SEAS alum receives 20-Year Test of Time Award at STOC

By Marcene Robinson

The award recognizes high-impact papers presented at STOC conferences within the past 10, 20 and 30 years.

The paper, “A sieve algorithm for the shortest lattice vector problem,” co-authored by Sivakumar, was honored for ushering in a new chapter in lattice algorithms, adding the powerful new technique of sieving to the field. The algorithm solved the exact shortest vector problem on n-dimensional lattices and presented dramatic improvement over the celebrated Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovasc algorithm, according to the ACM. The technique has also been used in cryptanalysis—attempting to break cryptosystems to test their security.

“While the work was done well after my graduation from UB, there's a strong UB [connection] here,” says Sivakumar, who earned a doctorate in computer science from UB in 1996. “After graduating, I visited Buffalo a few times in the next year or two; one of those [visits was] to work with Jin-Yi Cai—who was still at UB then. At that time, he was focusing on the complexity of lattice problems with graduate student Ajay Nerurkar, and my interest in lattice problems arose primarily from those interactions.”

Sivakumar’s research interests include a variety of topics in theoretical computer science, information retrieval and discovery on the web, and measurement and modeling for information systems. He has served on the faculty of the University of Houston, as a research scientist at IBM Research and Google Research, and as a senior director at Yahoo Research.

He is currently a member of the technical staff at Google, and serves as a member of the Departmental Advisory Board for the UB Department of Computer Science and Engineering.