Saket Saurabh Chosen as Recipient of 2020 ACM India Early Career Researcher (ECR) Award

December 21, 2020

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Council has selected Dr. Saket Saurabh of Institute of Mathematical Sciences as the recipient of the 2020 ACM India Early Career Researcher (ECR) Award. A selection committee comprising eminent international personalities chose Saket for this inaugural edition of the award. As a special case for this first year, the committee also chose to give an Honorable Mention to Dr. Uday Reddy Bondhugula of Indian Institute of Science.

The ACM India ECR Award recognizes individuals in early stages of their careers who have made fundamental, innovative, and impactful contributions to the computing field while primarily working in India. The winner of the ECR award receives a prize of ₹15 lakhs. The Honorable Mention award carries a prize of ₹7.5 lakhs. Financial support for both of these awards is provided by Persistent Foundation.

Saket is recognized for his fundamental contributions to the area of Parameterized Complexity, including methods for showing algorithmic lower bounds, and meta-theorems for polynomial time preprocessing. His work over the last decade can be characterized by these contributions, establishing him as an outstanding researcher, educator, and scientific leader:

  1. performing research of the highest quality in multiple areas of algorithms;
  2. leading the field of parameterized complexity by initiating new research directions to the community;
  3. mentoring students pursuing undergraduate and graduate to postdoctoral fellowships;
  4. sharing his knowledge in the form of new courses, lecture notes, surveys, schools, and workshops; and
  5. serving the community in conference program committees and journal editorial boards.

Saket received his PhD in Theoretical Computer Science from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. After spending a couple of years as a postdoc at the University of Bergen, Norway, he joined his alma mater for a faculty position, where he is currently a Professor. He is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Bergen.

The 2020 ECR Award Honorable Mention recipient Dr. Uday Reddy Bondhugula is recognized for his fundamental contributions in advancing the theory and practice of polyhedral compilation frameworks, and their use in scientific computing, image processing, and deep-learning application domains. His key research contributions include:

  1. making polyhedral optimization practical and effective;
  2. loop tiling and distributed-memory code generation;
  3. automatic optimization for image processing pipelines;
  4. compiler infrastructure for ML/AI computations; and
  5. widely-used open source software infrastructure and tools.

Uday received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from Ohio State University. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Automation, Indian Institute of Science. He is also the Founder, CEO and CTO of PolyMage Labs, a deep-science startup incubated at Indian Institute of Science.

Please join us in congratulating Saket Saurabh and Uday Reddy Bondhugula.

Regards,
Hemant Pande, Executive Director, ACM India Council
(On behalf of the ACM India Awards Steering Committee)