Rate My Professor Sampath Kannan

Sampath Kannan is the Henry Salvatori Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, supported by Regents and Helen and George Pardee Fellowships. Kannan's research centers on algorithmic fairness, combinatorial algorithms, program reliability, streaming computation, and computational biology, with additional interests in bioinformatics, cryptography, and streaming algorithms. His contributions span theoretical foundations and practical applications, including program self-checking, phylogenetic reconstruction, data stream processing, semi-streaming graph algorithms, trust management in interdomain routing, privacy-preserving mechanisms, and healthcare optimization. Key publications include "The exponential mechanism for social welfare: Private, truthful, and nearly optimal" with Z. Huang (FOCS 2012), "Designing programs that check their work" with M. Blum (Journal of the ACM), "On graph problems in a semi-streaming model" (Theoretical Computer Science, 2005), "AS-CRED: Reputation and alert service for interdomain routing" (IEEE Systems Journal, 2013), and "Optimal Provision-After-Wait in Healthcare" (ITCS 2014). He has published extensively in premier venues such as FOCS, STOC, SODA, EMNLP, and SIAM Journal on Computing.

At Penn, Kannan has held significant leadership roles, including Associate Dean for Academics in the School of Engineering and Applied Science from 2006 to 2008. He has taught a broad array of courses, such as CIS 677 Advanced Topics in Algorithms & Complexity, CIS 511 Theory of Computation, GCB 537 Advanced Computational Biology, and CIS 320 Introduction to Algorithms, from the mid-1990s onward. His honors include ACM Fellow (2013), AAAS Fellow (2019), ACM SIGACT Distinguished Service Award (2012), University of Pennsylvania Outstanding Faculty Advising Award (2005), Ford Foundation Best Advisor Award (2004), and recognition of one of two Impact Papers from STOC 1992. In 2024, Kannan became Associate Director at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. His scholarship has shaped algorithmic research, earning over 13,000 citations and influencing fields from network security to evolutionary biology.