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 primarily lie in systems algorithms. In particular, I use approximation and randomized algorithmic techniques in two major systems areas: (1) parallel and distributed algorithms for multiprocessor systems and (2) algorithms for massive data sets (``big data''). In the area of multiprocessor computing I concentrate on the algorithmic modeling of the hardware as well as the design and analysis of efficient algorithms for multiprocessor hierarchical-memory systems. For big data applications I work on I/O-efficient external-memory algorithms and data structures where data is too big to fit into the internal memory and must be retained on external storage.

I also design approximation and randomized algorithms for scheduling, graph, and computational geometry problems. In addition, I solve problems that arise in other areas of science and engineering beyond computer science. 

Refereed Conference Publications (Selected)

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

• 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 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