David Steurer is a German theoretical computer scientist, working in approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation, sum of squares, and high-dimensional statistics. He is an associate professor of computer science at ETH Zurich.[2]

David Steurer
BornFebruary 16, 1984
Alma materPrinceton University
Awards
  • Michael and Shiela Held Prize (2018)[1]
  • Amnon Pazy Memorial Award (2015)
  • NSF CAREER Award (2014)
  • Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2014)
  • ACM Dissertation Award Honorable Mention (2011)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsETH Zurich
Thesis On the complexity of unique games and graph expansion  (2010)
Doctoral advisorSanjeev Arora
Websitewww.dsteurer.org

Biography

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David Steurer studied for a bachelor's degree at the University of Saarland (2003–2006), and went on to study at Princeton University, where he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Sanjeev Arora at 2010. He then spend two years as a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England, before joining Cornell University. In 2017 he moved to ETH Zurich, where he became an associate professor in 2020.[3]

Work

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Steurer's work focuses on optimization using the sum of squares technique, giving an invited talk on the topic at the 2018 ICM, together with Prasad Raghavendra.[4]

Together with Prasad Raghavendra, he developed the small set expansion hypothesis, for which they won the Michael and Shiela Held Prize.[5]

Together with James Lee and Prasad Raghavendra, he showed that in some settings, the sum-of-squares hierarchy is the most general kind of SDP hierarchy.[6]

Together with Irit Dinur, he introduced a new and simple approach to parallel repetition theorems.[7]

References

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  1. ^ "News from the National Academy of Sciences". National Academy of Sciences. January 16, 2018.
  2. ^ "Professors". ETH Zürich.
  3. ^ "curriculum vitæ". David Steurer.
  4. ^ "Invited Section Lectures - List of Speakers". ICM 2018.
  5. ^ "Michael and Shiela Held Prize". National Academy of Sciences.
  6. ^ Lee, James; Raghavendra, Prasad; Steurer, David (June 2015). "Lower bounds on the size of semidefinite programming relaxations". STOC '15: Proceedings of the forty-seventh annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing. STOC. Portland, Oregon: ACM. pp. 567–576. arXiv:1411.6317.
  7. ^ Dinur, Irit; Steurer, David (May 2014). "Analytical approach to parallel repetition". STOC '14: Proceedings of the forty-sixth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing. STOC. New York: ACM. pp. 624–633. arXiv:1305.1979.
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