8 May 2018 – Assistant Professor Kuldeep Meel won the 2018 Ralph Budd Award from his alma mater, Rice University, on 28 April 2018, in Houston, Texas.
The award, established in 1935, is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards given annually to a graduate student judged to have the best doctoral thesis at Rice University’s School of Engineering.
A/P Meel’s doctoral thesis, “Constrained Sampling and Counting: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice”, tackled two fundamental problems – constrained sampling and counting – in the artificial intelligence field. A/P Meel and his collaborators proposed a novel approach to make existing algorithms in approximate constrained sampling more scalable and useful for practical use. Their work is a first step in bridging the gap between theory and practice in the sub-field.
“I am deeply honoured to receive the award, which is a testament to the extraordinary environment focused on excellence offered by Rice and in particular my thesis advisors, Professor Supratik Charkaborty and Professor Moshe Vardi,” said A/P Meel.
A/P Meel completed his PhD studies in September 2017 and joined the NUS School of Computing’s Department of Computer Science on 26 December last year. His research is centred on the design of computational techniques for constrained sampling and counting, scalable and accurate probabilistic research with applications to diverse domains such as power grid resilience, hardware and software verification.
