About

I am an Associate Professor in the CS department at Northwestern University, and by courtesy, the IEMS department. I'm a member of the Theory CS Group and my research interests are broadly in theoretical computer science. I work on the algorithmic foundations of machine learning, data science, combinatorial optimization, and more recently, quantum information. I am particularly interested in using paradigms that go Beyond Worst-Case Analysis to obtain good algorithmic guarantees. I also serve as a Site Director (Northwestern) of the Institute for Data, Economics, Algorithms and Learning (IDEAL), and served as the Institute Director in 2023-24. IDEAL is an NSF-funded collaborative institute across Northwestern, TTI Chicago, UIC, U of Chicago, and IIT. My research has also been supported by an NSF CAREER award, an NSF AITF award CCF-1637585 (with David Sontag), CCF-2154100 (with Julia Gaudio), the Google Research Scholar program and the Amazon Research Awards program. Prior to joining Northwestern in Fall 2015, I was at Courant, NYU for a year as a part of the Simons Collaboration on Algorithms and Geometry , and was a Simons Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Theory Group at Carnegie Mellon University. I obtained my PhD from Princeton University in Computer Science with Prof. Moses Charikar, after getting my bachelor's degree in CS from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. I spent the first fifteen years of my life in Pondicherry, a beautiful town in Southern India, where Pi Patel hails from.

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