Andrew Yao

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao (Template:Lang-zh; born December 24, 1946) is a Chinese computer scientist, physicist, and computational theorist. He is currently a professor and the dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University. Yao used the minimax theorem to prove what is now known as Yao's principle.

Yao was raised in Taiwan and graduated from National Taiwan University. He earned a master's degree and his PhD in physics from Harvard University, then earned a second doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Yao was a naturalized U.S. citizen, and worked for many years in the U.S. In 2015, together with Yang Chen-Ning, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and became an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Citation</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Early life and education

Yao was born in Shanghai, China, in 1946. His parents later moved to Hong Kong and then Taiwan, where Yao was raised.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Yao graduated with his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in physics from National Taiwan University in 1967 and completed graduate studies in the United States at Harvard University, where he earned his Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in physics in 1969 and then his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1972.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His doctoral thesis was titled, "Internal Symmetries and Positivity," and was supervised by Nobel Prize laureate Sheldon Glashow.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 1975, Yao completed a second Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign as a fellow of the National Science Foundation. His second doctoral dissertation was titled, "A Study of Concrete Computational Complexity," and was supervised by Taiwanese computer scientist Chung Laung Liu.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Academic career

Yao was an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1975–1976), assistant professor at Stanford University (1976–1981), and professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1981–1982).<ref name="Yao Turing">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> From 1982 to 1986, he was a full professor at Stanford University.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> From 1986 to 2004, Yao was the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> where he continued to work on algorithms and complexity. In 2004, Yao became a professor of the Center for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University (CASTU) and the director of the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS), Tsinghua University in Beijing. Since 2010, he has served as the Dean of Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) in Tsinghua University. In 2010, he initiated the Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS). Yao is also the Distinguished Professor-at-Large in the Chinese University of Hong Kong.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In May 2024, Yao joined fellow AI researchers Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and others in publishing an expert consensus paper describing the extreme risks posed by AI. The authors warned that AI safety research is lagging, and outlined "proactive, adaptive governance mechanisms" for policymakers ahead of the AI Seoul Summit.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Awards

In 1996, Yao was awarded the Knuth Prize. Yao also received the Turing Award in 2000, considered the "Nobel Prize" of computer science, "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity".<ref name="Yao Turing"/> In 2021, Yao received the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology.<ref>Kyoto Prize 2021</ref> In 2022, he was listed on the Asian Scientist 100.

Yao is a member of U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences. His wife, Frances Yao, is also a theoretical computer scientist.

See also

• Dolev–Yao model
• Garbled circuit
• Hybrid argument
• Yao's Millionaires' Problem
• Yao's principle
• Yao's test
• Yao graph

External links

• Andrew Yao Template:In lang at CASTU