About me

I am interested in Theoretical Computer Science in general and Graph Algorithms in particular. I am associated with Umass Theory Group. Before coming to Umass, I was a PIMS postdoc at the Compter Science Department, University of Victoria, hosted by Valerie King. I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oregon State University. I am fortunate enough to have Cora Borradaile as my advisor. Long time ago, I got a B.S. degree in Computer Science (honors program) from Hanoi University of Science and Technology.

My research has been generously supported by an NSF small grant (CCF-2121952), an NSF CAREER Award (CCF-2237288) and a Google Research Scholar Award.


My technical blog Rambling on Graphs is up.


Check out our FOCS 2022 workshop “Advances on Metric Embeddings” I co-organize with Arnold Filtser.

Note: I am NOT looking for a new PhD student this cycle. I already have more PhD students than I could advise. Check out other theory faculty at UMass.

News

I will be updating both good news, bad news and all kinds of news.

  • [November 2024] My application for Lilly Fellowship was eliminated in the departmental round.

  • [November 2024] Our paper “Learning Representations for Hierarchies with Minimal Support” was uploaded to OpenReview.

  • [November 2024] Our paper “Embedding Planar Graphs into Graphs of Treewidth $O(\log^3n)$” was uploaded to Arxiv.

  • [October 2024] Two papers were accepted at SODA 25.

  • [September 2024] Our paper “Learning Representations for Hierarchies with Minimal Support” was accepted at NeurIPS 24. The major effort is due to student Benjamin Rozonoyer. This paper has a very interesting theoretical problem that I had never seen before (and I only contributed to this part of the paper.).

  • [September 2024] Our paper “Towards Instance-Optimal Euclidean Spanners” was uploaded to Arxiv.

  • [August 2024] Super stoked about a paper with my student An La who came up with all major ideas in this paper: “Dynamic Locality Sensitive Orderings in Doubling Metrics” on Arxiv.

  • [August 2024] Paper with my student An La “New Weighted Additive Spanners” was uploaded to Arxiv.

  • [August 2024] Our paper “Optimal Padded Decomposition For Bounded Treewidth Graphs” was uploaded to Arxiv.

  • [June 2024] Our Dagstuhl worskhop proposal (with Sujoy Bhore, Jie Gao, and Csaba D. Tóth) was accepted. More info coming soon!

  • [June 2024] Two papers were rejected from FOCS 24, and one paper got accepted to FOCS 24.