Aviad Rubinstein

[Last updated 8/23]

I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford.


Algorithms for Toddlers: the book!

Yes, Mary Wootters and I wrote a book about Algorithms for Toddlers.

Mentoring

PhD advisees: Joshua Brakensiek, Ruiquan Gao, Jabari Hastings, Mohammad Roghani, Xiao Mao, Kianna Wan, Junyao Zhao, Zixin (Jack) Zhou

Postdocs: Soheil Behnezhad (Stanford -> Northeastern), Kangning Wang

Undergraduates: Isabel Papadimitriou (Berkeley -> Stanford), Erik Jones (Stanford -> Berkeley), Ruiquan Gao (Tsinghua -> Stanford), Qianfan Zhang (Tsinghua -> Princeton), Jake Kaplan (Stanford Math Undergraduate Research Award), Michael Zhang, Paul Duggan, Vedant Garg, Ishan Khare, Anthony Zhan.

High school: Ishaan Sinha

Masters: Sadly there are no masters students on this list (yet). But here is a great resource if you're considering doing a masters in theory of computer science!
(Also, if you know of a relevant masters program that isn't represented on the spreadsheet, please send me an email!)


Teaching

What I'm teaching this year
  • Design and Analysis of Algorithms (CS161) - Fall 18, Fall 19, Fall 20, Fall 21, Fall 22, Fall 23
  • Incentives in Computer Science (CS269i) - Spring 21, Winter 23, Spring 24
  • Topics in Intractability: Unfulfilled Algorithmic Fantasies (CS354) - Spring 19, Winter 22
  • Incentives in Computer Science (CS259q) - Winter 20


Research: algorithms, complexity, and game theory.

Most of my research is quite theoretical, but I'm also interested in the real world. At least some of the time. [BGORZ23] is my most practical paper.
(Cool fact about this paper: the best parts were done by my co-authors Ruiquan Gao and Qianfan Zhang when they were undergrads!)

If you just want to read one of my papers, [RWW20] is probably the most accessible.
(Cool fact about this paper: the best part was done by my co-author Jack Wang when he was an undergrad!)

Even more accessible is this really nice Quanta Magazine article about [BR20] by Erica Klarreich.
(Cool fact: Yakov Babichenko and I also received the Kalai Prize from the Game Theory Society for this work.)

In sharp contrast, [Rub16] is probably my least accessible paper. I tried, but the proof is just very hard.
(At least it got some nice recognition such as a FOCS Best Paper Award :))

If you still want to read more papers, check out my dblp.


Workshops I co-organized



Consulting

Outside of my work at Stanford, I also consult part time for a blockchain start-up called Lava.

Contact

email:       aviad@cs.stanford.edu
Office: Gates 164

Department of Computer Sciences
Stanford University