Ravi Kumar
Senior Director/Research Scientist
Mountain View, CA 94043
Email: ravi.k53 at Gmail
Interests: Algorithms, Theory of computation, Machine learning, Privacy
Education
Cornell University, Ph.D. (CS) Jan'98. Dissertation: Robust Properties in Program Checking
Cornell University. M.S. (CS) Jan'97
Visiting student: MIT, Sep'95–May'96; Georgia Tech, Sep'92–Jun'93
Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India. M.S. (CS) Jan'92
College of Engineering Guindy, Chennai, India. B.S. (CS) Jun'90
Experience
Google Research, Mountain View. Research Scientist and Manager of the Discrete Algorithms group; Jun'12-present
Yahoo! Research, Sunnyvale. Research Scientist and Manager of the Algorithms and Data Mining group; Jul'05–Jun'12
IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose. Research Staff Member in the CS Principles and Methodologies group; Feb'98–Jul'05
Intern: Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque (Jul'96–Aug'96); NEC, Princeton (Jun'96); Microsoft, Redmond (May'94-Aug'94; Jun'93-Aug'93)
HCL-HP, Chennai, India. R & D Engineer; Feb'92-Aug'92
Awards
Fellow, ACM '21
Test of time: 56th STOC'24, 55th STOC'23, 26th WWW'17
Best paper: 36th SPAA'24, 32nd ALT'21 (student), 21st KDD'15, 8th WSDM'15, 25th SPAA'13, 4th WSDM'11 (poster), 9th WWW'00
Best paper nominations: 33rd SPAA'21, 5th WSDM'12, 15th KDD'09 (student), 15th WWW'06, 10th WWW'01
IBM awards: Outstanding Innovation '02; Research Division '02; Pat Goldberg Memorial '01; Pat Goldberg Memorial '00
Yahoo! award: Master Inventor '11
Selected publications (dblp, scholar, aminer)
Lynn Chua, Badih Ghazi, Pritish Kamath, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi, Amer Sinha, Chiyuan Zhang. How private are DP-SGD implementations?, ICML'24
Flavio Chierichetti, Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins. On the number of trials needed to distinguish similar alternatives, PNAS'22
Badih Ghazi, Noah Golowich, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi, Chiyuan Zhang. Deep learning with label differential privacy, NeurIPS'21
Aditya Bhaskara, Ashok Cutkosky, Ravi Kumar, Manish Purohit. Online learning with imperfect hints, ICML’20
Ravi Kumar, Manish Purohit, Zoya Svitkina. Improving online algorithms via ML predictions, NeurIPS’18
Flavio Chierichetti, Ravi Kumar, Silvio Lattanzi, Sergei Vassilvitskii. Fair clustering through fairlets, NIPS’17
Ravi Kumar, Andrew Tomkins, Sergei Vassilvitskii, Erik Vee. Inverting a steady-state, WSDM’15
Ravi Kumar, Benjamin Moseley, Sergei Vassilvitskii, Andrea Vattani. Fast greedy algorithms in MapReduce and streaming, SPAA’13; TPC’15
Anirban Dasgupta, Ravi Kumar, Tamás Sarlós. A sparse Johnson--Lindenstrauss transform, STOC’10
David Liben-Nowell, Jasmine Novak, Ravi Kumar, Prabhakar Raghavan, Andrew Tomkins. Geographic routing in social networks, PNAS’05
Ronald Fagin, Ravi Kumar, D. Sivakumar. Comparing top k lists, SODA’03; SIDMA’03
Ziv Bar-Yossef, T. S. Jayram, Ravi Kumar, D. Sivakumar, Luca Trevisan. Counting distinct elements in a data stream, RANDOM’02
Ziv Bar-Yossef, T. S. Jayram, Ravi Kumar, D. Sivakumar. An information statistics approach to data stream and communication complexity, FOCS’02; JCSS’04
Cynthia Dwork, Ravi Kumar, Moni Naor, D. Sivakumar. Rank aggregation methods for the Web, WWW’01
Miklós Ajtai, Ravi Kumar, D. Sivakumar. A sieve algorithm for the shortest lattice vector problem, STOC'01
Andrei Z. Broder, Ravi Kumar, Farzin Maghoul, Prabhakar Raghavan, Sridhar Rajagopalan, Raymie Stata, Andrew Tomkins, Janet L. Wiener. Graph structure in the Web, WWW’00
Selected plenary talks
Algorithmic Problems in Discrete Choice: ISAAC'24, SimBig'25, UCSC'26
Sequences, Choices, and their Dynamics: COMAD'16, ECML/PKDD'16, SimBig'17, WAW'18
Compressibility of Behavioral Graphs: UIUC Distinguished Lecture'11
Some Patterns in Online Behavior: DSAA'14
Online Social Networks: Modeling and mining: ICDM'08; WSDM/WAW'09; CPM'09
Mining Web Logs: Applications and Challenges: KDD'09 Industrial
Professional services
Editorial board: JACM
Boards: SIGKDD (Chair), SIGACT, CATCS
PC chair: WAW'10; WWW'11,'24; ICDM'14; CIKM'15; ASONAM'16; DSAA'16; KDD'17,'23,'24; SIAM DM'18
Vice chair: WWW'08,'09; ICDM'08,'09,'11; ECML-PKDD'11
SPC: WWW'10; WSDM'09-'11,'14,'16-'19,'21,'23-'25; KDD'08,'10,'12,'14-'16,'21,'22
PC: STOC'05,'09,'17,'19; FOCS'17,'21; SODA'15,'22,'25,'26; ITCS'25; ICALP'21; RANDOM'16; APPROX'09; SPAA'17; ICDT'09; PODS'11
Organizing committee: WSDM'08; CCC'05; WAW'02-'04; TOCA-SV