Anna Karlin

Anna R. Karlin is an American computer scientist, the Microsoft Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. She studied at Stanford University, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1981 and a doctorate in 1987 under Jeffrey Ullman, then worked for five years at the DEC Systems Research Center before moving to the University of Washington in 1994. Her research centers on the design and analysis of online and randomized algorithms, applied to algorithmic game theory, system software, distributed computing and data mining, with heavily cited work on IP traceback, competitive snoopy caching, memory hierarchy management, web proxy servers and hash tables with constant worst-case lookup time. She was program chair of the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science in 1997 and received the 2020 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for her work on balanced allocations, known as the power of two choices. She is a fellow of the ACM and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.