Dr. Amir Abboud

Research area: Algorithm and Theory of Computation
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Dr. Abboud is soon joining INSAIT as a Faculty. He is currently a Senior Scientist (assistant professor) at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science. Previously, he was a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He obtained his Ph.D. from Stanford University, his M.Sc. from Technion, and B.Sc. from the University of Haifa in a special program for high-school students.

Dr. Abboud is a leader in a rapidly growing field called Fine-Grained Complexity. His papers exhibit a variety of novel algorithms and reductions that have resolved decades-old open questions about the precise polynomial in the time complexity of fundamental and basic problems such as all-pairs max-flow, longest common subsequence, dynamic matching, context-free grammar parsing, approximate distance oracles, and many others.

His research has been recognized by various awards such as an ERC Starting grant, the best student paper award at STOC – the top conference in theoretical computer science, the best student paper award at the Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) conference, the best student paper award at the Distributed Computing (DISC) conference, the best paper award at the LATIN conference, and an Alon scholarship for outstanding young scientists in Israel.

In 2024, at age 32, Dr. Abboud received the Erdos Prize, which is awarded to researchers working in Israel under the age of 40 who have made outstanding contributions to mathematics or theoretical computer science. The only previous recipients from computer science are Adi Shamir, Ran Raz, and Irit Dinur.

Dr. Abboud has published more than 30 papers in the top conferences in theoretical computer science (STOC/FOCS/SODA) and has participated as a program committee member in the conferences: SODA 2025, FOCS 2023, ICALP 2023, STOC 2023, SWAT 2022, SODA 2022, SOSA 2022, ESA 2020, CPM 2020, IPEC 2019, STOC 2019, FOCS 2018, and CPM 2016.