 March 1953 (age 72)
Alma materIndian Institute of Technology Bombay (B.Tech.)
Cornell University (Ph.D.)
AwardsKnuth Prize (2011)
Fulkerson Prize (1991)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science

Ravindran (Ravi) Kannan (Tamil: ரவீந்திரன் கண்ணன்); born 12 March 1953, is a theoretical computer scientist[1]. His work has mainly focused on efficient algorithms[2] for problems of a mathematical[3] (often geometric) flavor that arise in Computer Science, Machine Learning and Optimization[4].

Ravi was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Lab, India. Before joining Microsoft, he was William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Applied Mathematics at Yale University. Prior to that he has been on the faculty of CMU and MIT. The ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) presented its 2011 Knuth Prize to Ravi Kannan for developing influential algorithmic techniques aimed at solving long-standing computational problems.[5]

Ravi Kannan did his B.Tech at IIT, Bombay. He received his PhD in 1980 at Cornell University under Leslie Earl Trotter, Jr.[6]

Awards and honors

Key contributions

1. Algorithm for approximating the volume of high dimensional convex sets via Markov Chains

2. Algorithms for Integer Programming the Frobenius Problem drawing on Geometry of Numbers

3. Randomized algorithms for Principal Component Analysis and Matrix Compression

4. Algorithmic version of the regularity lemma in Graph Theory

Selected works

Books

Other representative publications

  • "Clustering in large graphs and matrices," with P. Drineas, A. Frieze, S. Vempala and V. Vinay, Proceedings of the Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1999.
  • "A Polynomial-Time Algorithm for learning noisy Linear Threshold functions," with A. Blum, A. Frieze and S. Vempala, Algorithmica 22:35–52, 1998.
  • "Covering Minima and lattice point free convex bodies," with L. Lovász, Annals of Mathematics, 128:577–602, 1988.


See also

References

  1. ^ Kannan, Ravindran (2025). "LEVATTENTION: TIME, SPACE AND STREAMING EFFI-CIENT ALGORITHM FOR HEAVY ATTENTIONS" (PDF). Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025.
  2. ^ Frieze, Alan M.; Kannan, Ravi; Pegden, Wesley (2026). "Aspects of a randomly growing cluster in ℝᵈ, d ≥ 2". Discrete Applied Mathematics. 384. Elsevier: 287–292.
  3. ^ Kannan, Ravi; Vempala, Santosh S.; Vetta, Adrian (2004). "On clusterings: Good, bad and spectral". Journal of the ACM. 51 (3). Association for Computing Machinery: 497–515. doi:10.1145/990308.990313.
  4. ^ Kannan, Ravi (1983). "Polynomial-Time Aggregation of Integer Programming Problems". Journal of the ACM. 30 (1). Association for Computing Machinery: 133–145. doi:10.1145/6490.6496.
  5. ^ a b Microsoft Researcher to Receive ACM SIGACT Knuth Prize Archived 2011-04-29 at the Wayback Machine
  6. ^ "Ravindran Kannan". The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 23 June 2022.
  7. ^ Distinguished Alumnus Archived 2011-10-07 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ^ Cacm Staff (March 2017), "ACM Recognizes New Fellows", Communications of the ACM, 60 (3): 23, doi:10.1145/3039921, S2CID 31701275.