Thomas Watson



Interests
Computational complexity theory, and theoretical computer science in general.

Biography
I am a fifth year graduate student in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. My advisor is Luca Trevisan. I obtained my undergraduate degree in May 2008 from the University of Wisconsin - Madison with majors in computer science, mathematics, and computer engineering. In 2009 I was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Here are my curriculum vitae and my dissertation.

Research
Thomas Watson. The Complexity of Estimating Min-Entropy. Manuscript.
Thomas Watson. Time Hierarchies for Sampling Distributions. ITCS 2013.
Thomas Watson. Advice Lower Bounds for the Dense Model Theorem. STACS 2013.
Thomas Watson. Lift-and-Project Integrality Gaps for the Traveling Salesperson Problem. Manuscript.
Anindya De and Thomas Watson. Extractors and Lower Bounds for Locally Samplable Sources. RANDOM 2011.
Thomas Watson. Pseudorandom Generators for Combinatorial Checkerboards. CCC 2011.
Thomas Watson. Query Complexity in Errorless Hardness Amplification. RANDOM 2011.
Thomas Watson. Relativized Worlds Without Worst-Case to Average-Case Reductions for NP. RANDOM 2010.
Dieter van Melkebeek and Thomas Watson. Time-Space Efficient Simulations of Quantum Computations. TOC 2012.

Teaching
CS 70: Discrete Mathematics and Probability Theory, Spring 2012
CS 170: Efficient Algorithms and Intractable Problems, Fall 2011

Courses
Courses taken at Berkeley and at Madison