Raghu Meka, an assistant professor of computer science at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the agency’s highest honor for faculty members at the start of their research and teaching careers.
The grant will support Meka’s research into the structure of randomness. Specifically, he will conduct research in three areas:
- Pseudorandomness: Looking at when randomness is necessary for efficient computing, versus when not-quite-perfect randomness may suffice.
- Optimization hierarchies and hardness of approximation: Identifying which algorithmic problems are hard to solve, even approximately, as well as when optimization techniques — the most powerful algorithm design methods currently available — can succeed in solving such problems.
- Communication complexity
The five-year research grant, with a projected total amount of $500,000, includes funds for educating graduate and undergraduate students. Meka joined UCLA in 2014. He was previously a researcher with Microsoft Research. Meka was also a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, and at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin.
