In 2022, I had many rejections and many acceptances. This seems to be constant in life and does not worry me, as much. It still stings, though, to get rejections but after a few hours, I feel fine (and sometimes become even more motivated to prove whoever wrong)!

Also, around the end of 2021, my parents had a terrible accident and barely survived. This event nearly broke me and serves as a reminder of what really matters: family, friends, relationships, and purpose. My parents have invested so much into me and love me unconditionally. The bare minimum I can do is to make them proud; I am happy to continue to do so.

Major events in 2022:

1. Successfully defended my Ph.D. at Harvard University.
2. Started a mini-version of naijacoder.org. The full version is tentatively planned for Summer 2023.
3. Started as a postdoc at Columbia University.
4. Moved back to NYC. It has been nice.

Only (additional) 2023 resolution: publish a blog post at LEAST once a month.

Cheers to a purposeful 2023!

I have begun life as a postdoc. This semester, I am planning to focus on using optimization and linear algebra strategies to design new algorithms. These (ideally efficient) algorithms would be for various statistical inference tasks under different constraints. In the cases where efficient algorithms cannot be obtained, can we prove computational lower bounds? Are there computational-statistical gaps for certain statistical problems?

Also, we are working on the Summer 2023 syllabus for http://naijacoder.org, which might incorporate some of the aforementioned topics.

Some References

[1] Otto Bretscher. Linear Algebra with Applications (4th Edition). 2009.

[2] Stephen Boyd and Lieven Vandenberghe. Convex Optimization. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[3] Noah Fleming, Pravesh Kothari, Toniann Pitassi. Semialgebraic Proofs and Efficient Algorithm Design. In Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science, Volume 14, Issue 1-2, 2019.

[4] Daniel Hsu. Computational Linear Algebra. https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~djhsu/coms3251-f22/

[5] Salil P. Vadhan. Pseudorandomness. In Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science, Volume 7, Issue 1-3, 2011.

I recently (in April of 2022) successfully defended my PhD in Computer Science at Harvard University. Thanks to my advisor (Prof. Salil Vadhan) and the rest of my research committee (Prof. Boaz Barak, Prof. Cynthia Dwork, Prof. Gary King) for their input in the thesis. Thanks to my friends and family for their support.

You can find a copy of my Dissertation below.

Writing the PhD thesis has been a very interesting and rewarding experience. If you have any questions/comments/concerns/suggestions, please reach out to me!