Resources and Projects

Below, you will find some links to resources, projects, slides, etc. that I’ve worked on over the years. These are listed in reverse chronological order. (Most recent projects first.)

Circuits, Parallelism, and Quantum Advantage (Course Project)

This is a report and presentation I prepared for COMP/MATH 4803: Computable Functions at Carleton University. The aim was to introduce the paper Quantum Advantage with Shallow Circuits by Bravyi, Gosset, and König. Because this was a computability theory course and most of the class did not have a background in quantum computing, my goal was to bring the class up to speed on concepts required to understand the paper and give a sketch of the results, their significance, and an idea of why they are true. I wish the page limit on this project had been higher, because I don’t really feel like I was able to get very far into the core story of this paper, but I did really enjoy writing the report and learning about circuits.

Supermodularity, Iterative Peeling, and Densest Subgraphs (Course Project)

A.k.a. Densest Subgraphs, Iterative Peeling, and Supermodularity. This is a report and presentation I prepared for COMP 5112: Algorithms for Data Science at Carleton University. The aim was to break down and understand a recent paper by Chekuri, Quanrud, and Torres called Densest Subgraph: Supermodularity, Iterative Peeling, and Flow which studies the densest subgraph problem through the lens of supermodular set functions. This was a really challenging project because I had no idea what anything in this paper meant before I started, lol (and also because I had never written such a technical document before). The report covers a (very brief) introduction to the theory of submodular functions and gives extended presentations of some ideas in the original paper.

Why does Theory Matter in Computer Science? (Talk)

A talk I did for the Carleton Computer Science Society Tech Talk Night on November 19th, 2024. It aims to explain why we make computer science students take theory courses, the importance of abstraction and generalization in problem solving, and how we can apply theory and/or math to solve real-world problems.

The first section is quite general; it is an overview of what we actually mean when we talk about “theory”, as well as a discussion about abstraction and generalization, which I see as being two fundamental ideas in computer science. The rest of the talk is a little bit more technical in nature – it goes over some real-world problems that can be reduced to the densest subgraph problem, and discusses some algorithms for solving the problem, and looks at some generalizations of the densest subgraph problem.

This presentation was intended to be self-contained and accessible to an audience of second year computer science students. I have also adapted the content of the talk into a series of blog posts, for anyone who is interested but could not attend.

Hypergraphs, Approximation Algorithms, and the Densest Subgraph Problem (Guest Lecture)

A guest lecture I did for the first year discrete structures course (COMP 1805) at Carleton University, in June 2024. This talk was intended to expose the students to how the math they were learning could be applied in other contexts, and serve as an introduction to the research I was doing under the supervision of Dr. Yuly Billig. A huge thank you goes out to Dr. Alexa Sharp for giving me the opportunity to lecture to her class! I also talked a bit about undergraduate research opportunities and how the research process felt.

How To Be a “Talentless Hack” in Public (Talk + Zine)

A talk I did for the Carleton Computer Science Society Tech Talk Night on March 1st, 2023. It is about imposter syndrome, its ramifications, and techniques for preventing imposter syndrome from taking over and ruining your life. I also converted this presentation into a blog post and a zine!