Alexandr Andoni

Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University working on algorithmic foundations of massive, high-dimensional data: sublinear algorithms, high-dimensional geometry, similarity search and theoretical machine learning. MIT PhD under Piotr Indyk (2009); previously Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, Princeton and the Simons Institute.

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• Represented Moldova at the International Olympiad in Informatics three times: bronze 1997, silver 1998, silver 1999 - Moldova's first-ever IOI silver medals.Oct 16, 1999
• Research focus is algorithmic foundations of massive, high-dimensional data - sublinear algorithms, high-dimensional geometry, metric embeddings, theoretical ML - with practical impact via similarity-search/hashing (FALCONN).2026
• PhD thesis 'Nearest Neighbor Search: the Old, the New, and the Impossible' under Piotr Indyk; the work seeded locality-sensitive hashing research he continues today.2009
• Immigrated trajectory: studied at Politehnica University of Bucharest 1999-2001 before transferring to MIT, where he earned a BS (2004), MEng (2005) and PhD (2009) under Piotr Indyk.
• Industry research career before academia: Microsoft Research Silicon Valley (2010-2014), after postdoc at Princeton's Center for Computational Intractability (2009-2010) and a visiting year at the Simons Institute (2014-2015).
• Coaches Moldova's national team for the International Olympiad in Informatics, giving back to the program that launched his own career.
• Leads Columbia's Core AI Lab and is a member of the university's Foundations of Data Science initiative.
• Maintains an active advising group at Columbia (students Hantao Yu, Jingwen Liu, Styopa Zharkov; former students incl. Jaroslaw Blasiok, Peilin Zhong, Sepideh Mahabadi).