Constantinos Daskalakis

Digital Library

ACM Fellows

USA - 2022

citation

For fundamental contributions to algorithmic game theory, mechanism design, sublinear algorithms and theoretical machine learning

Press Release

ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

USA - 2018

citation

For seminal contributions to the complexity of Nash Equilibria.

Strategic behavior greatly complicates our large-scale technological systems: online advertising, kidney exchanges, cryptocurrencies, sharing-economy applications such as Uber and Airbnb, and social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. To analyze such complex systems, economists have long relied on the concept of equilibrium, which has been the pillar of economics. For real-life interactions among strategic agents to end in equilibrium, the agents should be able to compute their equilibrium strategies.

Unfortunately, disregarding special cases, equilibrium existence is non-constructive. Famously, Nash's proof used Brouwer's fixed-point theorem, for which no efficient algorithm is known. In itself, this non-constructiveness did not threaten the universal applicability of Nash equilibrium: perhaps, equilibria could be easier to find than fixed-points. Constantinos proved that the computational complexity of finding Nash equilibria is the same as that of finding Brouwer fixed points.

Constantinos's work has had great impact on Computer Science and Economics, and earned 1000 citations and many awards from both fields, including the SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize, the Kalai prize from the Game Theory Society, and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. By challenging equilibrium theory, his work has triggered the on-going reshaping of our understanding of strategic behavior, proving that computation must play an essential role in laying new and firmer foundations for Economics.

Press Release

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

USA - 2008

citation

For his dissertation "The Complexity of Nash Equilibria" nominated by the University of California at Berkeley.

ACM Names 57 Fellows for Computing Advances that are Driving Innovation

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named 57 of its members ACM Fellows for wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in disciplines including cybersecurity, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and recommender systems among many other areas. The accomplishments of the 2022 ACM Fellows make possible the computing technologies we use every day.

The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee.

“Computing’s most important advances are often the result of a collection of many individual contributions, which build upon and complement each other,” explained ACM President Yannis Ioannidis. “But each individual contribution is an essential link in the chain. The ACM Fellows program is a way to recognize the women and men whose hard work and creativity happens inconspicuously but drives our field. In selecting a new class of ACM Fellows each year, we also hope that learning about these leaders might inspire our wider membership with insights for their own work.”

In keeping with ACM’s global reach, the 2022 Fellows represent universities, corporations, and research centers in Canada, Chile, China, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.

Additional information about the 2022 ACM Fellows, as well as previously named ACM Fellows, is available through the ACM Fellows website.

Read the news release.

2018 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award

ACM named Constantinos Daskalakis and Michael J. Freedman recipients of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.

Daskalakis, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is recognized for his seminal contributions to the theory of computation and economics, particularly the complexity of Nash Equilibrium.

Strategic interaction greatly complicates behavior in socioeconomic environments, from traditional markets and offline social networks to modern technological systems such as online advertising platforms, kidney exchanges, cryptocurrencies, sharing economy applications, and online social networks. To analyze behavior in such strategic environments, economists have long relied on concepts of equilibrium. Daskalakis’s work, with Goldberg and Papadimitriou, has challenged equilibrium theory by showing that Nash equilibrium is computationally intractable and thus unattainable, in general. His work has influenced an ongoing reshaping of the study of strategic behavior, showing that computation must play an essential role in the foundations of game theory and economics. Daskalakis’s more recent work has resolved long-standing open problems in multi-dimensional mechanism design, and advanced several other fields, including machine learning, probability theory and statistics.

Freedman, a professor at Princeton University, is cited for the design and deployment of self-organizing geo-distributed systems.

By introducing new algorithms and protocols, Freedman has shown how to build scalable, performant, and autonomous distributed systems for modern heterogeneous deployments and realistic workloads. Some of Freedman’s most popular systems include CoralCDN, a content distribution infrastructure that has been deployed at hundreds of network sites worldwide and been used by millions of clients to share images, videos and other content; the JetStream system, which employs an innovative approach to data streaming analytics; and TimescaleDB, an open source time series database that provides complex queries at scale on both historical and fresh data. Additionally, in more fundamental research, Freedman and colleagues have demonstrated that theoretically deep cloud systems need not be slow or scale poorly.

The ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award is given to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. This award is accompanied by a prize of $35,000. The candidate must have been 35 years of age or less at the time the qualifying contribution was made. Financial support for this award is provided by Microsoft.