I am a postdoc in Computer Science at Yale University, under the supervision of Prof. Dan Spielman. I obtained my PhD from Georgia Tech in 2018, advised by Prof. Richard Peng. Before that, I got my MS from Purdue University in 2015 and my BS from Zhejiang University, China.
My research lies broadly in the design of efficient algorithms for problems in Theoretical Computer Science and with applications in Data Science. I combine tools from linear algebra, probability, and optimization. My work includes:
- Designing and understanding the limits of fast algorithms for solving structured systems of linear equations and linear programs, such as linear equations in graph-structured block matrices (a slight generalization of graph Laplacians), packing and covering linear programs (linear programs with non-negative variables, coefficients, and constants),
- Developing efficient algorithms to improve the design of randomized experiments, by partitioning experimental subjects to balance covariates -- characteristics of the subjects collected before we run an experiment.
I taught CPSC 662 Combinatorial Discrepancy and Its Applications in Fall 2020.
Papers
Balancing covariates in randomized experiments using the Gram-Schmidt walk with Christopher Harshaw, Fredrik Savje, Daniel Spielman. Arxiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03071.
Hardness and Tractability For Structured Numerical Problems My PhD dissertation, 2018. Georgia Tech College of Computing Dissertation Award.
Positive LPs are Hard to Solve Accurately, Assuming Linear Equations are Hard with Rasmus Kyng, Di Wang. In SODA 2020.
Incomplete Nested Dissection with Rasmus Kyng, Richard Peng, Robert Schwieterman. In STOC 2018.
Hardness Results for Structured Linear Systems with Rasmus Kyng. In FOCS 2017, won the best student paper award.
On Approximate Pattern Matching with Thresholds with Mikhail J. Atallah. In Information Processing Letters 123 (2017): 21-26.
Approximating the Solution to Mixed Packing and Covering LPs in Parallel O~(ε^{−3}) Time with Michael W. Mahoney, Satish Rao, Di Wang. In ICALP 2016.
Optimal Query Complexity for Estimating the Trace of a Matrix with Karl Wimmer, Yi Wu. In ICALP 2014.
Minimizing Seed Set Selection with Probabilistic Coverage Guarantee in a Social Network with Wei Chen, Xiaoming Sun, Yajun Wang, Jialin Zhang. In SIGKDD 2014.