Piyush Srivastava

पीयूष श्रीवास्तव

I am a third 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. My résumé can be found here.

Email: <my first name><first two letters of my last name> (at) cs (dot) berkeley (dot) edu.

Papers

1. Alistair Sinclair, Piyush Srivastava, and Marc Thurley. Approximation algorithms for two-state anti-ferromagnetic spin systems. SODA 2012. [arXiv version].
2. Narendra M. Dixit, Piyush Srivastava and Nisheeth K. Vishnoi. A finite population model of Molecular Evolution. Manuscript.

Working Papers

1. Alistair Sinclair and Piyush Srivastava. Roots of the derivative of the Ising polynomial and the hardness of computing the magnetization. March 2012.

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