Piyush Srivastava पीयूष श्रीवास्तव

I am a fourth year graduate student in computer science at UC Berkeley, where my research advisor is Alistair Sinclair. I am broadly interested in randomized algorithms (and especially in connections between statistical physics and approximate counting).

Before coming to Berkeley, I did my undergraduate studies in computer science at IIT Kanpur.

Email: piyushsr (at) cs (dot) berkeley (dot) edu.

Résumé.

Papers

1. Alistair Sinclair, Piyush Srivastava. Lee-Yang theorems and the complexity of computing averages. Extended abstract to appear in STOC 2013. [arXiv version].
2. Narendra M. Dixit, Piyush Srivastava and Nisheeth K. Vishnoi. A finite population model of Molecular Evolution. Journal of Computational Biology 19 (10), pp. 1176-1202, October 2012.
3. Alistair Sinclair, Piyush Srivastava, and Marc Thurley. Approximation algorithms for two-state anti-ferromagnetic spin systems. SODA 2012. [arXiv version].

Older Manuscripts

• An elementary approach towards Cramer's conjecture. Undergraduate Thesis, completed under Manindra Agrawal.
• Approximative techniques for embedding matrix multiplication in group algebras, with Piyush Kurur.
• Average case complexity theory. The report contains a generalization of an upper bound on the min-entropy of distributions under which a problem can be distNP complete under deterministic reductions, and shows some weak restrictions on randomized reductions to distNP complete problems with a uniform distribution.

Teaching

• CS172: Computability and Complexity (Spring 2012, UC Berkeley).