Akshar Varma

Photo PhD Candidate
Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Northeastern University





About me

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.

Research

I have worked on the following problems in the past (some ongoing):


Resume

My most recent resume can be found here (Updated October 2021).


Conferences and Workshops


Teaching

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.


Miscellany

Footnotes


Last modified: November 12, 2022