Venkatesan Guruswami

Venkatesan Guruswami (born 1976) is a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He did his schooling at Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan, one of the premier educational institutions in Chennai, India. He completed his undergraduate in Computer Science from IIT Madras and his doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Madhu Sudan in 2001 . After receiving his PhD, he spent a year at UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow, and then was a member of the faculty at the University of Washington from 2002 to 2009. His primary area of research is Computer Science, where he is well known for his work on error-correcting codes. Following 2007, he was on leave from University of Washington. During 2007-2008, he visited IAS at Princeton University as a Member of School of Mathematics. He also visited SCS at Carnegie Mellon University during 2008-09 as a Visiting Faculty. In July 2009, he joined the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University as Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department.

Guruswami was awarded the 2002 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation List Decoding of Error-Correcting Codes., which introduced an algorithm that allowed for the correction of errors beyond half the minimum distance of the code. It applies to Reed–Solomon codes and more generally to algebraic geometric codes. This algorithm produces a list of codewords (it is a list-decoding algorithm) and is based on interpolation and factorization of polynomials over and its extensions. Guraswami was one of two winners of the 2012 Presburger Award, given by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science for outstanding contributions by a young theoretical computer scientist.