Constantinos (or Costis) Daskalakis is the Avanessians Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and an affiliate of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC). He is also an investigator in the Foundations Of Data Science Institute (FODSI).
Daskalakis completed his undergraduate studies in Greece, at the National Technical University of Athens, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He was a postdoctoral researcher in Microsoft Research-New England in 2008-2009, and has been in the MIT faculty since 2009.
Daskalakis works on computation theory and its interface with game theory, economics, probability theory, statistics and machine learning.
He has resolved long-standing open problems about the computational complexity of the Nash equilibrium, the mathematical structure and computational complexity of multi-item auctions, and the behavior of machine-learning methods such as the expectation–maximization algorithm. He has obtained computationally and statistically efficient methods for statistical hypothesis testing and learning in high-dimensional settings, as well as results characterizing the structure and concentration properties of high-dimensional distributions.
With Goldberg and Papadimitriou, Daskalakis was honored with the Kalai prize of the Game Theory Society for their work on the Computational Complexity of Nash equilibrium. Their same work was honored with the 2011 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize and the ACM SIGECOM Test of Time Award.
With Cai and Weinberg, Daskalakis was honored with the FOCS Test of Time award for their work on the computational complexity of computing optimal multi-item auctions.
Daskalakis was also the recipient of the 2018 Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union, the 2018 Simons Investigator Award, the 2018 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the 2008 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the 2019 Bodossaki Foundation Distinguished Young Scientists Award.
Other awards and honors include the 2007 Microsoft Graduate Research Fellowship, the 2009 NSF Career Award, the 2010 Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the 2011 MIT Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching, 2012 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, the 2017 Google Faculty Award, and the 2019 MIT EECS Frank Quick Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship. His work also received the 2006, 2012 and 2013 Best Student Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, and the 2013 Best Paper Award at the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation.
Daskalakis served in the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing Scientific Advisory Board, as advisory editor for Games and Economic Behavior, and was the head of the MIT Theory of Computation Group from 2018 to 2022.
We are trying to develop theoretical tools that can be used to analyze the convergence of iterative algorithms used for non-convex optimization problems.
Our goal in this project is to understand how one can test if a particular dealer's shuffles follow a certain pattern. We have developed a theoretical framework for the same and wish to understand its performance in practice.
The goal of the Theory of Computation CoR is to study the fundamental strengths and limits of computation as well as how these interact with mathematics, computer science, and other disciplines.
Theory research at CSAIL covers a broad spectrum of topics, including algorithms, complexity theory, cryptography, distributed systems, parallel computing and quantum computing.
