Mika Göös is a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Simons Award for Graduate Students in Theoretical Computer Science. Mika is currently a PhD student, under the supervision of Professor Toniann Pitasssi, where his research focuses on communication complexity.
Mika has over 10 publications appearing in the top conferences/journals in theoretical computer science (PODC, STOC, JACM) including best student paper at PODC 2012, and best paper at DISC 2012. He has pioneered an approach in communication complexity where the complexity in the simpler query model is first established, and this result is then "lifted" to the world of communication complexity by proving a general transfer theorem.
This approach has led him (and coauthors) to resolve several longstanding open problems in communication complexity, including Yannakakis' clique versus independent set problem in communication complexity, improved monotone circuit depth lower bounds, stronger lower bounds for the log-rank conjecture, and a superlogarithmic separation between deterministic communication and partition number.