Hi! I am a professor in the CSE department in UC San Diego. I am part of the Theory of Computation group and help run the theory seminar.
I have a broad interest in theoretical computer science and mathematics. In particular computational complexity, randomness and pseudo-randomness, algebraic constructions, coding theory, additive combinatorics and high-dimensional geometry. My research is funded by NSF and a Simons investigator award.
If you are a student and would like me to write you a recommendation letter, please read this first.
Teaching (previous years):
- CSE 291, Additive Combinatorics and its Applications (topics class), Fall 2024
- CSE 209, Theory seminar, Fall 2024
- CSE 290, Reading seminar on pseudo-randomness, Winter 2025
- CSE 105, Theory of Computation, Spring 2025
Surveys:
- Recent Advances on the Log Rank Conjecture, Bulletin of EATCS, 2014
- Additive Combinatorics and its Applications in Theoretical Computer Science, Theory of Computing, graduate survey #8, 2019
- Higher order Fourier analysis and applications, with Hamed Hatami and Pooya Hatami, Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science, 2019
- Models of computation between decision trees and communication, with Sasha Knop, Sam McGuire and Weiqiang Yuan, SIGACT news, Volume 52, No. 2, 2021
Current PhD students:
- Farzan Byramji (co-advised with Russell Impagliazzo)
- Anthony Ostuni (co-advised with Daniel Kane)
Current postdocs:
Previous students/postdocs:
- Shay Moran (2018) → faculty at the Technion
- Kaave Hosseini (2019) → postdoc at CMU → faculty at U. of Rochester
- Jiapeng Zhang (2019) → postdoc at Harvard → faculty at USC
- Sankeerth Rao Karingula (2020) → Palo Alto Networks → Google Research
- Sam McGuire (2022)
- Amy Kanne (2022)
- Gaurav Mahajan (2023) → postdoc at Yale
- Max Hopkins (2024) → postdoc at IAS and Princeton
Professional activities:
- Program Committees: SOFSEM 2012, RANDOM 2013, CCC 2014, FOCS 2015, CCC 2017, CCC 2018 (local chair), ISIT 2018, ITCS 2019 (local chair+PC member), FOCS 2019, CCC 2022 (PC chair), ITCS 2023, FOCS 2023, SOSA 2024, SODA 2025
- Scientific/Editorial Boards: Journal of the ACM, ACM Transacations on Computation Theory (TOCT), IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (ITIT), Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC), SIGACT Executive Committee
- Past: Computational Complexity Foundation, Prague summer school on discrete mathematics
Some theory-related websites that I help maintain:
- CS theory events (list+calender of workshops, conferences, schools, etc): cstheory-events.org
- CS theory jobs: (students, postdocs, faculty) cstheory-jobs.org
