Joseph Haraldson wins ACM SIGSAM Distinguished Student Author Award at ISSAC ‘18

Friday, August 24, 2018

photo of Joseph Haraldson
PhD candidate Joseph Haraldson, with coauthors Professors Mark Giesbrecht and George Labahn, has won the Distinguished Student Author Award at ISSAC 2018, the 43rd International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation. The annual symposium was held this year at the CUNY Graduate Center and Courant Institute/NYU in New York from July 16–19, 2018.

Haraldson’s paper, titled “Computing nearby non-trivial Smith forms,” takes an optimization approach to the classical problem of computing a non-trivial Smith normal form of a matrix polynomial. This is a significant contribution because the paper shows that computing the Smith form of a matrix polynomial is amenable to numeric computation as an optimization problem. In particular, the paper makes progress on a classical problem in computational algebra and has applications in control theory.

“Congratulations to Joseph for being the sole recipient of the Distinguished Student Author Award at ISSAC 2018,” said Dan Brown, Director of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science. “This is an important and prestigious recognition as well as a significant contribution to symbolic computation.”

Sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation, the Distinguished Student Author Award is conferred to students who present notable papers at the annual international symposium.


To learn more about this research, please see Mark Giesbrecht, Joseph Haraldson and George Labahn, 2018. Computing nearby non-trivial Smith forms, in ISSAC 2018: 2018 ACM International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation, July 16–19, 2018.