Prasad Raghavendra
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.
Education
After completing a BTech at IIT Madras in 2005, he obtained an MSc and PhD 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.