Congratulations, Dr. Sridhar!

This past week was the final exam week for our spring term, and in it we also held the doctoral defense of another Ph.D. student, Vinesh Sridhar (advised by Mike Goodrich). Vinesh organized his thesis in an unusually symmetric way, with two parts on computing with noisy primitives, two parts on in-place algorithms, two parts on sequential algorithms, and two parts on parallel algorithms, in four combinations (noisy sequential, noisy parallel, in-place sequential, in-place parallel). I’ve previously written here about Vinesh’s work with Mike and me on computational geometry algorithms with noisy primitives, which we published in WADS 2025. In this work, following a random walk back and forth along a search path in a history DAG or other geometric data structure (and occasionally, choosing a false step and then backtracking) allows algorithms based on this idea to avoid the logarithmic time penalty of repeating each noisy query for enough repetitions to be sure that it is accurate.…