David Karger is a Professor of Computer Science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received an AB from Harvard University and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.[1] Dr. Karger's dissertation received the 1994 ACM doctoral dissertation award and the Mathematical Programming Society's 1997 Tucker Prize. He also received the National Academy of Science's 2004 Award for Initiative in Research.
David Karger's work in algorithms has focused on applications of randomization to optimization problems and led to significant progress on several core problems. He is responsible for Karger's algorithm, a Monte Carlo method to compute the minimum cut of a connected graph.[2] Dr. Karger developed the fastest minimum spanning tree algorithm to date with Philip Klein, and Robert Tarjan. They found a linear time randomized algorithm based on a combination of Borůvka's algorithm and the reverse-delete algorithm.[3] With Ion Stoica, Robert Morris, Frans Kaashoek, and Hari Balakrishnan, he also developed Chord, one of the four original distributed hash table protocols.[4]
Dr. Karger has also conducted research in the area of information retrieval and personal information management. This work has focused on new interfaces and algorithms for helping people sift effectively through large masses of information. While at Xerox PARC, he worked on the Scatter/Gather system, which hierarchically clustered a document collection and allow the user to gather clusters at different levels and rescatter them.[5] More recently he has been researching retrieval systems that personalize themselves to best fit their individual users' needs and behaviors, leading the Haystack project.
Dr. Karger is married to Allegra Goodman, an American author. The couple lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has four children, three boys and a girl.[6]