Santosh Vempala is Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center (ARC) at Georgia Tech. His research interests are in algorithms, randomness and geometry and their applications. He graduated from CMU in 1997, advised by Avrim Blum and was at MIT until 2006 except for a year as a Miller Fellow at UC Berkeley. His first book, "The Random Projection Method," was published in 2004 by the AMS and he has just completed a new book on "Spectral Algorithms" (with Ravi Kannan). Vempala is a Sloan Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow, and continues to get unreasonably excited when a phenomenon that appears complex from one perspective turns out to be simple from another.

 

More information can be found on his webpage: www.cc.gatech.edu/~vempala