Ravindran Kannan


For the Hindu deity refer to Kannan
Ravindran Kannan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he leads the algorithms research group. He is also the first adjunct faculty of Computer Science and Automation Department of Indian Institute of Science.
Before joining Microsoft, he was the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Applied Mathematics at Yale University. He has also taught at MIT, CMU and IISc. The ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory presented its 2011 Knuth Prize to Ravi Kannan for developing influential algorithmic techniques aimed at solving long-standing computational problems.
Ravi Kannan did his B.Tech at IIT, Bombay and PhD. at Cornell University. His research interests include Algorithms, Theoretical Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics as well as Optimization. His work has mainly focused on efficient algorithms for problems of a mathematical flavor that arise in Computer Science. He has worked on algorithms for integer programming and the geometry of numbers, random walks in n-space, randomized algorithms for linear algebra and learning algorithms for convex sets.

Key contributions

Among his many contributions, two are
  1. Polynomial-time algorithm for approximating the volume of convex bodies
  2. Algorithmic version for Szemerédi regularity partition

    Selected works

Books

In 2017 he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.