Hossein Esfandiari and Kartik Nayak awarded Google PhD Fellowships

Research at Google has named graduate students Hossein Esfandiari and Kartik Nayak as 2016 Google PhD Fellowship awardees. This award recognizes "outstanding graduate students doing exceptional work in computer science, related disciplines, or promising research areas" from all over the world. Esfandiari was awarded a fellowship for his exceptional research in Market Algorithms, and Nayak was awarded a fellowship for his exceptional research in Security.

Esfandiari and Nayak competed among many talented to students from all over the world to win this year's fellowships.  In the award letter congratulating them on their efforts, they learned that this year's group was the most competitive yet.  In an announcement to the department, Jeff Foster, Associate Chair of Graduate Studies, explained that the department was able to nominate two students, and that "...this may be the first time that we have had both students [announced as winners]."

Hossein Esfandiari's research interests include Online Algorithms, Algorithmic Game Theory, and Big Data Algorithms.  He has published over ten papers in conferences including Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), ACM Conference on Economics and Computation  (EC), and ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architecture (SPAA). He has also been the recipient of the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship, the World Quantitative and Science Scholarship, a Distinguished Graduate Student Teaching award, and the UPE Award in the ACM-ICPC International Programming Contest. His research advisor is Mohammad T. HajiAghayi. Esfandiari completed his undergraduate studies in computer engineering at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran.

Kartik Nayak's research interests include applied cryptography and security.  He is working to improve the efficiency of privacy-preserving computation by improving oblivious RAMs, secure multiparty computation and designing secure processors. Nayak has five publications including a few appearing in IEEE Security and Privacy and ACM Computer Communications Security.  Nayak's research advisors are Jonathan Katz and Elaine Shi (Cornell University). He completed his undergraduate studies in computer science at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai, India.

Congratulations and best wishes to Hossein and Kartik!

Google created the PhD Fellowship program in 2009 to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in Computer Science and related disciplines. Now in its eighth year, [their] fellowship program has supported hundreds of future faculty, industry researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs.