David Parkes and Salil Vadhan named 2018 ACM Fellows

Professors David Parkes and Salil Vadhan of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have been named Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for their significant contributions to the field of computer science.

The 56 members of the 2018 class of fellows — hailing from universities, companies and research centers in Finland, Greece, Israel, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US — were elected by their peers for their contributions in areas including computer architecture, mobile networks, robotics, and systems security.

Parkes, the George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science at SEAS and Co-Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, was chosen for his contributions to computational markets, including novel mechanism design and incentive engineering methods.

At SEAS, Parkes founded the “EconCS” research group, and leads a broad research agenda on topics between economics and computer science, especially as they relate to artificial intelligence. He has served as area chair for computer science, and is currently co-chair of the Masters in Data Science and the Harvard Business Analytics Program.

Parkes served as chair of the ACM SIGecom Committee on Economics and Computation from 2011 to 2015. He is Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and recipient of the 2017 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF Early Career Development Award, the Roslyn Abramson Award for Teaching, and the Thouron Award.  Parkes has degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania.

Vadhan, the Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics and area co-chair for Computer Science at SEAS and Harvard College Professor, was chosen for his work advancing computational complexity and cryptography, and for promoting public support for theoretical computer science.

At SEAS, Vadhan works to understand the limits of efficient computation and to use this understanding to design systems that withstand adversarial behavior. His research in theoretical computer science spans differential privacy, computational complexity, and cryptography.

Vadhan leads Harvard's multidisciplinary Privacy Tools Project, which brings together computer science, law, social science, and statistics to better understand data privacy issues and build computational, statistical, legal, and policy tools to help address these issues in a variety of contexts.

Vadhan served on the SIGACT Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science from 2009 to 2016, and chaired the committee for the last three of those years. He has received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF Early Career Development Award, a Simons Investigator Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Godel Prize and the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Teaching. He received his A.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT. ​