David Karger, PhD

David R. Karger is a professor of computer science at MIT and a member of CSAIL who invented Karger’s algorithm — a randomized method for computing minimum cuts in graphs — and has expanded his research to span information retrieval, personal information management, and distributed hash tables. The algorithm, first published in 1993, remains a textbook result and has found applications across network reliability, image segmentation, and combinatorial optimization. His dissertation received the 1994 ACM doctoral dissertation award. After a postdoctoral stint at Xerox PARC, he joined MIT in 1995, where he is now a professor in EECS and a member of CSAIL. He co-developed Chord, one of the four original distributed hash table protocols, and has led the Haystack research group on personal information management. He has also contributed to the fastest known randomized minimum spanning tree algorithm, with Philip Klein and Robert Tarjan.