The Faculty of Mathematics recognizes three graduate students for their outstanding research papers. Sam Harris from Pure Mathematics and Ahmad Abdi from Combinatorics and Optimization each receive the 2018 Huawei prize, while Michael Cormier from the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science wins the Murray Martin prize. The three PhD award winners include:
Abdi is one of the winners of the 2018 Huawei Prize for his paper Packing odd T-joints with at most two terminals. Abdi’s novel proof draws on techniques from matroid theory, graph connectivity, and topological graph theory alike to prove the Cycling Conjecture for the class of even cycle matroids.
Harris also receives the 2018 Huawei Prize. His paper Connes’ embedding conjecture and winning strategies for quantum XOR games connects a long-standing conjecture in the theory of operator algebras to an open question in quantum mechanics about entanglement.
Cormier receives the Murray Martin prize for his paper Purely vision-based segmentation of web pages for assistive technology. Grounded in computer vision, a subfield of artificial intelligence research, this research is based on the clever insight that webpages can be considered as visual images.
We extend our sincerest congratulations to these fine researchers and wish them all the best in their continued research pursuits.