Prasad Raghavendra

{{Short description|Indian-American computer scientist}}

{{BLP sources|date=November 2023}}

{{Infobox scientist

| name = Prasad Raghavendra

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| field = Computer science

| work_institution = University of California at Berkeley

| alma_mater = University of Washington

| doctoral_advisor = Venkatesan Guruswami

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| thesis_year = 2001

| thesis_title = Approximating NP-hard Problems Efficient Algorithms and their Limits

| known_for = Raghavendra's theorem{{cite conference |url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1374376.1374414 |title=Optimal Algorithms and Inapproximability Results for Every CSP? |last=Raghavendra |first=Prasad |author-link=Prasad Raghavendra |date=17 May 2008 |publisher=ACM |book-title=STOC '08: Proceedings of the fortieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing |pages=245–254 |location=Victoria, BC |conference=STOC '08 |doi=10.1145/1374376.1374414|url-access=subscription }}

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  • Michael and Shiela Held Prize (2018){{Cite web|url=https://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/inaugural-held-prize.html|title=News from the National Academy of Sciences|date=January 16, 2018|website=National Academy of Sciences}}
  • Okawa research grant (2015){{Cite web|url=http://www.okawa-foundation.or.jp/en/activities/research_grant/list_2015.html|title=The Research Grant Recipients|website=The Okawa Foundation|access-date=December 1, 2023}}
  • NSF CAREER (2013){{Cite web|url=https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Awards/nsf.html|title=NSF Awards|website=Berkeley EECS|access-date=December 1, 2023}}
  • Sloan research fellow (2012){{Cite web|url=https://sloan.org/fellows-database|title=Fellows Database|website=Alfred P. Sloan Foundation|access-date=December 1, 2023}}

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| website = {{URL|https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~prasad/}}

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Prasad Raghavendra is an Indian-American theoretical computer scientist and mathematician, working in optimization, complexity theory, approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation and statistics. He is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.{{cite web|url=https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Lists/CS/faculty.html|title=CS Faculty List|date=23 November 2023|website=Berkeley EECS}}

Education

After completing a BTech at IIT Madras in 2005, he obtained an MSc (2007) and PhD (2009) at the University of Washington under the supervision of Venkatesan Guruswami. After a postdoctoral position at Microsoft Research New England, he became faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.

Career

Raghavendra showed that assuming the unique games conjecture, semidefinite programming is the optimal algorithm for solving constraint satisfaction problems.

Together with David Steurer, he developed the small set expansion hypothesis, for which they won the Michael and Shiela Held Prize in 2018.

He developed sum of squares as a versatile algorithmic technique. Together with David Steurer, he gave an invited talk on the topic at the 2018 ICM.

References