Presburger Award 2026 – Laudatio

The 2026 Presburger Award Committee has chosen Vincent Cohen-Addad and Gautam Kamath as joint recipients of the 2026 EATCS Presburger Award for Young Scientists.

Vincent Cohen-Addad’s research focuses on the design of inference methods for foundational models and the development of algorithms for optimization problems arising from data analysis and machine learning. He has had a breakthrough impact across many different areas of clustering, ranging from classic algorithmic questions to modern topics in large-scale machine learning. His work is characterized by its remarkable breadth, leaving a strong mark on effectively all subfields of the discipline. Due to the high volume and depth of his contributions, he has been a driving force in his area, inspiring other researchers and fostering progress in recent years. Finally, the diversity of his work highlights one of his greatest strengths: his ability to bring researchers together and build a strong, collaborative scientific community.

Gautam Kamath has made breakthrough contributions to the algorithmic foundations of robust and private statistics and machine learning. He is a pioneer of algorithmic robust statistics, giving the first efficient high-dimensional estimators with essentially optimal guarantees under adversarial corruption, and his work helped launch a major research area. He has also played a leading role in differential privacy, obtaining foundational results for private estimation and testing, and revealing deep connections between robustness and privacy. His work is distinguished by its combination of conceptual depth, technical strength, and broad influence on the theory of modern data analysis. He has furthermore provided exceptional service to the community through leadership, mentoring, and widely admired expository and organizational work.

Presburger Award Committee 2026

Joël Ouaknine (Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, chair),

Shiri Chechik (Tel-Aviv University) and

Kasper Green Larsen (Aarhus University).

The Presburger Award is awarded by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) to a young scientist for outstanding contributions in theoretical computer science, documented by a published paper or a series of published papers. The award is named after Mojżesz Presburger who accomplished his path-breaking work on decidability of the theory of addition (which today is called Presburger arithmetic) as a student in 1929.

The list of the previous recipients of the Presburger Award is available at http://eatcs.org/index.php/presburger.