Kalen Patton, an ACO math student advised by Prof. Sahil Singla, has earned the best student paper award at the annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2026). Kalen will present his paper, titled “Online Resource Allocation with Concave Diminishing Returns Objectives," (https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11266) in January 2026 in Vancouver.
The paper studies online allocation with concave (diminishing-returns) objectives, a general model covering settings such as online advertising. While the simple greedy algorithm achieves only half of the hindsight optimum, this work gives the first unified algorithm guaranteeing (1-1/e) of the optimum for all such valuations.
Congratulations to Kalen for this well-deserved honor!
