Srinivasan Awarded 2019 Dijkstra Prize

Aravind Srinivasan, a professor of computer science with an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), was just awarded the 2019 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing.

The Dijkstra Prize recognizes outstanding academic papers whose impact on distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade. It is named for Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930–2002), a pioneer in the area of distributed computing.

Srinivasan was honored for a paper he co-authored in 1997 with Alessandro Panconesi, a professor of computer science at the Sapienza University of Rome.

“Randomized Distributed Edge Coloring via an Extension of the Chernoff-Hoeffding Bounds” was originally published in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Journal on Computing. It has been cited more than 240 times in other academic publications.

The paper notes that types of routing, scheduling, and resource-allocation problems in a distributed setting can be modeled as edge-coloring problems. The authors go on to present fast and simple randomized algorithms for edge coloring a graph in the synchronous distributed point-to-point model of computation.

Srinivasan and Panconesi will be formally honored with the Dijkstra Prize at this year’s International Symposium on Distributed Computing, to be held in Budapest, Hungary in October.