Current Research Themes

Reproducibilty in Randomized Computations: Can monte-carlo approximation algorithms be made reproducible (output a unique value on all runs of the algorithm)? Current investigations on this question reveal surprising connections to several other notions in foundations of computation such as circuit complexity, hierarchy theorems, and certain partition problems in geometry. Recent contributions on this topic are available at proceeding of  ITCS 2021 and STOC 2022. This research also led us to the discovery of a new Eucldean parition problem (arXiv 2022) which is of independent mathematical interest.  

Sample Efficiency in Learning and Testing: Learning distributions from observation is a fundamental problem in machine learning. We investigate the necessity and sufficiency of number of observations  needed for learning distributions. Establishing optimal bounds on observations needed to learn is a central research question especially for high-dimensional distributions. Recent research establishes new upper and lower bounds on learning and testing high-dimension distributions including Bayes nets and interventional distributions. Recent publications are available in proceedings of ICML 2020, NeurIPS 2020, ALT 2021, STOC 2021, and AISTATS 2022.

Algorithms for Streaming Data: The data streaming model is one of the well-established models for computation over large data sets. It  is a model for real-time computation that limits storage capacity and processing time. Since the velocity and the volume of the data are expected to be very high, algorithms processing them can not revisit an item or spend too much time on a single item.  Prof. Vinodchandran Variyam's and his collaborators research on this topic has led to contributions not only in foundations of data analysis but also in applied areas including bioinformatics, databases, and software engineering. Recent publications are available at proceedings of SWAT 2016, ACM BMB 2017, PODS 2021, PODS 2022, ICSE 2022, and ESA 2022. A work, appeared in PODS 2021, made a striking discovery that certain algorithms developed independently in model counting and data streaming are the same. This work won several recognitions including Best of PODS 21, SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, and CACM Research Highlight Award. 

Complete publication list at DBLP

A note on the name on publications: In scientific publications, name appears as N. V. Vinodchandran.