Piotr Indyk named to Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professorship

Professor Piotr Indyk

EECS Staff

EECS Professor Piotr Indyk has been appointed as the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor, department head Asu Ozdaglar has announced.

“This appointment recognizes Professor Indyk’s foundational research in the broad area of design and analysis of algorithms with fundamental contributions in high-dimensional computational geometry and in the development of algorithms for massive data sets, as well as outstanding educational contributions and service to the department,” Ozdaglar said.

Indyk joined EECS in 2000. He received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and a Magister degree from Uniwersytet Warszawski (the University of Warsaw) in Poland.

Indyk is a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is the lead PI on an NSF-supported MIT Institute for Foundations of Data Science (MIFODS) project. His research interests lie in the design and analysis of efficient algorithms. Specific interests include high-dimensional computational geometry, sketching and streaming algorithms, sparse recovery, and machine learning.

He has co-created several courses that bridge algorithms and other areas of EECS, including Geometric Computing (6.850), Computational Biology: Genomes, Networks, Evolution (6.047/6.878), and Algorithms and Signal Processing (6.893). He also co-teaches courses on algorithms and sub-linear algorithms.

Among other honors, Indyk received an NSF CAREER Award in 2002, and a Sloan Research Fellowship and a Packard Foundation Fellowship, both in 2003. His work on Sparse Fourier Transform was named one of MIT Technology Review’s “10 Breakthrough Technologies” in 2012.

In 2012, he also received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for “groundbreaking work on locality-sensitive hashing that has had great impact in many fields of computer science, including computer vision, databases, information retrieval, machine learning, and signal processing.” In 2013, he received a Simons Investigator Award in theoretical computer science from the Simons Foundation. In 2015, he became an ACM Fellow.

The Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot chair, established in 1986, reflects a long and distinguished relationship between the Cabot family and MIT. Thomas Cabot’s grandfather, Dr. Samuel Cabot, was among the Boston citizens whose efforts led the founding of MIT. His father, Godfrey L. Cabot, a member of the MIT class of 1881 and founder of the company that bears the family name, was a benefactor of the Institute, having established the Godfrey L. Cabot Solar Energy Fund.