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. I have a broad research interest ranging from computational geometry, optimal stopping theory, scalable graph theory, and coding theory. I also enjoy thinking about recreational math problems.
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.
Publications
| Name | Year | Venue | With | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New Prophet Inequalities via Poissonization and Sharding. | 2025 | SODA 2025 (to appear) | 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 am originally from Egypt. Don’t assume my political views or religious beliefs (or lack thereof) based on where I was born; it’s a quick way to irritate me. If you’re curious about my thoughts on a topic, just ask directly. I can’t believe I have to spell this out, but it has happened enough times to warrant a note.