Aravind Srinivasan

I am on sabbatical until June '08.

For prospective students: If you wish to email me about admissions or about working with me, please read this first.

Local News: SoCG 2008 and CCC 2008 will be held in College Park in Summer 2008. Also, STOC 2009 will take place in nearby Bethesda in Summer 2009. Attend these conferences and enjoy the summer in DC!

Education and Postdoctoral Fellowships

• B.Tech. (Computer Science), Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, 1989 (Madras is now called Chennai).
  Undergraduate advisor: Prof. C. Pandu Rangan
  
• Ph.D. (Computer Science), Cornell University, 1993.
  Ph.D. advisor: Prof. David Shmoys
  
• Postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and DIMACS - Center for Discrete Math and Theoretical Computer Science (Rutgers), 1993-94.

Research

My main research-interests are in the following areas, and especially in their intersection: (i) algorithms and combinatorial optimization, (ii) randomness and computation, and (iii) networking, social networks & epidemiology, and distributed algorithms. The interaction of randomness with algorithms and networks pervades almost all of my work. Click here to hear Donald Knuth's thoughts on randomized algorithms -- this link is posted from Michael Rabin's Fall 2003 course page.

In more detail, much of my current research is in the following inter-related areas.

• Randomized algorithms, probabilistic combinatorics, and the role of randomness in computation;
• Algorithmic foundations of wireless networking;
• Peer-to-peer and overlay networks, robust and secure information-dissemination and retrieval;
• Social networks: models, dynamics, diffusion processes, and epidemiology;
• Combinatorial optimization: mainly approximation algorithms, stochastic optimization & game-theoretic issues; and
• Decentralized (i.e., distributed) algorithms: e.g., in social, wireless, and wired networks.

• Tom DuBois
• Bo Han (co-advised with Bobby Bhattacharjee)
• David Levin (co-advised with Bobby Bhattacharjee)
• Dr. Srinivasan Parthasarathy (Ph.D., Resource Allocation in Networked and Distributed Environments, 2006)
  Research Staff Member, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.
• Dr. Nan Wang (Ph.D., Modeling and Analysis of Massive Social Networks, 2005)
  Strategist and Research Associate at Goldman Sachs.
• Levon Mkrtchyan (student of Montgomery Blair High School, Senior Research Project on Distributed Algorithms, 2006)
  Joined our university (Computer Science major) in Fall 2007, supported by a four-year President's Scholarship.
• Mike Kobyakov (independent study on Complex Networks, Fall 2005)
• Jennifer Roberts (undergraduate independent study on Quantum Computing, Spring 2004)
  Currently a graduate student at MIT.

Teaching

I will teach CMSC 456, Cryptology, in Fall 2008. The textbook will be Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell.

Some of my previous courses are available online.

Honors and Recent Professional Activities

• Journal Editorships:
  • Managing Editor, Theory of Computing (ToC), an open-access journal.
  • Associate Editor, Journal of Computer and System Sciences (JCSS).
  • Associate Editor, Networks.
  • Editor, Journal of Discrete Algorithms (JDA).
  • Guest Editor, along with S. Khanna, of the special issue of JCSS devoted to selected papers from STOC 2003: Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Volume 69, Number 3, 2004.
  • Guest Editor, along with P. Sanders and B. Voecking, of the special issue of Theory of Computing Systems (Volume 39, Number 6, 2006) devoted to selected papers from SPAA 2004.
  
  
• I was an invited speaker at SAGA 2007 held at ETH Zurich in September 2007.
• Ramesh Govindan, Christian Scheideler and I organized a Workshop on Wireless Networking at the Bertinoro Center, Italy, in August 2007.
• I was an invited speaker at the Midwest Theory Day at Purdue University, in December 2006.
• N. Alon, J. Pach, P. Tetali and I organized a Conference on Probabilistic Combinatorics & Algorithms in honor of Joel Spencer's 60th birthday, in April '06. Joel is one of my role models.
• A. Kumar and I organized a Workshop on Algorithms in Networking preceding FSTTCS 2005.
• I was one of the speakers at Frieze Fest, a conference to celebrate Alan Frieze's 60th. Alan has made groundbreaking contributions to (probabilistic) combinatorics and randomized algorithms.
• S. Banerjee and I presented a tutorial on Performance of Peer-to-Peer Systems at Sigmetrics-Performance 2004; both systems and algorithmic issues were covered.
• Program-committee memberships: INFOCOM 2009, RANDOM (2007, 2000), FST & TCS (2007, 2001, 1998), SPAA 2004, STOC 2003, DIAL-M-POMC (2005, 2002, 2000), ASIAN 1999, ISAAC (1999, 1996), SODA 1998, and SWAT 1998.
• Co-Organizer, Workshop on Random Graphs and Randomized Algorithms, Bertinoro, Italy, May 2002.
• Co-Organizer, DIMACS Mini-Workshop on Quality of Service Issues in the Internet, February 2001.
• Three U.S. patents: on Internet telephony, Web content distribution, and robust routing of data in networks.
• IBM Graduate Fellowship, 1992-1993.
• Research Fellowship, Mathematical Sciences Institute of Cornell University, Summer 1992.
• Best Paper Award for the paper "Distributed Ranked Search" coauthored with V. Gopalakrishnan, R. Morselli, B. Bhattacharjee, and P. Keleher, Annual International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC), 2007.
• Co-Winner, Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award for the paper ``Improved Distributed Algorithms for Coloring and Network Decomposition Problems'' coauthored with A. Panconesi, ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), 1992.
• Eighth in India, Joint Entrance Examination for the Indian Institutes of Technology, 1985.

Address Information

• Room 3227, A. V. Williams Building, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, MD 20742.
• Phone: 301-405-2695, Fax: 301-405-6707.
• E-mail: srin AT cs.umd.edu