Prof. Siddharth Barman receives ACM India Early Career Researcher (ECR) 2023 Award

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Council has named Dr. Siddharth Barman from IISc Bangalore as the recipient of the ACM India Early Career Researcher (ECR) Award for 2023.The ACM India Awards Steering Committee, comprising eminent international personalities chose him for this edition of the ECR award.The ACM India ECR award recognizes individuals in early stages of their careers, who have made fundamental, innovative, and impactful contributions to the computing field while primarily working in India. The award carries a prize of ₹15 lakhs, sponsored by Persistent Foundation.

Dr. Barman’s award is accompanied by the jury citation: For pioneering contributions to important problems at the intersection of computer science and microeconomics, in particular, to algorithmic game theory and to the theory of fair and efficient resource allocation.

Since 2015 Barman has been a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science & Automation (CSA) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore. He obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT (BHU) Varanasi, and received his PhD in 2012 from the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, advised by Prof. Shuchi Chawla. Between his PhD and joining IISc, he was a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the Center for the Mathematics of Information.

Barman is a recipient of the Young Engineer award from Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), Associateship from Indian Academy of Sciences (IASc), Ramanujan Fellowship from Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), and Pratiksha Trust Young Investigator Award from IISc.

As mentioned in the citation, Barman’s work has significantly contributed to important themes at the intersection of computer science and microeconomics. In his recent work, Barman has made foundational strides on the critical problem of discrete resource allocation, which deals with the allocation of indivisible goods. As a compelling instance, he has shown the surprising result that there are important application domains where economic efficiency, allocation fairness, and computational tractability can be concurrently achieved. This work leverages the fundamental theorems of welfare economics, which establish the connection between market equilibrium and efficient outcomes. In a parallel effort, Barman has successfully developed a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for rent division, where prices are assigned to indivisible goods, under piecewise linear utility functions. This result is expected to have important implications for the future practice of fair division.

Barman’s creative and impactful research contributions have been supplemented by exceptional mentorship of young students and interns, several of whom have gone on to establish bright research careers of their own. In short, he has been an academic par excellence in all dimensions.

More details on his work can be found at www.csa.iisc.ac.in/~barman/.