Property testing is concerned with the design of super-fast algorithms for the structural analysis of large quantities of data. The aim is to unveil global features of the data, such as determining whether the data has a particular property or estimating global parameters. Remarkably, it is possible for decisions to be made by accessing only a small portion of the data. Property testing focuses on properties and parameters that go beyond simple statistics. This book provides an extensive and authoritative introduction to property testing. It provides a wide range of algorithmic techniques for the design and analysis of tests for algebraic properties, properties of Boolean functions, graph properties, and properties of distributions.
Oded Goldreich is a professor of Computer Science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. His research interests lie within the theory of computation and are, specifically, the interplay of randomness and computation, the foundations of cryptography, and computational complexity theory. He won the Knuth Prize in 2017.
Goldreich has contributed to the development of pseudorandomness, zero knowledge proofs, secure function evaluation, property testing, and other areas in cryptography and computational complexity.