UB Computer Scientist Cai Wins Humboldt Research Award

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Jin-Yi Cai, Ph.D., a professor of computer science and engineering at the University at Buffalo, has been awarded the Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

He is one of 62 top international researchers who this year will receive the award, which originates in Germany and is presented to foreign scholars to allow them to conduct research at German research institutes. Recipients must be nominated by leading German scholars or research institutions, and may use the award any time within five years of its receipt.

Cai will use his award for collaborative work with colleagues in Germany on research on computational complexity theory, the study of efficient computation using limited resources, such as space and time.

In 1998, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation that he used to study the relationship between average case complexity and worst case complexity, as well as the structural and computational properties of lattice problems and their application to secure public-key cryptography.

Cai was the recipient of a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990 and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in Computer Science in 1994. He also received the Hao Wang Prize at the 1997 International Computing and Combinatorics Conference.

He was an invited speaker at the 1999 Annual Conference on Computational Complexity, presented as part of the Federated Computing Research Conferences held in Atlanta.

A member of the Scientific Board for the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, Cai is associate editor of the Journal of Complexity and an editor of The International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science and The Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science. He has written and published more than 60 research papers.

Cai joined the UB faculty in 1993 after teaching at Yale and Princeton universities. He holds a doctoral degree in computer science from Cornell University, a master's degree in mathematics from Temple University and a certificate of completion from Fudan University in Shanghai, China.

He is a resident of Clarence.