This year's Katayanagi Prizes in Computer Science will be awarded to Christos Papadimitriou and Erik D. Demaine. The prizes -- which carry an honorarium of $20,000 for the senior researcher and $10,000 for the junior -- have been endowed with a gift from Japanese entrepreneur and education advocate Koh Katayanagi, who founded TUT and several other technical institutions in Japan over the last 60 years.
Papadimitriou, who is receiving this year's Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence, is an internationally recognized expert on the theory of algorithms and complexity, and its applications to databases, optimization, artificial intelligence, networks and game theory. The author of five books, including "Computational Complexity" and "Turing," he is the C. Lester Hogan Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley.
Demaine, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Professor and associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, will receive the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize. His focus is in the area of theoretical computer science with interests in computational geometry, data structures, algorithms and combinatorics.
