Ronitt Rubinfeld facts for kids

Ronitt Rubinfeld (born 1964) is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University.

Education

Rubinfeld was born in 1964 in Ohio and grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a child, she attended Huron High School (class of 1981) and went on to graduate from the University of Michigan with a BSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1985). Following that, she received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley (1990), under the supervision of Manuel Blum. In the years 1990–1992 she did a post-doctorate at Princeton University in New Jersey and then at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Career

In 1992, Rubinfeld joined the faculty of computer science at Cornell University in New York as an associate professor and in 1998 was appointed associate professor. In 2004, she joined as a full professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. In 2008, she received an appointment as a full professor at Tel Aviv University .

Rubinfeld's research interests include randomized and sublinear time algorithms. In particular, her work focuses on what can be understood about data by looking at only a very small portion of it. She was a co-author of over 120 academic articles, which were cited in thousands of different articles. One of her main results, and in the field of model property testing in general, is a method for testing the linearity of a function, which she developed in her work with Manuel Blum and Michael Luby in 1993. The method allows, by sampling a small number of values of a given function, to determine with high probability whether the function is close to a linear function or not.

Rubinfeld also held positions in several research laboratories at various companies in the industry. In 1998, she served as a visiting researcher at the IBM Almaden research laboratories in San Jose (California). Between 1999 and 2003 she served as a senior researcher at the NEC laboratories in Princeton and in 2004 she served as a researcher at the Radcliffe Institute for Science Research.

Awards and honors

• She gave an invited lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2006.
• She became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014 for contributions to delegated computation, sublinear time algorithms and property testing.
• She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 2020 and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.