Ilias Diakonikolas, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is the recipient of the 2024 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for his work in robust algorithms.

The ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award recognizes a single recent major technical or service contribution made by an individual aged 35 or younger. It is worth $35,000 and is funded by Microsoft. 

The citation in respect of Ilias Diakonikolas reads:

For making contributions to the field of algorithmic robust statistics by introducing new techniques to robustly estimate high-dimensional distributions along with a surprising variety of algorithmic applications. 

The primary focus of Diakonikolas' work is the mathematical foundations of data analysis, machine learning and algorithmic statistics. He is most well-known for his work on robust statistical algorithms for high-dimensional data. “Robust algorithms” are algorithms that perform well even when the data significantly deviates. The new paradigms that Diakonikolas developed changed the way we think about what is possible for efficient algorithms that process high-dimensional data—overcoming problems that have stymied researchers since the 1960s.

Diakonikolas began the work that led to this breakthrough with collaborators in 2016. The aim was to find efficient algorithms for learning the parameters of a high-dimensional distribution that are robust to arbitrary corruption in a constant fraction of data, with the constant independent of dimension. His subsequent work showed these new methods are not only of theoretical interest, but can be made practical, and can also be used to tackle more complex robust high-dimensional statistical problems, such as mixtures of distributions, in some cases being more efficient than even the prior state-of-the-art non-robust methods.

Diakonikolas has also played a pivotal role in disseminating his new ideas, including co-authoring a textbook, Algorithmic High-Dimensional Robust Statistics, see sidebar.

Diakonikolas will formally receive the Grace Murray Hopper Award at ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 14, 2025 in San Francisco.

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