New Assistant Professor Tselil Schramm joins in January

The new year will see a welcome new appointment in the department. Tselil has spent 2020 in various locations and pursuits, most recently as Microsoft Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing with their Probability, Geometry and Computation in High Dimensions program. This past spring and summer she held Visiting Researcher posts at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Microsoft Research's Machine Learning and Optimization Group, respectively. Tselil's PhD in Computer Science was awarded by UC Berkeley, and she has completed postdoctoral appointments at Harvard and MIT.

Tselil describes her research interests as not only algorithms but a "theory of algorithms", with a focus on convex optimization, statistical inference, and the interface of the two. Her work aims to develop algorithmic tools for high-dimensional estimation problems, and to characterize and explain information/computation tradeoffs. Some specific themes are: understanding the algorithmic power of the sum-of-squares hierarchy of semidefinite programs; developing fast spectral methods; and relating the power of different models of computation for high-dimensional estimation tasks.