Ronitt Rubinfeld

Biosketch

Ronitt Rubinfeld is an Edwin Sibley Webster Professor at MIT’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, where she has been on the faculty since 2004. Rubinfeld was born in Dayton, Ohio and grew up in Ann Arbor, MI. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Computer Engineering, and from the University of California, Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1990. After postdoctoral positions at Princeton University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she held faculty positions at Cornell University and Tel Aviv University, and has been a member of the research staff at NEC Research Institute. Her work has received the Symposium on Theory of Computing 30 years Test of Time award. Ronitt Rubinfeld was an ONR Young Investigator, a Sloan Fellow, and an invited speaker at the Internal Congress of Mathematics in 2006. She is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests

Ronitt Rubinfeld's research interests center around sublinear time algorithms for massive data. Specifically, her research focuses on designing algorithms which analyze data by looking at only a very small portion of it. She is best known for her works on property testing, which allow one to establish global properties of functions by making a small number of randomly chosen local tests. More generally, she has demonstrated the scope and applicability of sublinear time algorithms for approximating the values and giving access to solutions of problems in various domains, including algebraic algorithms, graph algorithms and combinatorial optimization. She also studies algorithms for testing properties of distributions over large discrete domains, with a number of samples that is sublinear in the domain size.