IBM Selects Arturs Backurs as 2016 IBM PhD Fellow

Fri, 04/15/2016

From MIT EECS Website

Arturs Backurs has been selected as a 2016 IBM PhD Fellow from a very competitive national pool of nominations.  The IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study.

The IBM Fellowship Committee selected Backurs from the national nominations after reviewing his research summary, accomplishments, academics and experience in the field. Arturs's research interests lie in the general area of algorithm design and analysis. The main focus of his research within this area is the computational complexity of problems solvable in polynomial time. In particular, Arturs is interested in the algorithmic hardness of computing various distance measures between sequences and other structures. Arturs has also been working in other areas, including metric embeddings, quantum computing and Fourier analysis of Boolean functions.

Arturs would like to thank his advisor Piotr Indyk for his guidance and support.