About me
Hi, my name is Farouk! I am a fourth year PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in the CS theory group. I am lucky to be co-advised by Sariel Har-Peled and Chandra Chekuri. My research interests span computational geometry, optimal stopping theory, scalable graph theory, and coding theory, with a focus on mixing theoretical insights with practical scalable algorithmic solutions.
I did my undergrad in The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where I was fortunate to work with Mordecai Golin and Raymond Chi-Wing Wong.
Prior to joining UIUC, I worked at Citadel as a Quantitative Trader for 2 years. In Summer 2022, I interned at Google. In Summer 2025, I will intern at Two Sigma as a Quantitative Researcher.
Publications
| Name | Year | Venue | With | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Prophet Inequalities via Poissonization and Sharding. | 2025 | SODA 2025 | paper | |
| Shortest Path Separators in Unit Disk Graphs | 2024 | ESA 2024 | Da Wei (David) Zheng, Zhengcheng Huang | paper |
| Oracle-Augmented Prophet Inequalities | 2024 | ICALP 2024 | Sariel Har-Peled, Vasilis Livanos | paper |
| Revisiting Random Points: Combinatorial Complexity and Algorithms | 2024 | SOSA 2024 | Sariel Har-Peled | paper |
| Convergence to Lexicographically Optimal Base in a (Contra)Polymatroid and Applications to Densest Subgraph and Tree Packing | 2023 | ESA 2023 | Kent Quanrud and Chandra Chekuri | paper |
| A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Constructing Optimal Binary AIFV-2 Codes | 2023 | IEEE Transactions on Information Theory | Mordecai Golin | paper |
| Faster and Scalable Algorithms for Densest Subgraph and Decomposition | 2022 | NeurIPS 2022 | Kent Quanrud and Chandra Chekuri | paper |
| KFC: A Scalable Approximation Algorithm for k-center Fair Clustering | 2020 | NeurIPS 2020 | Sharon Lam | paper |
| Speeding up the AIFV-2 dynamic programs by two orders of magnitude using Range Minimum Queries | 2020 | Theoretical Computer Science | Mordecai Golin | paper |
| Polynomial Time Algorithms for Constructing Optimal AIFV Codes | 2019 | DCC 2019 | Mordecai Golin | paper |
Teaching
I have TA’d the following courses:
1) Fall 2024: Head TA for CS 374 Introduction to Algorithms & Models of Computation
2) Fall 2023: CS 374 Introduction to Algorithms & Models of Computation 🔥
3) Fall 2022: CS 473 Algorithms
🔥 = Included on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students. No student evaluation for CS473.
Professional Service
I have officially reviewed papers for the following conferences and journals:
- ITCS 2025, AAAI 2025, SODA2025, FOCS2024, ICML 2024, ISIT2024, SOCG 2024, ICLR 2024, SODA 2024, NeurIPS 2023
- IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Communications
I have served on the Program Commitee of the following conferences:
- AAAI 2025.
Misc.
- In my free time (which recently has been rare), I enjoy creating Youtube videos about problem solving.
- I enjoy playing Chess and Poker.
- My endlessly supportive wife.
- I’m originally from Egypt. Please don’t make assumptions about my political views or religious beliefs based on that. If you’re genuinely curious about my perspective on something, just ask. I’ve added this note because it’s been an issue more often than I’d expect.