Tel Aviv University Graduate Receives ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
July 16, 2020
Dor Minzer of Tel Aviv University is the recipient of the 2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “On Monotonicity Testing and the 2-to-2-Games Conjecture.” The key contributions of Minzer’s dissertation are settling the complexity of testing monotonicity of Boolean functions and making a significant advance toward resolving the Unique Games Conjecture, one of the most central problems in approximation algorithms and complexity theory.
Honorable Mentions for the 2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award went to Jakub Tarnawski of École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and JiaJun Wu of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tarnawski’s dissertation “New Graph Algorithms via Polyhedral Techniques” made groundbreaking algorithmic progress on two of the most central problems in combinatorial optimization: the matching problem and the traveling salesman problem. Wu’s dissertation, “Learning to See the Physical World,” has advanced AI for perceiving the physical world by integrating bottom-up recognition in neural networks with top-down simulation engines, graphical models, and probabilistic programs.
The 2019 Doctoral Dissertation Award recipients will be formally recognized at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on October 3 in San Francisco. The Doctoral Dissertation Award is accompanied by a prize of $20,000, and the Honorable Mention Award is accompanied by a prize totaling $10,000.
