This field investigates a range of theoretical and practical aspects of algorithmics. Considering all aspects of the process holistically—from analyzing the efficiency and the quality of the solutions, to developing provably efficient and correct software, to packaging and releasing this software—helps to inform the research as well as benefit the community.
Groups and Researchers in this Field
Algorithms & Inequality
Rediet Abebe is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research examines the interaction of algorithms and inequality, with a focus on contributing to the scientific foundations of this area. Abebe has also co-founded numerous organizations, including the ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO), and the associated international research initiative. Abebe is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including the Hector Endowed Fellowship by the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), MIT Technology Fellows 35 Innovators under 35, the ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award, and an honorable mention for the ACM SIGecom Dissertation Award. Abebe is currently leading several large-scale evaluations of ML systems used in commercial, legal, and policy contexts. Read more
Gilles Barthe's research interests lie in the areas of programming languages and program verification, software and system security, cryptography, formal methods and logic. His goal is to develop foundations and tools for reasoning about security and privacy properties of algorithms and implementations. His recent work focuses on building relational verification methods for probabilistic programs and on their applications in cryptography and privacy. He is also interested in provably secure countermeasures against side-channel attacks. Read more
Karl Bringmann leads the group Fine-Grained Complexity and Algorithms in the Algorithms and Complexity department at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. He is interested in the inherent time complexity of combinatorial problems. Specifically, which problems can be solved in near-linear time, which require quadratic time, etc.? Since NP-hardness is too coarse to answer such questions, the modern approach is to prove conditional lower bounds via fine-grained reductions from certain hardness assumptions; this approach is called fine-grained complexity theory. Karl’s group develops this theory and uses a combination of fine-grained lower bounds and algorithm design to determine the optimal time complexity of various problems from computational geometry, stringology, graph theory, and optimization. Read more
Derek Dreyer leads the Foundations of Programming group at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. The group focuses on the design, semantics, verification, and implementation of modern programming languages and systems. Topics of study have included advanced type systems for modular programming and verification; Kripke models and separation logics for reasoning about higher-order, imperative, and concurrent programs; and compositional compiler certification. Derek is interested in developing a “realistic” theory of modularity—figuring out how we can build and reason modularly about programs that use features like fine-grained concurrency, higher-order state, recursive linking, dependent types, or self-modifying assembly code, meaning traditional semantic and verification techniques cannot account for them. Read more
Deepak Garg’s interests include computer security and privacy, formal logic, and programming languages. He is head of the Foundations of Computer Security group, associated with both the Security & Privacy and the Programming Languages & Verification research areas at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. The group’s current projects investigate tracking and controlling flows of sensitive information through Web browsers, using type systems to statically estimate the asymptotic complexity of incremental runs of programs, creating mechanisms to enforce data protection policies across multiple system infrastructure layers, extending separation logics to reason about security protocols, and developing foundations and algorithms for temporal logic-based privacy audits of legal compliance, among others. Read more
Cătălin Hrițcu is a tenured faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy (MPI-SP). He is particularly interested in security foundations (secure compilation, compartmentalization, memory safety, security protocols, information flow), programming languages (program verification, proof assistants, dependent types, formal semantics, mechanized metatheory, property-based testing), and the design and verification of secure systems (reference monitors, secure compilation chains, tagged architectures). He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant on formally secure compilation and is also actively involved in the design of the F* verification system. Read more
