CS 201 Jon Postel Distinguished Lecture | Piotr Indyk, MIT

Reception with light refreshments in the lobby at 3:45 PM, followed by lecture

“Graph-Based Algorithms for Similarity Search: Challenges and Opportunities”

Over the last few years, graph-based approaches to nearest neighbor search have attracted renewed interest. Algorithms such as HNSW, NSG, and DiskANN have become popular tools in practice. These algorithms are highly versatile and come with efficient implementations. At the same time, their correctness, performance guarantees, and functionality remain poorly understood. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by this class of algorithms.

Dr. Piotr Indyk is the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Warsaw in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2001. His research interests include algorithms for high-dimensional geometric problems, as well as sublinear-time and streaming algorithms. In 2012, he received the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his work on locality-sensitive hashing. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Apr 07, 2026
3:30 pm - 5:45 pm

Location:
Mong Auditorium – Engineering VI – First Floor
404 Westwood Blvd Los Angeles California 90095