NYC Student Theory Day
Nov 21 • NYU Tandon
Nov 21 • NYU Tandon
Join us for a one-day gathering of NYC-area graduate students in theoretical computer science and machine learning at NYU Tandon. The event features student research talks, plenty of discussion time, and opportunities to connect across schools.
Attendance is free, but registration is required. Please register by Monday, November 17.
The event will be held at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, 370 Jay Street, 8th floor, Room 825, Brooklyn, NY.
Friday, November 21, 2025, 11:00 AM – 4:10 PM (tentative)
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 11:00 am – 11:10 am | Opening Remarks |
| 11:10 am – 11:30 am | Talk 1: Mursalin Habib (Rutgers) – Algorithmic Improvements to List Decoding of Folded Reed-Solomon Codes (SODA 2026) |
| 11:30 am – 11:50 am | Talk 2: Zhaozi Wang (NYU) – An Optimal Online Algorithm for Robust Flow Time Scheduling (SODA 2026) |
| 11:50 am – 12:10 pm | Talk 3: Adarsh Srinivasan (Rutgers) – Algorithms for the Diverse-k-SAT Problem: The Geometry of Satisfying Assignments (ICALP 2025) |
| 12:10 pm – 12:30 pm | Talk 4: Ashwin Padaki (UPenn), Yarin Shechter (NYU) – Sparse Navigable Graphs for Nearest Neighbor Search (SODA 2026); Efficiently Constructing Sparse Navigable Graphs (SODA 2026) — merged presentation |
| 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm | Lunch Break |
| 1:30 pm – 1:50 pm | Talk 5: Mirah Shi (UPenn) – Collaborative Prediction: Tractable Information Aggregation via Agreement (SODA 2026) |
| 1:50 pm – 2:10 pm | Talk 6: Zhongtian He (Princeton) – Disjoint Paths in Expanders in Deterministic Almost-Linear Time via Hypergraph Perfect Matching (SODA 2026) |
| 2:10 pm – 2:30 pm | Talk 7: Yifei Xu (NYU) – Geometric Algorithms for Neural Combinatorial Optimization with Constraints (NeurIPS 2025) |
| 2:30 pm – 2:50 pm | Break |
| 2:50 pm – 3:10 pm | Talk 8: Jingwen Liu (Columbia University) – Fast Attention Mechanisms: A Tale of Parallelism (NeurIPS 2025) |
| 3:10 pm – 3:30 pm | Talk 9: Hantao Yu (Columbia University) – Two Heads are Better than One: Simulating Large Transformers with Small Ones (NeurIPS 2025) |
| 3:30 pm – 3:50 pm | Talk 10: Behrad Moniri (UPenn) – On the Mechanisms of Weak-to-Strong Generalization (NeurIPS 2025) |
| 3:50 pm – 4:10 pm | Talk 11: Noah Amsel (NYU) – The Polar Express: Optimal Matrix Sign Methods and Their Application to the Muon Algorithm |
| After 4:10 pm | Wrap-up / Networking Session (Followed by Happy Hour) |
For additional details or inquiries, please email: Akbar Rafiey <ar9530@nyu.edu> or Nairen Cao <nc1827@nyu.edu>.