Antares Chen

About Me

I am a sixth year Ph.D student in the Computer Science department at the University of Chicago where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Lorenzo Orecchia. My work usually involves: variational analysis of first-order methods, applications of first-order methods for problems in combinatorial optimization (particularly graph partitioning), and the study of message passing algorithms from a combinatorial and convex analytic perspective (think Belief Propagation).

Broadly I like to think about: algorithmic spectral graph theory, convex duality, the design of first-order methods using tools from mechanics, and applications of statistical physics to algorithm design.

I also enjoy teaching and writing about nice ideas in theoretical computer science. Sometimes I post about food.

Finally, I'm very grateful for all my previous mentors: Jonathan Huang, David G. Harris, Aravind Srinivasan, Armando Fox, Satish Rao, Ramanathan V. Guha, Aaron Schild, Luca Trevisan

Students

Past students supervised

• Ethan Koroma
• William Hu
now a PhD student at Rutgers University
• Rebecca (Bex) Golovanov now a PhD student at Northeastern University
• Kelly Mao now at United Airlines
• Andy Yang now a PhD student at Notre Dame University

Students mentored through UChicago's Math REU (2024)

• Rohan Buluswar Analysis of Langevin diffusions
• Glen Cahilly Counterfactual regret minimization: intuition, theory, and application
• Pascal Descollonges Moore-type bounds in hypergraphs
• James Gillibrand Exposition on the connection between descent methods and Hamiltonian mechanics
• Junfei Sun A Hamiltonian perspective on Sherman's area-convexity algorithm
• William Hu Graph partitioning and multi-way Cheeger inequalities
• Daniel Katari High conductance expander graphs: constructions and bounds
• Dow Lafevers The relationship between expansion and the Unique Games Conjecture
• Lucas Tucker Dimensionality reduction and the Fenchel game
• William Spencer High conductance expander graphs: constructions and bounds

Students mentored through UChicago's Math REU (2023)

• William Hu Graph partitioning and multi-way Cheeger inequalities
• Daniel Katari High conductance expander graphs: constructions and bounds
• Dow Lafevers The relationship between expansion and the Unique Games Conjecture
• Lucas Tucker Dimensionality reduction and the Fenchel game
• William Spencer High conductance expander graphs: constructions and bounds

What's new...

• I'm currently visiting Yale University and Yale's Institute for the Foundations of Data Science where I'm working on applications of Belief Propagation to combinatorial optimization with Sekhar Tatikonda.

In the Past...

• I visited Bocconi University again to work on approximation algorithms which use semidefinite programs with rank constraints.
• I started my Ph.D at the University of Chicago
• I was a visiting researcher at Bocconi University in Milan working on various notions of graph sparsification
• We restarted Berkeley's Undergraduate Group for Theoretical Computer Science
• I was a student researcher for Data Commons, an open-source knowledge graph that unifies public datasets
• I was a student researcher for AutoStyle, an automated programming style tutor for large scale classrooms