Alek Westover

I'm a student at MIT. My research focuses on using combinatorics to design and analyze algorithms.

Email: alekw at mit dot edu

Publications

1. “A Nearly Quadratic Improvement for Memory Reallocation” [Slides]
   Martin Farach-Colton, William Kuszmaul, Nathan Sheffield and Alek Westover.
   To appear in Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA'24)
   Maintain memory under item inserts and deletes, minimizing the overhead of moving other items.
2. “Scheduling Jobs with Work-Inefficient Parallel Solutions” [Slides]
   William Kuszmaul and Alek Westover.
   To appear in Proceedings of the 36th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA'24)
   On-line scheduling problem: receive tasks with serial and parallel implementations, have to choose what to run.
   
3. “Complexity of Multiple-Hamiltonicity in Graphs of Bounded Degree”
   Brian Liu, Nathan S. Sheffield, Alek Westover.
   We give a tight characterization of the complexity of a generalization of Hamiltonicity.
4. “On the Relationship Between Several Variants of the Linear Hashing Conjecture”
   Alek Westover
   Introduced several variants of linear hashing and established relationships between them.
   
5. “The Variable-Processor Cup Game”. [Slides]
   William Kuszmaul and Alek Westover.
   In 12th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS'21).
   Proved upper and lower bounds for a two player game involving filling and emptying cups.
6. “Cache-Efficient Parallel-Partition Algorithms using Exclusive-Read-and-Write Memory.” [Animation] [GitHub]
   William Kuszmaul and Alek Westover.
   Proceedings of the 32nd ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA'20).
   Designed and implemented a cache optimal randomized algorithm for the parallel partition problem.

Blog

• hashing: Contemplations on what I enjoy about research.
• Truth: Contemplations on the importance of "working out the details carefully" in math.
• Girth: Some notes I took while reading literature on girth for a research project.
• Sketching: Notes on Sketching Algorithms, presented through dialogue of occasionally recurring characters of the blog.
• k-server on a circle: Attempting to solve a problem I read about in a paper.
• simply periodic binary functions: A neat number-theoretic bijection.

Tutoring Services

I enjoy helping people understand math and computer science. I offer private tutoring in the following subjects:

• Calculus
• Programming
• Algebra
• Linear Algebra
• Computer Science
• Combinatorics

Contact me for more information.