Article link: https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2023/01/samir-khuller-named-acm-fellow/

Northwestern Engineering’s Samir Khuller, the Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair of Computer Science, has been elevated to an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow, the society’s highest membership grade.

The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1 percent of ACM Members for their “outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community.”

“The election of Samir to ACM Fellow is an excellent and well-deserved recognition of his leadership in the field,” said Ken Forbus, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern Engineering and professor of education at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy. Forbus was named an ACM Fellow in 2006.

Nominated by peers and evaluated by a selection committee, ACM Fellows have achieved a lasting impact on the field of computing through technical leadership and the demonstration of innovation, originality, and creativity in theoretical or practical accomplishments.

Khuller was recognized “for contributions to algorithm design with real-world implications and for mentoring and community-building.” He is among the cohort of 57 members named 2022 ACM Fellows.

“I am truly honored, and frankly a bit surprised, to receive this recognition,” Khuller said. “Most importantly, I want to thank all of my own mentors over the years from whom I have learned an incredible amount and tried to simply imitate and blend their research and mentoring styles. At both the University of Maryland and Northwestern, I have been fortunate to work with amazing students and colleagues who constantly inspire me.”

A member of the Northwestern CS Theory Group, Khuller’s research interests include graph algorithms, discrete optimization, scheduling, and computational geometry. He has published nearly 200 journal and conference papers, and several book chapters on these topics.

“Samir’s leadership as chair has transformed CS at Northwestern over the past few years,” said Larry Birnbaum, professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering. “It’s great to see this well-deserved recognition of his scholarship and leadership from the national and international community of CS scholars.”

Khuller is a co-principal investigator of the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL), which received a five-year, $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Harnessing the Data Revolution: Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science Phase II award last year.

“Samir has been instrumental in mobilizing faculty and driving numerous initiatives across the department,” said Jason Hartline, professor of computer science at Northwestern Engineering. “He brings considerable breadth of research in algorithms and has made central contributions to algorithms for unsupervised machine learning, job scheduling, and combinatorial optimization. His election as a Fellow of the ACM brings well deserved recognition to a champion of computer science and Northwestern.”

Khuller was named a 2021 Fellow of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). He also received the 2020 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award. Additional awards and honors include the NSF CAREER Award, Google Research Award, and CTE-Lilly Teaching Fellowship.

In 2016, he earned the inaugural European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) Test-of-Time Award for his work with collaborator Sudipto Guha on approximation algorithms for connected dominating sets.

From 2018-2021, Khuller served as chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT).

He is an associate editor of Networks and an editorial board member of Algorithmica. He previously served as editor of the International Journal on Foundations of Computer Science and editor of the ACM Transactions on Algorithms “Problems Column.”

Prior to joining Northwestern in 2019, Khuller was a faculty member at the University of Maryland for 27 years, most recently as the Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science in the University of Maryland’s Department of Computer Science. Khuller received the University of Maryland’s Distinguished Scholar Teacher Award and Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

“Professor Khuller’s contributions to the field of computing are wide reaching – inspiring and leading thousands of students and faculty in his career,” said Sara Owsley Sood, Chookaszian Family Teaching Professor of Computer Science and associate chair for undergraduate education at Northwestern CS.

The ACM Fellows induction ceremony will be held at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 10 in San Francisco, California.