Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Prof. Naveen Garg, Sep 2016

The CSE department is extremely proud that Prof. Naveen Garg has been awarded the 2016 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award in the area of Mathematical Sciences for his "outstanding contributions in solving scheduling and facility location problems using mathematical programming techniques." Many congratulations!

Prof. Naveen Garg is a Professor of Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. His research interests are in Theoretical Computer Science, specifically in the design and analysis of algorithms. Naveen’s major contributions are primarily in the design and analysis of approximation algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems arising in network design, scheduling, routing, facility location and related areas. To mention only a couple of highlights: his work on the algorithmic aspects of multicommodity flow has been highly influential, as has his work on local search heuristics for facility location problems. Naveen is also a popular teacher whose lecturing has regularly met with appreciation from both undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Naveen Garg did his B.Tech. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from IIT Delhi. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut fur Informatik, Germany from 1994 to 1997. Since 1998 he has been a faculty member in the CSE Department at IIT Delhi. He is currently co-director of the Indo-German Max-Planck Center for Computer Science and the Amar S. Gupta Chair for Decision Science. He was awarded the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel award (2002) by the Humboldt foundation, Germany, was chosen by the Max-Planck-Society to form and head a partner group on "Approximation Algorithms" at IIT Delhi (2004), and received the AICTE Career Award for Young Teachers (2004), INAE Young Engineer Award (2005), INSA Young Scientist Medal (2006), IBM Research Faculty Award (2006) and IIT Delhi Teaching Excellence Award (2012). He is a Fellow of IASc.

Watch his felicitation function at IIT Delhi, with words by the director Prof Ramgopal Rao, and by Prof Amit Kumar from the CSE Department.

Watch his insightful talk on online scheduling: How do we make decisions without knowledge of the future? How do you decide between paying Rs 1000 for the monthly membership to the swimming pool and paying-per-swim at Rs 100/swim? This talk will explore the area of "Online Algorithms" where the input to the algorithm is revealed one step at a time and the algorithm has to make decisions while hedging against the future. The lack of information - about the future - can often be offset by "resource augmentation", and we shall demonstrate this through examples from the world of scheduling.