Ravindran Kannan (born 12 March 1953, Madras) is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he leads the algorithms research group. He is also the first adjunct faculty of Computer Science and Automation Department of Indian Institute of Science. Before joining Microsoft, he was the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Applied Mathematics at Yale University. He has also taught at MIT, CMU and IISc. The ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) presented its 2011 Knuth Prize to Ravi Kannan for developing influential algorithmic techniques aimed at solving long-standing computational problems. He also served on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2012 and 2013. Ravi Kannan did his B.Tech at IIT, Bombay. He received his PhD in 1980 at Cornell University under Leslie Earl Trotter, Jr. His research interests include Algorithms, Theoretical Computer Science and Discrete Mathematics as well as Optimization. His work has mainly focused on efficient algorithms for problems of a mathematical (often geometric) flavor that arise in Computer Science. He has worked on algorithms for integer programming and the geometry of numbers, random walks in n-space, randomized algorithms for linear algebra and learning algorithms for convex sets.

Key contributions

Among his many contributions, two are

Selected works

Books

Other representative publications

Awards and honors

In 2017 he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.