Award+by+Sanjeev+Arora

ACM and the Infosys Foundation have named Sanjeev Arora the recipient of the 2011 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences for his innovative approaches to problem solving. Arora's research revolutionized the approach to essentially unsolvable problems that have long bedeviled the computing field, the so-called NP-complete problems. These results have had implications for problems common to cryptography, computational biology, and computer vision, among other fields. Arora, the Charles Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, is an ACM Fellow, and won the Gödel Prize for both 2001 and 2010, as well as the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1995. He was the founding director of the Center for Computational Intractability, which addresses the phenomenon that many problems seem inherently impossible to solve on current computational models.

"With his new tools and techniques, Arora has developed a fundamentally new way of thinking about how to solve problems," said ACM President Alain Chesnais. "...In particular, his work on the PCP theorem is considered the most important development in computational complexity theory in the last 30 years. He also perceived the practical applications of his work, which has moved computational theory into the realm of real world uses." The ACM-Infosys Foundation Award, established in August 2007, recognizes personal contributions by young scientists and system developers to a contemporary innovation that exemplifies the greatest recent achievements in the computing field. Financial support for the award, which was increased this year to $175,000, is provided by an endowment from the Infosys Foundation. Read more in the ACM press release.