2011 is off to a great start for Yahoo Labs. Edo Liberty and Nir Ailon won the Best Paper award at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) for their paper “An Almost Optimal Unrestricted Fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform.” Edo and Nir presented their work on Sunday, January 23rd as part of the main session. Their paper discussed new tools from the probability in Banach spaces that were successfully used in the context of sparse reconstruction to advance on an open problem in random projection. To view the full paper, click here. About SODA SODA 2011 focuses on research topics related to efficient algorithms and data structures for discrete problems. In addition to the design of such methods and structures, the scope also includes their use, performance analysis, and the mathematical problems related to their development or limitations. Yahoo Labs was a sponsor for SODA 2011.