The PolyTCS project currently is under the supervision of Professor Gil Kalai, Professor Virginia Vassilevska Williams and Professor Ryan Williams.

Gil Kalai

Professor at IDC, Hertzliya and Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Gil Kalai was born in 1955 in Tel Aviv. He studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem were he currently holds the Henry and Manya Noskwith Chair. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Yale University. He has held visiting positions at MIT, Cornell, IAS, KTH, Bell-labs, IBM and Microsoft. Kalai has written over 70 scientific papers and is the author of a blog entitled “Combinatorics and More.” He is the recipient of the 1992 Pólya Prize, the 1993 Erdös Prize, the 1994 Fulkerson Prize and the 2012 Rothschild Prize.

An influential 1988 paper by Kahn, Kalai and Linial on Boolean functions gave an early application of Fourier analysis in theoretical CS. Kalai, with various co-authors, has since applied Fourier analysis to the study of thresholds, influences, symmetries, noise, percolation and social choice. He has also worked on face-numbers and the diameter of polytopes and on randomized simplex algorithms. In 1993, Kalai and Kahn found a geometric object in 1325 dimensions that disproved the famous Borsuk Conjecture of 1933.

Virginia Vassilevska Williams

Professor at MIT

Virginia Vassilevska Williams (née Virginia Panayotova Vassilevska) is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research on graph algorithms and fast matrix multiplication (her breakthrough works on matrix multiplication once beat all the previous records ). She is also one of the leading scholars in fine-grained complexity area and her research results shed light on the hardness and structure in P. She was an NSF Computing Innovation Fellow for 2009–2011, and won a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2017. She is an invited speaker at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematicians, speaking in the section on Mathematical Aspects of Computer Science. As a role model of a lot of women students, she is also very active and dedicated to promoting gender equality and helping young women students in all aspects, the TCS Women Workshop she co-organized has helped hundreds of women students and early career women scholars to travel to STOC.

Ryan Williams

Professor at MIT

Ryan Williams works in the design and analysis of efficient algorithms and computational complexity theory. One of his major interests is to understand how the art of finding good algorithms for solving problems relates to the art of proving lower bounds, which are limitations on solving problems via good algorithms. Deep relationships between the existence of mildly efficient algorithms for simple problems in circuit analysis, and strong limitations on what problems circuits can solve, are presently being uncovered by Williams and others. Williams is also interested in theoretical topics that help give scientific explanations for computational phenomena, such as the unreasonable effectiveness of satisfiability solvers in practice.

Shachar Lovett

Professor at UCSD

Shachar Lovett is broadly interested in many areas within theoretical computer science and their connections to mathematics. In particular, he studies the role that structure and randomness play in computation and mathematics. Some examples are: combinatorial structure in computational complexity, algebraic structure in coding theory, and geometric structure in machine learning and optimization. Other than doing research, Shachar has a wife, three kids, one dog and three chickens, so he never has time to be bored.

Join the Supervising Team!

The PolyTCS Project highly encourages junior scholars to get involved in. To guarantee the research quality and make this project run smoothly, some dedicated seiner scholars kindly serve as project supervisors. Other senior scholars who would like to join the supervising team, please contact polytcspolytcs@gmail.com