Computer Science Ph.D. Candidate Govind Sankar Wins Best Student Paper at 2025 FORC Symposium

Computer Science Ph.D. candidate Govind Sankar is the lead author on a paper awarded Best Student Paper at the 6th annual Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) on June 4-6 at Stanford University. 

As a forum for mathematical research in computation, the FORC Symposium aims to advance the application of theoretical computer science to address issues of current and anticipated societal concern. 

Sankar’s paper — co-authored by Duke Professor of Computer Science Kamesh Munagala, and Santhini K.A. and Meghana Nasre from IIT-Madras — explores a complex resource allocation problem: How to assign students to schools while taking into consideration each student’s preferences and limited school capacity? 

“School assignment is an extremely consequential decision process,” Mungala said. “This research gives policymakers a flexible algorithmic tool, allowing them to define ‘fairness’ — whether it’s about geography, income levels, or other factors — and then find a principled assignment plan that best achieves their community goals." 

The paper presents approximation algorithms for the problem via convex program rounding that balances trade-offs between fairness, efficiency and feasibility. The work achieves demonstrated techniques that can serve as a model in other complex settings with multiple rules and goals.  

“What I find most exciting about our work is its simplicity,” Sankar shared. “We were able to apply a straightforward rounding technique in a novel way to make significant progress on a theoretically interesting and socially important problem. I am deeply grateful to my co-authors for their mentorship and collaboration throughout this process and I am incredibly honored to receive the Best Student Paper award at FORC 25."