PhD Candidate
Khoury College of
Computer Sciences
Northeastern University
varma.ak@northeastern.edu
I am a fifth year PhD candidate working with Dr. Ravi Sundaram in the Theory Group at Northeastern University. I am interested in understanding the theoretical aspects of problems arising in Computer Science, in particular problems related to utilizing randomness instead of computing/optimization as well as in overparametrization and generalization in deep learning. I have previously worked on complexity of some graph theoretic problems related to inference of graph structures from node properties.
Before joining NEU, I completed my B.Tech. degree (2013-2017) in Information and Communication Technology from DAIICT, Gandhinagar, India. I also got a minor in Computational Sciences and still have some interest (in the algorithmic questions) in areas like High Performance Computing, Complex Networks, and Modelling and Simulation.
I have worked on the following problems in the past (some ongoing):
My most recent resume can be found here (Updated October 2021).
I presented a paper on Realization problems at the COCOON 2020 conference. Details above.
In the last couple of years, I have attended the SPML discussion meeting at ICTS in January 2020; the Workshop on Theory of Deep Learning at IAS in October 2019; the Non-convex optimization and deep learning workshop at MIT in January 2019.
In Dec 2018, I gave a short talk during the TBML discussion meeting at ICTSfun-fact. You can watch the talk or go through the slides. This work is now under submission, the arXiv version of the paper is now up.
Long ago, I had attended the NMI workshop on Complexity Theory at IIT Gandhinagar in November 2016 and the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar in December 2015.
I am the head Teaching Assistant for the graduate Algorithms (CS5800) course offered in Fall 2021 at Northeastern University, which contains approximately 110 students. I am responsible for creating problem sets, recitations, exams, and conducting recitation sessions. I also taught a few lectures during the course. I had much of the same responsibilities during the Fall 2019 offering of this course.
In the past (Jul - Nov 2016) I have also been a Teaching Assistant for an undergraduate High Performance Computing course offered to juniors. Experiences in teaching this course lead to the development of a web-based platform to aid HPC education. Details can be found in the following article in the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computation or on arXiv. This was joint work with Bhaskar Chaudhury, Yashwant Keswani, Yashodhan Mohan Bhatnagar and Samarth Parikh.
Last modified: November 12, 2022