Alumnus Yi-Jun Chang Wins PODC Dissertation Award

Alumnus Yi-Jun Chang (PhD CSE 2019) has been awarded a 2020 Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “Locality of Distributed Graph Problems,” which he completed at the University of Michigan.

The PODC Dissertation Award was created in 2012 to acknowledge and promote outstanding research by doctoral (Ph.D.) students on the principles of Distributed Computing. One or two dissertations are selected for this honor each year.

In his dissertation, Chang investigates three aspects of the locality of distributed graph problems: complexity theory for a local model, in which each device has direct communication links with its neighbors so that there is no message size constraint; complexity theory for distributed computing, in which  each device has direct communication links with its neighbors, and the size of each message is limited; and a framework for distributed algorithm design to address bandwidth constraints when each device has direct communication links with all other devices.

Chang was previously recognized with a Chia-Lun Lo Fellowship. His advisor at Michigan was Prof. Seth Pettie. 

Chang is currently a junior fellow of the ETH Institute for Theoretical Studies in Zürich, where he is affiliated with the Discrete and Distributed Algorithms Group.