Virginia Vassilevska Williams
My research applies combinatorial and graph theoretic tools to various computational domains. My recent work has focused on two domains:
- designing algorithms for shortest paths, pattern detection and other computational problems in graphs and matrices, and
- computational issues in social choice: when and how can one efficiently manipulate elections, tournaments and competitions, how to measure the quality of a voting rule, etc.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science in August, 2008 from Carnegie Mellon University under the guidance of Prof. Guy Blelloch. Before that I received a Bachelor's degree from the California Institute of Technology in 2003, double-majoring in Mathematics and in Engineering and Applied Science (this was what computer science students majored in before Caltech instituted the undergraduate computer science major in 2004). During the 2008-2009 academic year I was a member of the IAS in Princeton in Avi Wigderson's group.
My recent results on matrix multiplication: [pdf]
Here is my 2012 SIGACT News article summarizing my matrix multiplication results.
Teaching:: During the Spring 2013 quarter I am helping teach CS 266: Parametrized algorithms and complexity.
Program committee work: I am on the STOC 2013, ICALP 2013, IJCAI 2013 and FOCS 2013 program committees. Submit your awesome papers there!
In the past, I was also on the following program committees: COMSOC 2012, AAMAS 2012, AAAI 2012, SWAT 2012, and SODA 2013.
