The Northwestern Theory group is excited to announce that we have several folks joining us at the beginning of this academic year! We have Hedyeh Beyhaghi as a postdoc joining from Cornell, Shravas Rao as a postdoc joining from NYU, Sumedha Uniyal as a visiting postdoc from Aalto University, Finland; Pattara Sukprasert as a new grad student transferring from the University of Maryland College Park; Saba Ahmadi and Sheng Yang, visiting grad students from the University of Maryland College Park.

Hedyeh Beyhaghi. Dr. Beyhaghi’s research interests are in Algorithm Design, with an emphasis on Algorithmic Game Theory and Mechanism Design. Her research mainly focuses on Auction Design, Online Stochastic Optimization, and Matching Markets. She obtained her Ph.D. at Cornell University, under the supervision of Eva Tardos.This text is only to create extra space for good indentation. Kudos to you if you found this text! Have a nice day. This text is only to create extra space for good indentation. Kudos to you if you found this text! Have a nice day.

 

Shravas Rao. Dr. Rao’s research interests are in theoretical computer science, with an emphasis on derandomization and pseudorandomness. He completed his Ph.D. at New York University advised by Oded Regev.This text is only to create extra space for good indentation. Kudos to you if you found this text! Have a nice day. This text is only to create extra space for good indentation. Kudos to you if you found this text!

 

Sumedha Uniyal. Dr. Uniyal is a postdoctoral researcher (Oct’17-Present) in the group of Prof. Parinya Chalermsook at Aalto University, Finland. She did her Ph.D. (Apr’13-Oct’17) at IDSIA, University of Lugano, Switzerland; under the supervision of Prof. Fabrizio Grandoni. She is broadly interested in approximation algorithms and algorithmic graph theory. During her Ph.D., she has worked on developing approximation algorithms for connectivity problems, clustering problems, and submodular optimization. Recently, she is also interested in structural graph theory and its implications in algorithms. She will be a visiting scholar at Northwestern till Dec’19 working with Prof. Samir Khuller.

 

Pattara Sukprasert. Pattara is a third-year Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Samir Khuller. He transferred from the University of Maryland College Park, where he spent his first two Ph.D. years and received a Master’s degree. Before that, he lived mostly in Thailand and got another Master’s degree from Kasetsart University advised by Prof. Jittat Fakcharoenphol. He is interested in approximation algorithms and graph theory, and has worked on network design problems, network flow problems, and some structural graph theory problems. Recently, he has also developed some interests in fast (up to sub-cubic) approximation algorithms.

 

Saba Ahmadi. Saba is a fifth year PhD student at the University of Maryland College Park visiting Northwestern, and she is advised by Prof. Samir Khuller. She is mainly interested in designing approximation algorithms. She is also interested in the topic of fairness and its relevance to combinatorial optimization. She finds problems at the intersection of AI and combinatorial optimization very interesting, one example is how to have diversity in the matching markets.

 

Sheng Yang. Sheng is a fifth year PhD student at University of Maryland, College Park advised by Prof. Samir Khuller. Currently, he is visiting Northwestern as a pre-doctoral visiting scholar. He is broadly interested in approximation algorithms. He has worked on graph theory topics related to connected dominating set and induced subgraph counting. Currently, he is mainly working on various scheduling problems, classical and new challenges originating from cloud computing.