what am i up to?

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# TAing

I’m currently TAing Theory of Algorithms (CMSC 27200), taught by Lorenzo Orecchia. My office hours are Wednesdays, 1-2pm in JCL 205.

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# on my mind

I’ve been thinking a lot about how research projects tend to fall into three consecutive phases.

1. Study/Exploration: You are just learning about the area, trying to develop intuition and learn techniques. This can take a long time, and sometimes you explore for a while and ultimately realize there is no path towards interesting results.
2. Discovery: Now you have a lot of intuition for the area and can prove things! This is a very exciting interval, but often short (or you get stuck here and it never ends, until you decide to give up).
3. Communication: You’ve basically determined your results but are trying to figure out how to communicate it — organizing/simplifying results, writing the paper, developing talks, etc. This phase always takes longer than I think, but I really enjoy it. It’s interesting to see how the act of communicating can help you refine the results themselves.

For my own sanity, it’s helpful to keep track of the states of my various projects:

Communication

• The BUD Walk
• Average-case hardness of LCIS
• 10x10 enumeration (on hold)

Discovery

• Impeaching “mayors” of universal covers (gave up for now)

Study/Exploration

• ReCom on dense random graphs
• Algorithms for planted random subgraph
• BUD irreducibility
• Cryptography from graph theoretic assumptions
• Prophet inequalities with cancellation costs
• AI and the Fourth Amendment
• Actuarially fair insurance pricing (on hold)
• Distinguishing permutations from functions (on hold)
• Job scheduling lower bound (on hold)

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# big (TCS) questions

• Given that the low-degree conjecture is false, how can we build a good theory of average-case hardness?
• Is structure necessary for public-key cryptography?

Last updated March 2026.

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