Bio

A leader in the algorithm and computational analysis, Santosh Vempala joined the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the fall of 2006 as a professor of Computer Science. He helped set up the Algorithms and Randomness Center and think tank at Georgia Tech, serving as its first director (2006-2011). Vempala's research interests include algorithms, randomness, geometry and computing-for-good (C4G). He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1997, having been advised by Avrim Blum, and then taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 2006 (with the exception of a year as a Miller Fellow at the University of Califronia, Berkeley). Vempala is also a Fellow with Sloan, Guggenheim and Association for Computing Machinery (AMC), and a generally excitable fellow, especially when a phenomenon that appears complex from one perspective turns out to be simple from another. In recent years, he has been trying to understand how the brain works and how to model its computational abilities.