Aravind Srinivasan

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

Local News: STOC 2009 will take place in nearby Bethesda from May 31st to June 2nd, 2009. A conference in honor of Les Valiant's 60th is planned on May 30th.

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 B. 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 am teaching CMSC 456, Cryptology, in Fall 2008; the textbook is Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Jonathan Katz and Yehuda Lindell.

I am scheduled to teach a graduate course on The Probabilistic Method in Spring 2009; the pre-requisites and structure will have quite some similarity to my Spring 2007 course. 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: PODC 2009, GECCO 2009, 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