shashanks@ias.edu

I am a joint postdoc at DIMACS, Rutgers and IAS, Princeton, where I work in Theoretical Computer Science. My current research is centered around Coding Theory, Pseudorandomness and Spectral Algorithms.

I obtained my PhD from TTI Chicago where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof Madhur Tulsiani. Before that, I did a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur, India. Here's my CV.

Publications:

1. (with Vikrant Ashvinkumar and Mursalin Habib)
   Algorithmic Improvements to List Decoding of Folded Reed-Solomon Codes, Under Submission

2. (with Madhur Tulsiani)
   List Decoding Expander-Based Codes up to Capacity in Near-Linear Time, FOCS 2025
   [Paper] [Talk]

3. (with Fernando Granha Jeronimo, Tushant Mittal and Madhur Tulsiani)
   Explicit Codes approaching Generalized Singleton Bound using Expanders, STOC 2025 (invited to special issue)
   [Paper] [Talk]

4. ⭐ Best Paper Award | ⭐ Best Student Paper Award
   Improved List Size for Folded Reed-Solomon Codes, SODA 2025 (invited to special issue)
   [Paper]

5. (with Thiago Bergamaschi, Fernando Granha Jeronimo, Tushant Mittal and Madhur Tulsiani)
   List Decodable Quantum LDPC Codes, QIP 2025 (Poster)
   [Paper]

6. (with Fernando Granha Jeronimo and Madhur Tulsiani)
   List Decoding of Tanner and Expander Amplified Codes from Distance Certificates, FOCS 2023
   [Paper] [Slides] [Talk]

7. (with Fernando Granha Jeronimo and Madhur Tulsiani)
   Near-linear Time Decoding of Ta-Shma's Codes via Splittable Regularity, STOC 2021
   [Paper]

8. (with Fernando Granha Jeronimo, Dylan Quintana and Madhur Tulsiani)
   Unique Decoding of Explicit Epsilon-Balanced Codes Near the Gilbert-Varshamov Bound, FOCS 2020 (invited to special issue)
   [Paper]

9. (with Vedat Levi Alev, Fernando Granha Jeronimo, Dylan Quintana and Madhur Tulsiani)
   List Decoding of Direct Sum Codes, SODA 2020
   [Paper]

PhD Thesis: Continuous Optimization for Decoding Errors
[ArXiv]

Undergraduate Research

Teaching:

As Instructor:

• Topics in Coding Theory, Spring 2025 (Rutgers University)

As Teaching Assistant:

• Mathematical Toolkit, 2023

• Information and Coding Theory, 2022

• Mathematical Toolkit, 2021

• Algorithms, 2021

• Mathematical Toolkit, 2019