About me
Hi, my name is Farouk! I am a third 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
Manuscripts
| Name | Year | With | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Prophet Inequalities via Poissonization and Sharding. Originally titled “Fishing For Better Constants: The Prophet Secretary Via Poissonization”, the new expanded paper generalizes the technique in the older one and applies it to numerous prophet inequalities in the literature (not only the prophet secretary) to improve numerous lower/upper bounds. | 2023 |
Teaching
I have TA’d the following courses:
1) Fall 2023: CS 374 Introduction to Algorithms & Models of Computation 🔥
2) Fall 2022: CS 473 Algorithms 🌑
🔥 = Included on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students
🌑 = No Teaching Evaluation survey conducted.
Professional Service
I have officially reviewed papers for the following conferences and journals:
- FOCS2024, ICML 2024, ISIT2024, SOCG 2024, ICLR 2024, NeurIPS 2023, SODA 2024
- IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on Communications
Misc.
- In my free time (which recently has been rare), I enjoy creating Youtube videos about problem solving.
- I enjoy playing Chess and Poker.
- I am originally from Egypt.