Varun Sivashankar

I am a PhD student in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. I am advised by Matija Bucic and Noga Alon. I was a predoctoral research fellow at Microsoft Research in the Algorithms and Theory Group where my advisor was Ravishankar Krishnaswamy. I completed my undergraduate degree in mathematics from UCLA where my advisor was Amit Sahai. My research interests include combinatorics, algorithms and theoretical computer science. Here is my CV. My email is varunsiva@princeton.edu.

Papers

1. Maximum Shattering [paper]
   Noga Alon, Varun Sivashankar and Daniel Zhu

2. Improved Approximation Algorithms for the Joint Replenishment Problem with Outliers, and with Fairness Constraints [paper]
   Varun Suriyanarayana, Varun Sivashankar, Siddharth Gollapudi, David Shmoys
   Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), 2024

3. Composable Coresets for Determinant Maximization: Greedy is Almost Optimal [paper]
   Siddharth Gollapudi, Sepideh Mahabadi and Varun Sivashankar
   Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023

4. MembrANNe: Graph Algorithms for Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search [paper]
   Siddharth Gollapudi, Neel Karia, Varun Sivashankar, Ravishankar Krishnaswamy, Harsha Vardhan Simhadri, Nikit Begwani, Swapnil Raz, Yiyong Lin, Yin Zhang, Neelam Mahapatro, Premkumar Srinivasan and Amit Singh
   The Web Conference (WWW), 2023

5. Extremal Uniquely Resolvable Multisets [paper]
   Varun Sivashankar
   SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics (SIDMA), 2023

6. Relinearization Attack on LPN over Large Fields [paper]
   Paul Lou, Amit Sahai and Varun Sivashankar
   The ACM Computer Journal, 2023
   Conference for Failed Approaches and Insightful Losses in Cryptology (CFAIL), 2022

Awards

1. Dean's Prize for Excellence in Research in Mathematics at UCLA.

2. Shivakumar Endowed Scholarship for Research in Computer Science at UCLA.

3. Google CS Research Mentorship Program (CSRMP) Fellow.

4. Neo Scholar (neo.com).

Teaching

• TA for Combinatorial Mathematics (MAT 377) at Princeton (Fall 2024).

• Course Reader for Machine Learning (CS M146) at UCLA (Winter 2021).

• Assistant Instructor at the Los Angeles Math Circle (Winter and Spring 2019).

• AI Workshops Officer at UCLA ACM AI (2019 - 2021).

Education

• University of California, Los Angeles (2018-22)
  B.S. Mathematics (Honors Program). GPA: 3.98/4.00 (summa cum laude)

Contact

Email: varunsiva@princeton.edu
Google Scholar: Varun Sivashankar
LinkedIn: varun-sivashankar
GitHub: varunsivashankar
Quora: Varun-Sivashankar
World Cubing Association: Varun Sivashankar