what am i up to?
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# just finished three papers!
I had three paper submissions from February 4-12th. It was a big
crunch but with the help of many collaborators we were able to get all
submitted. Since then I bought a guitar and have mostly been playing
that. Eventually I will start doing research again.
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# TAing
I’m currently TAing Intro to Cryptography (CMSC 28400), taught by Aloni Cohen. My office hours are
Wednesdays, 10am-12pm and 2-4pm at JCL 207.
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# on my mind
I’ve been thinking a lot about how research projects tend to fall
into three consecutive phases.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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
- RSE bounds/constructions
- 10x10 enumeration (on hold)
Discovery
- Impeaching “mayors” of universal covers (gave up for now)
Study/Exploration
- ReCom on dense random graphs
- Algorithms for planted subgraph
- 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
Last updated February 2026.
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