Alexandra Kolla I am an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department at UIUC. I got my PhD at U.C. Berkeley. My advisor was Umesh Vazirani. After that, I did a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study and at Microsoft Research in Redmond. Research interests: Spectral Graph Theory, Algorithms, Complexity, Convex Programming, Quantum Computing. I am particularly interested in the use of spectral methods in graph algorithms and more so in developing new spectral techniques that use the full power of graph spectra (for example, see this paper). I believe that such techniques will help shed light into various unanswered complexity questions, like the Unique Games Conjecture. Contact Information: akolla [at] illinois [dot] edu #3222 Siebel Center 201 N. Goodwin ave. Urbana, IL 61801

Teaching

Spring 2013, Undergraduate Algorithms (CS 473).

Fall 2012, Computational Complexity (CS 579).

Spring 2012, Spectral Graph Theory (CS 598).

Papers

1. Maximal Inequality for Sperical Means on the Hypercube.
   With Aram Harrow and Leonard Schulman.
   Preprint on the ArXiv, 2012.

2. How to Play Unique Games Against a Semi-Random Adversary.
   With Konstantin Makarychev and Yury Makarychev.
   FOCS 2011.

3. Sparsest Cut on quotients of the hypercube.
   With James Lee.
   CATS 2011.

4. Spectral Algorithms for Unique Games.
   CCC 2010. Invited to CCC 2010 journal, Special Issue.

5. Subgraph Sparsification and Nearly Optimal Ultrasparsifiers.
   With Yury Makarychev, Amin Saberi, Shang-hua Teng.
   STOC 2010.

6. Unique Games on Expanding Constraint Graphs are Easy.
   With Sanjeev Arora, Subhash Khot, David Steurer, Madhur Tulsiani and Nisheeth Vishnoi.
   STOC 2008.

7. Playing Unique Games Using Graph Spectra.
   With Madhur Tulsiani.
   Manuscript, 2007.

8. Making classical honest verifier protocols secure against quantum attacks.
   with Sean Hallgren, Pranab Sen and Shengyu Zhang.
   ICALP 2008, BEST PAPER AWARD FOR TRACK C.

9. On parallel composition of zero-knowledge proofs with black-box quantum simulators
   with Rahul Jain, Gatis Midrijanis, and Ben Reichardt.
   QIC Journal, 2007.

P.h.D Thesis

Merging Techniques for Combinatorial Optimization: Spectral Graph Theory and Semidefinite Programming.

Students

I am currently looking for P.h.D students. If you are interested in working with me, please send me an email (akolla [at] illinois [dot] edu) to set up a meeting.