Turing Award winner Prof. Robert Tarjan kicks off the start of the area of algorithms and theory at INSAIT
Leading scientists from top universities and institutions such as Carnegie Mellon (USA), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Max Planck (Germany) and Weizmann (Israel) are moving to work at INSAIT in Sofia. They were presented at an official event by the Minister of Education and Science prof. Galin Tsokov, the Rector of Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” Prof. Georgi Valchev, the founder and scientific director of INSAIT Prof. Martin Vechev and Executive Director Eng. Borislav Petrov.
Due to the importance of the event, one of the most prominent scientists of our time in this field – the legendary Prof. Robert Tarjan also visited INSAIT for the announcement. He is the recipient of the A.M. Turing Prize in Computer Science, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in Computer Science and the inventor of some of the world’s most significant and widespread algorithms.
“What is happening at INSAIT is attracting international attention, and the addition of these three scientists is news that all the world’s leading universities would like to boast about,” said Prof. Robert Tarjan.
Prof. Bernhard Haeupler
Prof. Haeupler received his PhD from MIT in 2013. Previously he was a professor at the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests focus on algorithm design, distributed computing, and (network) coding theory.
His research, spanning more than 100 papers, has been recognized with numerous awards, including the ACM-EATCS PhD Dissertation Award in Distributed Computing, the George Sproul Dissertation Award at MIT, and others. It has been funded by prestigious grants such as a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, and an ERC Starting Grant.
Research interests: Algorithm design and analysis for problems at the intersection of combinatorial optimization, Distributed systems and parallel computing, Coding theory, Graph and Network Algorithms, and Network Information Theory.
Dr. Amir Abboud
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.
Dr. Tomasz Kociumaka
Tomasz Kociumaka received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Warsaw, Poland. He has been a post-doctoral researcher at Bar-Ilan University, Israel; the University of California at Berkeley, USA; and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany. His research focuses on designing efficient algorithms for processing strings, with an emphasis on sequence similarity measures, approximate pattern matching, text indexing, and lossless data compression.
He studies string problems from multiple perspectives, including combinatorics on words, dynamic algorithms, fine-grained complexity, sublinear algorithms, and quantum computing. He is a co-author of over 100 publications, including 28 papers presented at the top three conferences in theoretical computer science (STOC, FOCS, and SODA). He has served as a program committee member for ten international conferences. He received the ERCIM Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award in 2021 and the Witold Lipski Prize in 2018. As a student, he scored a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, a silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad, and two silver medals at the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals.
The announcement is yet another recognition of the results that INSAIT has achieved in a very short time and which are already attracting attention at a global level. Just a few weeks ago, Google announced a major donation to the institute, and among INSAIT’s strategic partners is Amazon Web Services. It is the first institution in Eastern Europe to join ELLIS, Europe’s most prestigious AI research network.