Infosys Science Foundation hosts Public Lecture on "Probabilistically Checkable Proofs"
Mumbai - June 11, 2015: The Infosys Science Foundation (ISF) in association with the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research (TIFR), today hosted Prof. Madhu Sudan, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research New England, and Adjunct Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, USA at TIFR campus to deliver a public lecture on "Probabilistically Checkable Proofs". The session was well attended by students and professors from TIFR and neighbouring colleges.
The lecture by Prof. Sudan is part of the Infosys Science Foundation Lectures by jurors and winners of the Infosys Prize. These lectures are aimed at boosting awareness of the viability of careers in research among India's student population, and the contribution of the Infosys Science Foundation in developing the research community in the country. Prof. Sudan has been a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England since 2009. He has made significant contributions to theoretical computer science in areas such as probabilistically checkable proofs, non-approximability of optimization problems, list decoding, and error correcting codes.
Through this lecture, Prof Sudan explained the concept of Probabilistically Checkable Proofs (PCP), a format that allows for perfectly valid proofs of correct theorems, and further described how such PCP formats, and associated verification methods are designed. He also highlighted how research in the 20th century allowed us to think about theorems and proofs formally, which paved the way for radically easy ways of verifying proofs.
Prof. Sudan's current research interests lie in the interface of Computation and Communication, particularly in the role of errors in this interface. During his distinguished career, he has won various awards, including the ACM Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation (1993), the Godel Prize (2001), and the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize (2002). He is a fellow of ACM and the American Mathematical Society.
About the Infosys Science Foundation
The Infosys Prize is awarded under the aegis of the Infosys Science Foundation, a not-for-profit trust instituted in February 2009. The Infosys Science Foundation is funded by a corpus which today stands at over INR 120 Crore, contributed by the trustees and Infosys.
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