Aaron Bernstein, M.S.

Aaron Bernstein, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Columbia University, received a B.S. in mathematics from MIT in 2009. His research focuses on dynamic graph algorithms, that is, problems in which a graph is changing over time, and one wants to efficiently update the graph and query the graph for various information. He has several results on the dynamic all-pairs shortest paths problem, showing that as edges are added and deleted, we can quickly update all the distances in the graph without having to recompute them from scratch. To obtain these results, he has developed a general framework that borrows techniques from spanner and emulator theory in order to effectively compress an arbitrary graph, allowing faster and simpler operations. He has published papers in the top conferences in theoretical computer science, STOC, FOCS and SODA, and received best student paper awards SODA 2010, SODA 2012, and STOC 2013. He is also the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Columbia Engineering Presidential Fellowship.