New Horizons in Theoretical Computer Science

Important dates:

See application form below.

New horizons in theoretical computer science is a week-long online summer school which will expose undergraduates to exciting research areas in the area of theoretical computer science and its applications. The school will contain several mini-courses from top researchers in the field. The course is free of charge,and we welcome applications from undergraduates majoring in computer science or related fields. We particularly encourage applications from students that are members of groups that are currently under-represented in theoretical computer science.

Please contact newhorizons@ttic.edu for more information. Please also see this (regularly updated) FAQ page.

Organizers:

Shuchi Chawla (UT Austin) Ran Libeskind-Hadas (Claremont McKenna) Adam Smith (Boston University) Madhur Tulsiani (TTI-Chicago)

The summer course is organized by the Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science (CATCS) of the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT). We are grateful for support from SIGACT and the Toyota Technical Institute at Chicago.

We are looking for teaching assistants! Please fill out this form if you are interested.

Applying to the school

The course is intended for currently enrolled undergraduate students that are majoring in computer science or related fields. Students will be expected to be familiar with the material typically taught in an introductory algorithms and discrete mathematics / mathematics for computer science courses. If you are unsure if you are prepared for the course, please write to us at newhorizons@ttic.edu. We particularly encourage applications from students that are members of groups that are currently under-represented in theoretical computer science.

Application form:

To apply to the summer school, please fill out this Google form
(URL: https://forms.gle/ssVoomzTFaXDwRnf7).

To ensure full consideration, please fill out the form no later than April 21, 2023. Please mention one reference in your form. References do not need to write a full letter, but rather a short (one paragraph) email to newhorizons@ttic.edu will suffice. The letter should have the subject “Reference for [full name]”.

Decisions will be communicated to applicants who applied by the deadline no later than May 08, 2023.

Instructors:

We will update the list of instructors as we get more confirmations:

Antonio Blanca (Penn State University) Antonio Blanca is an Assistant Professor in the CSE Department at Penn State. His research is focused on the design and analysis of randomized algorithms, the Markov chain Monte Carlo method, and more generally, on the computational problems that arise in the study of probabilistic models in machine learning, statistical physics, and theoretical computer science. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2016; after that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Algorithm and Randomness Center at Georgia Tech.
José Correa (Universidad de Chile) José Correa is a full professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering and a principal researcher in the Center for Mathematical Modeling, both at Universidad de Chile. Jose obtained a mathematical engineering degree from Universidad de Chile in 1999 and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT in 2004. His research, focusing on the interplay between economics and computation, has received numerous awards, including an ACM SIGecom best paper award, an INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics best paper award, a Tucker prize finalist, and research awards from Amazon and Google. Jose serves and has served on the editorial board of some of the leading journals of his field: Mathematical Programming B, Mathematics of Operations Research (as Game Theory Area Editor), and Operations Research, and he often sits on the program committee of international computer science conferences. Currently, Jose serves as vice-rector of Information, Technology, and Data at the University of Chile.
Andrés Cristi (Universidad de Chile) Andrés Cristi is a postdoc at the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) at Universidad de Chile, and will soon be joining the College of Management of Technology at EPFL as assistant professor. Andrés did his PhD in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Universidad de Chile, and advised by José Correa and Paul Dütting. His research interests lie in the intersection of Algorithmic Game Theory, Mechanism Design, Sequential Decision-Making, and Approximation Algorithms
Yael Kalai (Microsoft Research) Yael Tauman Kalai received her BA (1997) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, MA (2001) under the supervision of Adi Shamir at the Weizmann Institute, and PhD (2006) under the supervision of Shafi Goldwasser at MIT. After postdoctoral positions at Microsoft Research and the Weizmann Institute, she is now a Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and an Adjunct Professor at MIT. Her honors include an outstanding master's thesis prize, a Sprowls award (co-winner) for best PhD thesis at MIT, and the 2022 ACM Prize in Computing. Her research focuses on cryptography.
Gillat Kol (Princeton University) Gillat Kol is an associate professor of computer science at Princeton university. Gillat studies applied math and data science with a focus on the theoretical aspects of computation, how information theory applies to computational complexity, and interactive compression and coding. She earned a PhD and an MSc in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute, Israel, and joined the joined Princeton the faculty in 2016. She is also the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, and a Sloan foundation fellowship.
Andrea Lincoln Andrea Lincoln received her PhD from MIT in 2020, under the supervision of Virginia Vassilevska Williams. She then joined the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher. Her work on fine-grained complexity and dynamic algorithms earned her a Stanford Graduate Fellowship in 2015, the EECS Merrill Lynch Fellowship in 2017 and selection for "Rising Star" events at the University of Illinois and MIT in 2019. Starting in the Fall of 2023, she will be an assistant professor at Boston University.

Schedule

The course will take place June 12 to June 16, 2023. A detailed program is available here.

You can also look at the past year’s webpage and program to get an idea of what to expect during the summer school.