Hajiaghayi Named EATCS Fellow

A University of Maryland computer scientist has been recognized by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) for his significant contributions to the theory of algorithms.

Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi, the Jack and Rita G. Minker Professor of Computer Science, was just named to the 2020 class of EATCS Fellows. He is one of three EATCS members selected for this honor.

The EATCS Fellows Program was established in 2014 to recognize outstanding EATCS members for their scientific achievements in the field of theoretical computer science. Fellows are chosen by a selection committee based on nominations received from within the organization’s research community.

Hajiaghayi was specifically noted for his “contributions to the theory of algorithms, in particular algorithmic graph theory, game theory, and distributed computing.”

Aravind Srinivasan, a professor of computer science who was named an EATCS Fellow in 2017, says he nominated Hajiaghayi for this honor because he is an accomplished researcher.

“Mohammad is a prolific author of several strong papers,” Srinivasan says. “His work combines depth and breadth in foundations and in applications to a variety of areas.”

In addition to his tenure home in computer science, Hajiaghayi has an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies and is a core faculty member in the University of Maryland Center for Machine Learning.

His research and scholarship focuses on algorithmic game theory and combinatorial auctions, network design, combinatorial optimizations and approximation algorithms, fixed-parameter algorithms, algorithmic graph theory, distributed and mobile computing, and computational geometry and embeddings.

Hajiaghayi has received a number of awards including the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, a Google Faculty Research award (twice), an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, the University of Maryland (UMD) Research and Scholarship Award (RASA), the EATCS Nerode Prize, the UMD Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year award, and the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Coach Award.

He has won best paper awards at the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) 2010, the International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC) 2006, and the Robocup 2001 Conference.

Hajiaghayi has been elected a Guggenheim Fellow, an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow, and an ACM Fellow.

Before joining UMD, he was a senior researcher in the Algorithms and Theoretical Computer Science group at AT&T Labs.

Prior to that, Hajiaghayi was a one-year postdoctoral fellow in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a one-year postdoctoral associate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he also earned his doctorate in applied mathematics in 2005.

—Story by Melissa Brachfeld