Shayan Oveis Gharan receives 2021 Presburger Award for Young Scientists from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science听

, UW associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, has received the from the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science.

The has been given each year since 2010, at the annual International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming conference, to an individual or group of scientists, for outstanding contributions in theoretical computer science.

The association honored Oveis Gharan for his “creative, profound and ambitious” research on “,” which asks how to find the shortest and most efficient route between multiple destinations and back to the starting point. Working with Oveis Gharan were Allen School faculty colleague and doctoral student .

The award is named for Polish Jewish mathematician, logician and philosopher (1904-1943). Read more on the Allen School .

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National Center for Atmospheric research names Cleo Woelfle-Erskine to Early Career Faculty Innovator Program

The National Center for Atmospheric Research has named , assistant professor in the UW School of Marine & Environmental Affairs, to its .

The designation comes with a $400,000 award and Woelfle-Erskine is among the new program’s second cohort, working with School of Environmental and Forest Sciences doctoral student .

The Faculty Innovator Program aims to support faculty researchers in the social, policy and behavioral sciences and graduate students for two years as they develop interdisciplinary research projects in partnership with the center. They will begin their work this summer.

Woelfle-Erskine is working with the Karuk Tribe Department of Natural Resources in northern California to study how cultural burning affects watershed hydrology such as snowpack, runoff and stream temperature. This is part of larger work to center floodplain restoration in Karuk science, culture and protocol.

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Hamza Zafer receives Katz fellowship for study at University of Pennsylvania for 2021-2022 year

, UW associate professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, has received a fellowship from the for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Zafer is also an affiliate of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.

Zafer and others of the , will be in residence at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2021-2022 school year. He will research war regulations and raiding norms among Arabian Jewish communities of the sixth and seventh centuries CE.

Zafer’s is the Jody Ellant and Howard Reiter Family Fellowship; his research title is: “Conscription, Captives, and Spoils among Arabian Jews: The Quran and Early Muslim Sources as Evidence for Late Antique Jewish Legal Culture.”

Open to scholars in eight scientific and technical fields 鈥� chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, molecular biology, neuroscience, ocean sciences and physics 鈥� the fellowships honor those early-career researchers whose achievements mark them among the next generation of scientific leaders.

The 126 听 were selected in close coordination with the research community. Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by independent panels of senior scholars based on each candidate鈥檚 research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in his or her field. Each fellow will receive $70,000 to apply toward research endeavors.

This year鈥檚 fellows come from 57 institutions across the United States and Canada, spanning fields from evolutionary biology to data science.

Harris is studying the recent evolutionary history of humans and other species through the lens of population genetic theory and advances in DNA sequence analysis. Among her several research topics is the fitness cost of Neanderthal and ancient human interbreeding. She is looking at how Neanderthals’ unhealthy inbred gene pool may have limited their contribution to modern genetic diversity. The findings might offer a broader lesson for conservational biology on attempting genetic rescue of inbred species.

Harris also has undertaken genomic studies of ancient human migration patterns across Earth, such as the peopling of the Americas.

“A major focus of our group is studying subtle differences between closely related populations,” said Harris.

Cheung engages in cross-disciplinary research as a member of the Allen School鈥檚 Database and Programming Languages & Software Engineering groups. In his young career, Cheung has produced multiple, paradigm-shifting solutions spanning data management, data analysis and end-user programming.

鈥淔rom booking plane tickets to browsing social networking websites, we interact with large amounts of data every day,鈥� said Cheung. 鈥淢y group works on new techniques to help users process and manage data easily, with the goal to simplify software developers’ efforts to build databases and applications without compromising on performance, and enable the rapid development of database applications that provide efficient and reliable data access to all.鈥�

Oveis Gharan is a member of the Allen School鈥檚 Theory of Computation group. He focuses on the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for solving fundamental counting and optimization problems at the heart of the theory and practice of computing. These problems have implications over a wide range of fields, from logistics and marketing to planning and policy-making, all of which cry out for new and better computational tools for managing and exploiting the vast quantities of data available.

鈥淚 encode a discrete phenomenon in a complex multivariate polynomial, and I understand it via the interplay of the coefficients, zeros, and function values of this polynomial,鈥� said Oveis Gharan. 鈥淎lthough these polynomials are so large that they cannot be stored in all computers in the world combined, I use their analytical properties to design efficient optimization algorithms for the underlying discrete phenomenon.鈥�

Among Oveis Gharan鈥檚 most notable contributions to date are his works on the , or TSP, and its asymmetric variant 鈥� one of the most studied problems in optimization 鈥� and his very recent work on counting problems related to . Oveis Gharan and his collaborators studied the TSP using analytical techniques, proposing a new class of algorithms for variants of the TSP and introducing novel analysis of classical algorithms for this problem dating back 50 years. The team鈥檚 efforts produced the first improvement on existing approximation algorithms, which broke barriers that had stood for three decades despite substantial previous attempts within the theoretical computer science community.

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For more information, contact Jackson Holtz at jjholtz@uw.edu.