Nisheeth Vishnoi is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Computer Science and a co-founder of the Computation and Society Initiative at Yale University. He studies the foundations of computation, and his research spans several areas of theoretical computer science, optimization, and machine learning. He is also interested in understanding nature and society from a computational viewpoint. Here, his current focus includes studying the emergence of intelligent behavior, and ethical problems at the interface of artificial intelligence and society. Professor Vishnoi was the recipient of the Best Paper Award at IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science in 2005, the IBM Research Pat Goldberg Memorial Award in 2006, the Indian National Science Academy Young Scientist Award in 2011, the IIT Bombay Young Alumni Achievers Award in 2016, and the Best Paper award at ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in 2019. He was named an ACM Fellow in 2019. His most recent book Algorithms for Convex Optimization was published by Cambridge University Press.

My research spans foundations of computer science, machine learning, and optimization: from approximability of NP-hard problems, to combinatorial, convex and non-convex optimization and sampling, to min-max optimization, to tackling algorithmic questions involving dynamical systems, stochastic processes and manifolds.

I am also broadly interested in understanding and addressing some of the key questions that arise in nature and society from a computational viewpoint. Here, my current focus includes studying entropy, the emergence of intelligent behavior, and ethical issues such as bias and privacy that arise at the interface of artificial intelligence and society.