A more readable (?) bio
After a childhood that involved growing up in Los Angeles, Bangalore, and Kanpur, I joined
the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1999 for an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering.
Driven mostly by an interest in math, and partly by a horror of Operating Systems, my interests
veered towards Theoretical Computer Science. TCS had this heady mix of simple to state problems
with deep mathematical rigor that seduced me right from my first algorithms course. When I finished
in 2003, I went to Princeton for graduate school in TCS. Advised by Bernard Chazelle, I specialized
in property testing and sublinear algorithms. This subfield of TCS studies what can be determined
about a massive input without actually reading all of it. Philosophically, it demonstrates the incredible
power of randomization for algorithmics. Wrapping up in 2008, I set out to the brown hills (green in winter) of San Jose
for a postdoc at IBM Almaden. |