I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Theoretical Computer Science in Prof. Emo Welzl’s group, “Theory of Combinatorial Algorithms”. This research group belongs to the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, which is part of the Department of Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich.

 

Research Interests

Computational Geometry; Metric Embeddings; Combinatorial Optimization

 

Publications

"The Euclidean Degree-4 Minimum Spanning Tree Problem is NP-hard", with Michael Hoffmann.

Appeared in Proc. 25th Annu. Sympos. Comput. Geom. (SoCG '09), Århus, Denmark, 2009, 179-188.

“A Doubly Exponentially Crumbled Cake”, with Tobias Christ, Heidi Gebauer, Jiří Matoušek and Takeaki Uno.

To appear in Proc. European Conference on Combinatorics (EuroComb ’11), Budapest, Hungary, 2011.

Scholarships

Recipient of a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship EMEA 2010

Fulbright Foreign Student Grantee 2011/12, Visiting Student Researcher at University of Washington, CSE, Seattle WA, USA, 09/2011-08/2012

 

Master’s Thesis

“A Quasioptimum for Linear Programs”, 06/2009 - 12/2009.

Supervisor: Bernd Gärtner

Investigation of a generalized notion of optimum for linear programs, which is also defined for unbounded or infeasible programs, and which shares important properties of optima of bounded and feasible linear programs. Such a quasioptimum might permit a simpler and more uniform treatment of solutions to linear programs when results from linear programming are used as building blocks in combinatorial proofs or algorithms.

 

Semester Thesis

“In Search of the Boundaries of Intractability for Euclidean Degree-k MST Problems”, 09/2008 - 04/2009.

Supervisor: Michael Hoffmann.

Research on the following question: Is it NP-hard to decide whether for a given point set in the plane, a Euclidean spanning tree with vertex degrees at most four of a certain length exists or not? This question was open for 25 years and in our work, we were able to settle it with a “yes”, (see also SoCG’09 paper above).

 

 

Talks

“On Perfect Matchings, Counting, Sampling, and Self-Reducibility”, 02/2013, Mittagsseminar, ETH Zurich

“A Metric Embedding: Ulam’s Metric into l1”, 04/2012, Theory Lunch, CSE, University of Washington

“A Metric Embedding: Ulam’s Metric into l1”, 06/2011, Mittagsseminar, ETH Zurich

“A Quasioptimum for Linear Programs”, 02/2010 , Master’s thesis presentation, Mittagsseminar, ETH Zurich

“Noga Alon, Gil Kalai: A Simple Proof of the Upper Bound Theorem”, 11/2009,  Mittagsseminar, ETH Zurich

“The Euclidean Degree-4 Minimum Spanning Tree Problem is NP-hard”, 06/2009, 25th Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2009), Aarhus, Denmark

“The Euclidean Degree-4 Minimum Spanning Tree Problem is NP-hard”, 05/2009, Semester thesis presentation, Mittagsseminar, ETH Zurich

“Business Optimization and Us”, 02/2009, Presentation of the basics of operations research and an intern’s work in connection to it for the girls participating in ETH Zurich’s one-week trial study in Computer Science, IBM Research Rüschlikon

“David Eppstein: Happy Endings for Flip Graphs”, 11/2007, Computational Geometry Seminar, ETH Zurich

Teaching Assistance

Informatik für Biologie und Pharmazeutische Wissenschaften, Spring 2013, Lecturer: Dr. Hans-Joachim Böckenhauer

Diskrete Mathematik (D-ITET), Fall 2012, Lecturers: Prof. A. Steger, Prof. E. Welzl

Algorithms, Probability and Computing, Fall 2010, Lecturers: Prof. T. Holenstein, Prof. U. Maurer, Prof. A. Steger, Prof. E. Welzl, Prof. P. Widmayer

Information Theory, Fall 2006, Lecturer: Prof. M. Gross

Information Theory, Fall 2005, Lecturer: Prof. M. Gross

 

Miscellaneous

Some peaks, lakes and flowers in the Alps 

I am an honorary member of ETH’s association of computer science students (VIS), and a member of the old scout section at Pfadi Bi-Pi Oberuzwil.