Piotr Indyk

Biosketch

Piotr Indyk is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been on the faculty since 2000. He was born in Białystok, Poland, and grew up in Gdynia, Poland. He graduated from the University of Warsaw in 1995 and received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2001. He has received the Packard Fellowship in 2003 and the Simons Investigator Award in 2013. He is also a co-winner of the 2012 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his work on Locality-Sensitive Hashing. Piotr Indyk is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests

Piotr Indyk’s research interests are in the design and analysis of efficient approximate algorithms for massive data processing. His work spans algorithms for high-dimensional geometric problems, streaming and sub-linear algorithms, fine-grained complexity and learning-augmented algorithms. He co-developed the notion of locality-sensitive hashing (LSH), a tool for designing efficient algorithms for searching for similar objects in large data sets. Algorithms based on this approach have been adopted and refined by numerous research and industrial entities around the world. He has also worked on approximate algorithms that use sub-linear amounts of space or time, developing highly efficient methods for computing the discrete Fourier transform for signals consisting of few frequencies. His recent interests lie at the intersection of algorithms and machine learning.