Moses Charikar

Moses Charikar is the Donald E. Knuth Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Mathematics. He earned his B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (1995) and a Ph.D. from Stanford University (2000). His research focuses on high-dimensional data processing, machine learning optimization, approximation algorithms, and metric embeddings. Charikar has held faculty positions at Princeton University (2001–2015) and spent time at Google Research.

Research interests include algorithmic techniques for massive data sets, convex optimization for non-convex problems, and low-distortion metric embeddings. His work has led to influential contributions like locality-sensitive hashing (LSH), earning the Paris Kanellakis Award (2012) and ACM Fellowship (2021). He has also received the Simons Investigator award (2014) and multiple best-paper accolades at top conferences.

• Awards:
• Donald E. Knuth Professorship (Stanford)
• 2012 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award
• ACM Fellow (2021)
• Simons Investigator in Theoretical Computer Science (2014)

Charikar’s research bridges theoretical computer science and practical applications, with notable contributions to clustering, approximation algorithms, and data analysis. His publications span algorithm design, computational geometry, and machine learning theory.