Welcome to MohammadTaghi HajiAghayi's homepage

Address:                     MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi
                                   Computer Science Department, University of Maryland

                                   Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering
                                   8125 Paint Branch Dr., Room 5158
                                   College Park, MD 20742
                                   USA
Phone:                        301-405-6724
Fax:                            301-405-6707
Email:                        [my lastname]@gmail.com

YouTube:                   @hajiaghayi (watch my LIVES with Distinguished Computer Scientists as well as my Courses Online)                          

Twitter:                      @MTHajiaghayi
Instagram:                  @mhajiaghayi
Wiki & LinkedIn:      @Mohammad Hajiaghayi

I am a Guggenheim Fellow (2019), an ACM Fellow (2018) (the youngest in the class of 2018 fellows), an AAAS Fellow (2023), an IEEE Fellow (2020), an EATCS Fellow (2020), a Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists Honoree (2020), a Washington Academy of Science Distinguished Career Awardee (2023), a University of Waterloo Alumni Achievement Medal (2022) Recipient, and the Jack and Rita G. Minker Professor of Computer Science Department at the University of Maryland at College Park. I am also affiliated Professor with Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland. In addition, I hold a Research Affiliate position in MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). I am also a Permanent Member of Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) at Rutgers. I was also a Visiting Scientist in the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at University of California, Berkeley, in Fall 2016, Spring 2018, and Fall 2018.

      My research is supported in part by NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, Google Faculty Research Award (twice), Northrop Grumman Faculty Research Award, University of Maryland Research and Scholarship Award (RASA), AT&T Research Labs, and a few other DARPA and AFOSR grants. I also thank European Association for Theoretical Computer Science for EATCS Nerode Prize, 2015 (awarded for our outstanding JACM paper on our Bidimensionality Theory, which was the topic of my Ph.D. thesis; see below for more info) as well as ACM and IEEE Computer Society for FOCS’2025 Best Paper Award.

      Regarding my industry experience, since November 2023, I have also been a Research Scientist at Google Research. Previously, from August 2021, I served as an Algorithms Fellow at Overstock. Prior to that, beginning in January 2019, I was an Amazon Scholar with Amazon Sponsored & Display Advertisement Division. Before I was a Visiting Research Scientist at Google AI- Research, New York City, in 2017-2018. I was also a Visiting Researcher in Microsoft Research at New England and New York City Labs in 2016. Before joining UMD in 2010, I was a Senior Researcher in the Algorithms and Theoretical Computer Science group at AT&T Labs - Research from 2007. During my doctoral studies, I also worked as an intern at Microsoft Research Theory group in 2004 and Department of Mathematical Sciences at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 2002.

      Regarding my education, I have been one-year Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (with ALADDIN project) and a one-year Postdoctoral Associate in MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) from which I also earned my Ph.D. under supervision of Professor Erik D. Demaine  and Professor Tom Leighton (Sep. 2001- May 2005). I got my M.Sc. from the Computer Science Department of the University of  Waterloo  (Sep. 2000- Sep. 2001) and my B.Sc. from the Computer Engineering Department of Sharif University of Technology  (Sep 1997-Sep 2000).

My book:

Computational Intractability: A Guide to Algorithmic Lower Bounds, MIT Press 2024, with E.D. Demaine and W. Gasarch (FREE to download for everyone)

Teaching:

 

 

 

·        Editor-in-Chief of Algorithmica.

·        Editor for SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics.

·        Editor for Journal of Computer and System Sciences

·        Editor for Networks.

·        Editor for Algorithms.

·        Editor for Encyclopedia of Algorithms.

·        Guest Editor for ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing (TOPC) special issue on selected papers from SPAA 2017.

·        Guest Editor for Algorithmica special issue on selected papers from ESA 2013.

·        Guest Editor for ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG) special issue on selected papers from SODA 2008.

·        Conferences and Workshop Committees:

1.      Senior program committee, the 36rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Washington, DC, February 2023.

2.      Senior program committee, the 16th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), Singapore, February 2023.

3.      Program committee, the 36th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC), Virtual Conference (due to COVID-19), October 2022.

4.      Organizing committee, SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics (DM), Pittsburgh, PA, June 13-16, 2022.

5.      Program committee, the 31st Web Conference (WWW), Lyon, France, April 2022.

6.      Program committee, the 29th European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), Lisbon, Portugal, September 2021.

7.      Steering committee, ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, 2017-2020.

8.      Technical program committee, the 37th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Honolulu, HI, April 2018.

9.      Program committee, the 28th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Mathematics (SODA), Barcelona, Spain, January 2017.

10.   Chair, Program committee, the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), Washington, DC, July 2017.

11.   Technical program committee, the 36th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Istanbul, Turkey, April 2017.

12.   Program committee, the 22nd Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON), Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, August 2016.

13.   Technical program committee, the 35th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), San Francisco, CA, April 2016.

14.   Program committee, the 10th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory (LATA), Prague, Czech, March 2016.

15.   Co-organizer: ACM Conference in Economics and Computation (EC) 2015 Tutorial on “Network Creation Games: How Does the Internet Form?”, Portland, OR, June 2015.

16.   Program committee, the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), Portland, OR, June 2015.

17.   Program committee, the 42nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), Kyoto, Japan, July 2015.

18.   Technical program committee, the 34th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Hong Kong, April 2015.

19.   Co-chair, International Conference on Topics in Theoretical Computer Science (TTCS), Tehran, August 2015.

20.   Program committee, the 9th International Workshop on Algorithms and Computation (WALCOM), Bangladesh, Feb 2015.

21.   Program committee, the 15th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (ACM EC), Palo Alto, CA, June 2014.

22.   Technical program committee, the 33rd Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Toronto, Canada, April 2014.

23.   Co-organizer, FOCS 2013 Workshop on Bidimensional Structures: Algorithms and Combinatorics, October 2013. 

24.   Program committee, the 45th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), Palo Alto, CA, May 2013.

25.   Program committee, the 21st European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), Sophia Antipolis, France, September 2013.

26.   Program committee, the 16th International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (APPROX), Berkeley, CA, August 2013.

27.   Technical program committee, the 32nd Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Turin, Italy, April 2013.

28.   Program committee, the 2nd International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications, and Informatics (ICACCI), Chennai, India, August 2013.

29.   Program committee, the 8th Workshop on Internet & Network Economics (WINE), Liverpool, UK, December 2012.

30.   Co-organizer, Seminar on Bidimensional Structures: Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Logic, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, March 2013.

31.   Technical program committee, the 31th Annual IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), Orlando, FL, March 2012.

32.   Co-organizer, Workshop on Approximation Techniques, Princeton University, June 2011. 

33.   Program committee, the 23st Annual ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), San Jose, CA, 2011.

34.   Program committee, the 16th Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON), Nha Trang, Vietnam, July 2010.

35.   Co-organizing Seminar on Fixed Parameter Algorithms and Approximation Algorithms, Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, December 2009.

36.   Organizing Network Design and Algorithms Session, INFORMS, San Diego, CA, October 2009.

37.   Program committee, the 19th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Mathematics (SODA), San Francisco, CA, January 2008.

38.   Program committee, International Workshop on Parameterized and Exact Computation (IWPEC), Victoria, Canada, May 2008.

39.   Organizing Network Design Session, INFORMS, Washington, DC, October 2008.

40.   Program committee, International Conference on Wireless Algorithms (WASA), Dallas, TX, October 2008.

41.    Organizing Optimization in Wireless Network Session, INFORMS, Pittsburgh, November 2006.

42.    Program Committee, the 2nd ACIS International Workshop on Self-Assembling Wireless Networks (SAWN), Las Vegas, Nevada, June 2006.

43.    Program Committee, the 11th International CSI Computer Conference (CSICC), Tehran, January 2006.

1.      Kiarash Banihashem

2.      Peyman Jabarzade

3.      Samira Goudarzi

4.      Sohu Shin

5.      Keivan Rezaei (co-advised with Prof. S. Feizi)

6.      Mohammad Mahdavi

7.      Iman Gholami

8.      Shayan Chashm Jahan

9.      Hamed Abdi

10.   Danny Mittal

11.   Mahdi Jafari

12.   Tanapoom Laoaron

13.   Arshia Soltani (co-advised with Prof. S. Feizi)

14.   Jeff Michael Giliberti

15.   Faraz Ghahremani

1.     [Ph.D.] Ali Ahmadi, 2025 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Steiner Forest and Hard Instances'', now at X.AI)

2.     [Ph.D.] Jacob M. Gilbert, 2025 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Attacking Big Data: Efficient Algorithms with Sparsification and Parallelism '', now post-doc at National Institute of Health (NIH))

3.     [Ph.D.] Max Stephen Springer, 2025 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled `` The Price of Fairness in Algorithmic Decision Making'', now post-doc at Princeton)

4.     [Ph.D.] Jan Olkowski, 2024 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Towards Scalability and Efficiency in Distributed Systems'', now at Google)

5.     [Ph.D.] Marina Knittel, 2023 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled `` Fair and Scalable Algorithms on Massive Graphs '', now post-doc at UC San Diego)

6.     [Ph.D.] Hamed Saleh, 2022 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Parallel Algorithms for Processing Massive Texts and Graphs'', now an Applied Scientist at Microsoft)

7.     [Ph.D.] Alireza Farhadi, 2021 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Sub-linear and Secure Algorithms for Large Datasets'', now a Postdoc at CMU)

8.     [Ph.D.] Soheil Behnezhad, 2021 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Modern Large-Scale Algorithms for Classical Graph Problems'', Motwani Postdoc at Stanford University, now an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University)

9.     [Ph.D.] Mahsa Derakhshan, 2021 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Algorithms for Markets: Matching and Pricing'', a Postdoc at Princeton University and UC Berkeley, now an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University)

10.  [Ph.D.] Hadi Yami, 2019 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Fairness Guarantees in Allocation Problems'', an Applied Scientist at Microsoft)

11.  [Ph.D.] Saeed Seddighin, 2019 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Campaigning via LPs: Solving Blotto and Beyond'‘, a post-doc at Harvard and a research faculty at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago)

12.  [Ph.D.] Soheil Ehsani, 2017 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Online Network Design via Prophet Inequality’’, before a Scientist at Uber, now an Applied Scientist at Amazon)

13.  [Ph.D.] Hossein Esfandiari, 2017 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Allocations in Large Markets’’, before a post-doc at Harvard University, now a Research Scientist at Google Research)

14.  [Ph.D.] Sina Dehghani, 2017 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Network Design and Resource Management under Uncertainty’’,  joining as a Research Scientist at Facebook)

15.  [Ph.D.] Melika Abolhassani, 2016 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Allocation in Networks with Economic Applications’’, now at Google)

16.  [Ph.D.] Vahid Liaghat, 2015 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled `` Primal-dual Techniques for Online Algorithms and Mechanisms’’, a post-doc at Stanford University, now a Research Scientist at Facebook)

17.  [Ph.D.] Reza Khani, 2015 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Revenue Efficient Mechanisms for Online Advertisement’’, before an Applied Scientist at Microsoft and  an Applied Scientist at Amazon, now a Principal Applied Scientist at Microsoft)

18.  [Ph.D.] Anshul Sawant, 2015 (co-advised with Prof. V. S. Subrahmanian with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Computational Analysis of Intelligent Agents:  Social and Strategic Settings”, now at Google)

19.  [Ph.D.] Rajesh Chitnis, 2014 (with Ph.D. thesis entitled ``Directed Graphs:  Fixed-Parameter Tractability and Beyond’’,  a post-doc at Weizmann Institute of Science as well as at University of Warwick, now an Assistant Professor at University of Birmingham, UK)

20.  [Ph.D.] Hossein Bateni , 2011 (student at Princeton University that I mentored his Ph.D. thesis entitled ``A Primal-dual Clustering Technique with Applications in Network Design’’, now a Research Scientist at Google Research)

21.  [Postdoc] Elif Tan, 2016 (now an Associate Professor at Ankara University)

22.  [Postdoc] Hamid Mahini, 2015 (now an Assistant Professor at University of Tehran)

23.  [Postdoc] David Malec, 2014 (now a Postdoc at Department of Economics, University of Maryland)

24.  [Postdoc] Morteza Monemizadeh, 2014 (an Assistant Professor at Charles University, before a Research Scientist at Amazon, Samsung, Walmart, now an Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands)

25.  [Postdoc] Marek Cygan, 2011 (now an Assistant Professor at University of Warsaw)

26.  [Master] Zuzanna Aleksandra, 2024 (with Master paper entitled ``Empirical Study on the Watermarking Methods for Diffusion Models’’)

27.  [Master] AmirMohsen Ahanchi, 2022 (with Master paper entitled ``Massively Parallel Tree Embeddings for High Dimensional Spaces’’)

28.  [Master] Hamid Kazemi, 2021 (with Master paper entitled ``Approximation for Competitive Equilibria With Indivisible Goods and Generic Budgets’’)

29.  [Master] Amin Ghiasi, 2019 (with Master paper entitled ``On the Efficiency and Equilibria of Rich Ads’’)

30.  [Master] Kevin Engel, 2015 (with Master paper entitled ``Learning a Reversi Board Evaluator with Minimax’’ now at Google)

31.  [Master] Catalin Stefan Tiseanu, 2013 (with Master thesis entitled ``Promised Streaming Problems and Finding Pseudo-Repetitions’’, (now at Coinbase)

32.  [Bachelor] Edgar Moreno, 2023 (with Bachelor thesis entitled ``Maximizing Nash Social Welfare in Online Settings’’, (visiting student from Spain)

33.  [Supported as Research Assistant] Saeed Alaei, 2012 (a Postdoc at Cornell University, now a Research Scientist at Google Research)

https://www.predictaa.com/