Vijay Vazirani to Be Honored with 2025 FOCS Test of Time Award

Vijay Vazirani, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Computer Sciences (ICS), will be honored at the 66th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2025) with the Test of Time Award in the 20-year category.

The honor is for Vazirani’s FOCS’05 paper “AdWords and Generalized On-line Matching.” This paper optimally solves a key computational problem underlying Google’s Adwords market, namely how to allocate keyword queries to advertisers so as to maximize Google’s revenue. Last year, this paper received the SIGecom Test of Time Award. The award will be formally announced at the FOCS 2025 event in Sydney, Australia, December 14-17. The event is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing.

Vazirani is among the foremost researchers in theoretical computer science today. His research interests include algorithmic problems in mathematical economics and game theory, design of efficient exact and approximation algorithms, and computational complexity theory.

– Tonya Becerra