By Rachel Robey
Ilias Diakonikolas, Sheldon B. Lubar professor of Computer Sciences, received the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award, one of the highest honors for young researchers in computing.
The Grace Hopper Award is presented annually to an “outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution” and is accompanied by a prize of $35,000. Past recipients have gone on to win the Turing Award, considered the “Nobel Prize for Computing.”
“It is an honor to receive this recognition,” says Diakonikolas. “This work has been the product of a multi-year effort that is still ongoing. I view it as a shared achievement with my close collaborators on the subject, and it motivates me to continue pushing the boundaries of the field.”
Diakonikolas, a researcher in algorithmic foundations of machine learning and statistics, is the first faculty member from the University of Wisconsin–Madison to win the Grace Hopper Award. ACM’s award announcement recognizes Diakonikolas for “chang[ing] the way we think about what is possible for efficient algorithms that process high-dimensional data.”
Diakonikolas’ award-winning research developed the first efficient algorithms for high-dimensional statistical tasks that are also robust, meaning they perform well even when the data significantly deviates from ideal modelling assumptions. While this line of study dates back to the 1960s, no robust scalable methods were known for even the most basic tasks until 2016,¹ when Diakonikolas broke barriers on a central question which had stymied researchers for over 50 years.
Since then, Diakonikolas has shown these new robust algorithms can also be used to tackle a wide range of more complex statistical problems. The applications of these methods range from developing reliable machine learning systems to analyzing biological datasets.
The 2024 Grace Hopper Award recognizes Diakonikolas’ breakthrough achievements in the field.
“[It’s] one of just two ACM awards targeted to young researchers in computing, and as such it is highly prestigious,” says Chair Steve Wright. “It recognizes the importance of algorithmic robust statistics and honors Ilias’s pioneering role in this field.”
The award will be presented at ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 14, 2025 in San Francisco.
About Ilias Diakonikolas
Diakonikolas is a Sloan Fellow and winner of the NSF CAREER Award, the best paper award at NeurIPS 2019, and the IBM Research Pat Goldberg Best Paper Award. He joined UW–Madison Computer Sciences in 2019. In 2024, he received UW–Madison’s H. I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship. His research has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, and a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant. With Daniel Kane, Diakonikolas authored a textbook titled Algorithmic High-Dimensional Robust Statistics. He earned a PhD in Computer Science at Columbia University, advised by Mihalis Yannakakis.
About the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award
The ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award is named for Grace Hopper (1906-1992), a computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. It’s given to the ACM’s outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution. The 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.
¹ I. Diakonikolas, G. Kamath, D. Kane, J. Li, A. Moitra and A. Stewart, “Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability,” 2016 IEEE 57th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), New Brunswick, NJ, USA, 2016, pp. 655-664, doi: 10.1109/FOCS.2016.85.