Carnegie Mellon University
Gates 9009 first initial middle initial last name (at) cs (dot) cmu (dot) edu
@singerng_
About Me
I'm a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. My research interests are in theoretical computer science, and I'm lucky to be advised by Ryan O'Donnell and Aayush Jain. I'm supported by an NSF GRFP fellowship. For my CV, see here, and for a list of my papers, see here.
In Spring 2022, I graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with an A.B. in Computer Science and Math. At Harvard, I was fortunate to be mentored by Madhu Sudan, and I was a proud resident of Pforzheimer House.
Research Overview
I have broad interests throughout algorithms, complexity theory, and combinatorics.
Expansion of coset complexes
Recently, I have been interested in studying the high-dimensional expansion (HDX) properties of coset complexes. A coset complex is a simplicial complex built from a group together with designated subgroups. These complexes are nice because they are highly symmetric and explicit, and their expansion properties can often be analyzed elementarily. I want to study the various known instantiations of the coset complex construction, find new instantiations, study their expansion properties, and think about downstream applications. In a recent preprint, Ryan O'Donnell and I show that the "\(B_3\)-type" complex constructed by O'Donnell and Pratt satisfies a notion of HDX called cosystolic expansion.
Streaming CSPs
A longtime project of mine is characterizing the approximability of constraint satisfaction problems in streaming and sublinear models. I was introduced to these questions during my undergrad by Santhoshini Velusamy and Madhu Sudan, and with them and other wonderful collaborators we have several papers, appearing in APPROX 2021, 2022, and 2023, SODA 2023 and 2025, and FOCS 2023. The first few of these works were the subject of my undergraduate thesis, which was awarded a Hoopes Prize at Harvard. See also my talk on streaming DICUT algorithms at CMU Theory Lunch.
Teaching
In Fall 2023, I was a teaching assistant for 15-459: Undergraduate Quantum Computation at CMU, taught by Ryan O'Donnell.
At Harvard, I was a teaching assistant for the following courses:
- CS 121: Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science (Fall 2021)
- CS 124: Data Structures and Algorithms (Spring 2021)
- CS 121: Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science (Fall 2020)
- CS 161: Operating Systems (Spring 2020)
- CS 121: Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science (Fall 2019)
In CS 121 (Fall 2019 and 2020), I organized guest lectures in the "CS 121.5" advanced section. In Summer 2022, I was a teaching assistant for the 2022 New Horizons in TCS program at TTIC.
Miscellanea
Before college, I helped found an online high school cybersecurity competition called ångstromCTF (running since 2016!), and redesigned our school newspaper website SilverChips Online.
My brother Ethan studies statistics and public policy.