C&O M.Math. student Samuel Jaques and C&O Ph.D. student Andre Linhares were awarded Alumni Gold medals at the 2019 Fall convocation ceremonies. The Office of Alumni Affairs recognizes top graduating students for academic achievement by awarding the Alumni Gold Medal. One medal is presented to a master's and doctoral student to recognize their academic excellent at Fall convocation.
Andre's Ph.D. thesis, entitled Approximation Algorithms for Distributionally Robust Stochastic Optimization, develops a framework for designing approximation algorithms for Distributionally Robust Stochastic (DRS) optimization problems when the collection of distributions is a ball around a central distribution (under certain classes of probability metrics). The thesis uses sophisticated and versatile techniques to design approximation algorithms for the DRS versions of several discrete optimization problems, which in many cases, provide approximation guarantees that are close to the guarantees provides by their deterministic counterparts. A paper based on the thesis was presented at the STOC 2019 conference. Andre's work was supervised by Professor Chaitanya Swamy.
Sam's M.Math. thesis, Quantum Cost Models for Cryptanalysis of Isogenies, was supervised by Professors Alfred Menezes and Michele Mosca. The thesis develops a cost model that enables direct cost comparisons between classical and quantum algorithms. The framework was used to justify using 448-bit primes instead of 768-bit primes in an isogeny-based key agreement scheme that is under consideration for standardization by the U.S. government's National Institute for Standards and Technology. A research paper based on the thesis, and co-authored with Ph.D. student John Schanck, was presented at the CRYPTO 2019 conference. Sam is also a receipient of the 2019 Governor General's Gold medal.