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Coordinates
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Courses
Carnegie Mellon University
- 15-155: The Computational Lens [S22]
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15-251: Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science
[S15, F15, F16, S17, F17, S18, F18, F19, S20, F20, S21, S22, F22, S23, F23] - 15-112: Fundamentals of Programming and Computer Science [F14, S16, M16]
- SAMS: Summer Academy for Mathematics and Science [N17]
McGill University
- COMP 202: Foundations of Programming (Spring14, Summer14)
- COMP 531: Advanced Theory of Computation (Spring14)
Scribbles
Papers
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On the Spectral Properties of Symmetric Functions
with Omar Fawzi, Raghav Kulkarni
Arxiv 2017 -
Spectral Norm of Symmetric Functions
with Omar Fawzi, Hamed Hatami
International Workshop on Randomization and Computation (RANDOM), 2012 -
The NOF Multiparty Communication Complexity of Composed Functions
with Arkadev Chattopadhyay, Omar Fawzi, Phuong Nguyen
International Conference on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP), 2012
Computational Complexity, 2015 -
The Hardness of Being Private
with Arkadev Chattopadhyay, Stephen Cook, Lila Fontes, Michal Koucký, Toniann Pitassi
IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity (CCC), 2012
ACM Transactions on Computation Theory (TOCT), 2014 -
Multiparty Communication Complexity of Disjointness
with Arkadev Chattopadhyay
Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (ECCC), 2008 -
On the Non-Deterministic Communication Complexity of Regular Languages
International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science, 2010
Special issue for Developments in Language Theory (DLT), 2008 -
On Bus Graph Realizability
with Melanie Coggan, Paul Di Marco, Alain Doyon, Liam Flookes, Samuli Heilala, Ethan Kim, Jonathan Li On Wing, Louis-Francois Preville-Ratelle, Sue Whitesides, Nuo Yu
Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG), 2007
Other
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Why I Do What I Do
Short reflections on teaching.
Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence 2017. -
Gödel's letter to von Neumann
This is a letter from 1956 in which Gödel basically formulates the famous P vs NP problem.
I created a PDF version of it for ease of distribution.
Barbados workshop
From 2009 to 2018, I helped organize the annual Barbados workshop on computational complexity.
Click here for details.
Students
I advised the following students in research projects.
Masters
-
Yassine Hamoudi
Master's Thesis in Communication Complexity (received A+)
Thesis, Paper
Undergraduate
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Yeongwoo Hwang
Decision Tree and Fourier Complexity of Boolean Functions
Senior Thesis (advised together with Ryan O'Donnell) -
Calvin Beideman, Anatol Liu, Thomas Tseng
Upper bounds in multiparty 'Number on the Forehead' model of communication complexity -
Aditya Krishnan, Nicholas Sieger
On the special cases of long-rank conjecture in communication complexity -
Kumail Jaffer, Sidhanth Mohanty
Multiparty 'Number on the Forehead' model of communication complexity and its relations to Ramsey Theory -
Alyazeed Basyoni, Jacob Imola, William Xiao
Upper bounds in multiparty 'Number on the Forehead' model of communication complexity.
Boolean circuits with mod 6 gates.
About me
I was born and raised up in Istanbul. I moved to Montréal after high school and received B.Sc. (Hon.) in Mathematics and Computer Science, M.Sc. in Computer Science, and Ph.D. in Computer Science, all from McGill University. I was advised by Denis Thérien and Hamed Hatami. I'm currently an Associate Teaching Professor in the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University.
My main academic interests are education and theoretical computer science.
During graduate school, I did research on theoretical computer science, trying to understand the inherent limitations of computers and computation. More specifically, my research interests are in communication complexity, circuit complexity, analysis of boolean functions and matrices, pseudorandomness - structure vs randomness in computer science and mathematics, and additive combinatorics.
Most of my time right now goes to thinking about teaching and education. My home is teaching theoretical computer science, but I also very much enjoy teaching introductory programming.