Rathish Das

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston. Prior to that I was a lecturer (tenure-track assistant professor) at the University of Liverpool, UK, and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo, hosted by Prof. Ian Munro. I completed my Ph.D in the Computer Science Department of Stony Brook University where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Michael A. Bender, Prof. Rezaul A. Chowdhury, and Prof. Joseph S. B. Mitchell. My Ph.D. thesis was on Algorithmic Foundation of Parallel Paging and Scheduling under Memory Constraints. 

Before coming to Stony Brook University, I did my masters in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay, Mumbai. I was also a long-term visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

Postdoc opening: I have a postdoc position in parallel algorithms and combinatorial optimization (approximation and online algorithms). If you are interested, please send me your CV. More information can be found here.

Research Interest

My research interests lie broadly in the design and analysis of algorithms for large-scale and high-performance computing. I use approximation, randomized, and parallel algorithmic techniques to study problems arising in multiprocessor systems, massive data sets, and computational science.

In multiprocessor computing, I focus on algorithmic models of modern hardware and on the design of efficient algorithms for hierarchical-memory and shared-memory systems, including problems involving scheduling, memory constraints, caching, and data movement. For massive-data applications, I study I/O-efficient external-memory algorithms and data structures, where the data is too large to fit in internal memory and must reside on external storage.

I am also interested in algorithmic problems arising in scientific computing, particularly the design of fast and memory-efficient algorithms for stencil computations and related computational kernels. More broadly, I develop approximation, randomized, and parallel algorithms for scheduling, graph, computational geometry, and computational science problems motivated by applications across science and engineering.

Refereed Conference Publications (Selected)

[Author lists ending with (*) are presented alphabetically as is customary in theoretical computer science.]

• Omer Wasim, Sami Davis, Shallu Tomar, and Rathish Das, “The Power of a Random Sample in Online Algorithms.” Proceedings of the Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026 (To appear). Selected for an oral presentation (fewer than 1.5% of accepted papers).

• Gerdus Benade, Rathish Das, and Thomas Lavastida (*), “Offline Local Search for Online Stochastic Bandits.” Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS, 2026. [PDF].

• Rathish Das and William Kuszmaul (*). “History-Independent Maximal Matchings Can be Surprisingly Efficient, and Lead to Better Worst-Case Guarantees.” Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), Pages 3999-4022, 2026. [PDF].

• Rathish Das and Hao Sun (*), “Approximation Hardness of Resource Scheduling.” Proceedings of the 37th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), Pages 46-61, 2025. [PDF]. Invited to ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing (TOPC), special issue for SPAA. 

• Rathish Das, Omrit Filtser, Matya Katz, and Joseph S.B. Mitchell (*), “Robustly Guarding Polygons.” Proceedings of the 40th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG), Pages 47:1-47:17, 2024. [PDF]. Invited to Journal of Computational Geometry (JoCG), special issue for SoCG. [PDF].

• Kunal Agrawal, Michael A. Bender, Rathish Das, William Kuszmaul, Enoch Peserico, and Michele Scquizzato (*). “Online Parallel Paging with Optimal Makespan.” Proceedings of the 34th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), Pages 205-216, 2022. [PDF]. Outstanding paper award winner (Best paper finalist). 

• Zafar Ahmad, Rezaul Chowdhury, Rathish Das, Pramod Ganapathi, Aaron Gregory, and Mohammad Mahdi Javanmard (*). “Low-Depth Parallel Algorithms for the Binary-Forking Model.” Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), Pages 22-34, 2021. [PDF], [Video talk]. Outstanding paper award winner (Best paper finalist). 

• Zafar Ahmad, Rezaul Chowdhury, Rathish Das, Pramod Ganapathi, Aaron Gregory, and Yimin Zhu (*). “Fast Stencil Computations using Fast Fourier Transforms.” Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), Pages 8-21, 2021. [PDF]. Outstanding paper award winner (Best paper finalist). 

• Kunal Agrawal, Michael A. Bender, Rathish Das, William Kuszmaul, Enoch Peserico, and Michele Scquizzato (*). “Tight Bounds of Parallel Paging and Green Paging.” Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), Pages 3022-3041, 2021. [PDF], [Video talk]. 

[For a detailed list of my publications, please refer to my research page.]

Program Committee Member

• ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA) in 2027, 2026, 2024, 2023, and 2022.

• European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) in 2025 and 2023.

• ACM SIGPLAN Annual Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP) in 2025.

• SIAM Symposium on Algorithmic Principles of Computer Systems (APOCS) in 2023 and 2022.

Contact

Email: rathish AT uh DOT edu