Huacheng Yu wins CAREER award, supporting research on data structures and streaming algorithms

Huacheng Yu. Photo by Sameer Khan/Fotobuddy

Huacheng Yu, an expert in theoretical computer science, has won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, one of the top honors for early career faculty.

The award is part of NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program and supports junior faculty who exemplify leadership in education and research. It comes with nearly $650,000 in research funding over five years.

Yu, an assistant professor of computer science, will use the grant to further his research on data structures and streaming algorithms. Data structures are fundamental to computer programs, providing an essential way to organize data so users can efficiently retrieve information. Streaming algorithms are a type of data structure, notable for processing large amounts of data sequentially without storing it. Because data is not stored, streaming algorithms can operate very efficiently, using only small amounts of memory. The focus of Yu’s work is on the tradeoffs between memory consumption, running time and accuracy for data structures and streaming algorithms.

Before joining Princeton as a faculty member in 2021, Yu served as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard and an associate research scholar at Princeton. He completed a doctorate in computer science at Stanford and a bachelor’s degree at Tsinghua University. He has received three commendations for outstanding teaching from the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton.