My interests lie in the area of combinatorics and optimization. In my senior year as an undergraduate student I became interested in error-correcting codes. Under the supervision of Prof. P. Boyvalenkov I investigated certain invariants of spherical codes, called moments and their connection with the linear programming bound (i.e. for a unit sphere in the Euclidian space of dimension $n$ and minimum distance $d$ an upper bound on the maximum number of codewords $A(n,d)$ in any code on the sphere). I co-authored a paper in which we showed how moments can be used to show nonexistence of targeted codes.

More recently I have become interested in network flow problems. With my advisor at CMU, Prof. Bruce Maggs we consider a network where applications require various levels of bandwidth while connections have limited capacity. In addition we are interested what happens if there are losses on the links and cost associated with using each link. On a more applied note we are interested in how to design efficient systems for delivering streaming media (both real time and prerecorded) by reducing loss levels as well as increasing quality of service level. Other people I have worked with include Adam Meyerson and Ramesh Sitaraman who was at Akamai.

Some of the courses I have taken at CMU are

  Graduate Algorithms

  Computational Complexity Theory

  Algorithms in the Real World

  Game Theory

  Computational Biology

  Discrete Mathematics

  Monte Carlo Markov Chains

  Methods of Optimization

  Linear Programming

  Integer Programming

  Graph Theory

As part of the ACO program I regularly attend the ACO seminar. You can also find me at the CS Theory lunch, GSIA/OR seminar. I am also affiliated with the Aladdin Center. The summer of 2003 we had a mini probe with the REU student Jevan Saks.

Here is an article for a project that I am involved in CANA. Here is a USA Today article about the project.