Seeun William Umboh

I am interested in the design and analysis of algorithms for combinatorial optimization from the perspective of theoretical computer science. My goal is to build an algorithmic toolkit with provable guarantees that are applicable to broad classes of problems by discovering and leveraging the underlying mathematical structure of real-world problems.

In particular, I design

• online algorithms (aka optimization under uncertainty), where the algorithm has to make a sequence of decisions over time without precise knowledge of the future, and
• approximation algorithms, which are efficient algorithms that obtain near-optimal solutions for problems where exact computation of the optimal solution is intractable (i.e. NP-hard).

I enjoy working on problems involving graphs, distances (i.e. metric spaces), and economies-of-scale (e.g. submodularity aka diminishing returns). These include scheduling, resource allocation, clustering, and also problems from operations research (e.g. a recent focus is on variants of the joint replenishment problem).

Before joining University of Melbourne in 2023, I was a Lecturer in Algorithms and Honours Coordinator at the School of Computer Science, University of Sydney, and was a member of the wonderful Sydney Algorithms and Computing Theory group from 2018. From 2015 - 2018, I was fortunate to be a postdoc with Prof. Nikhil Bansal at TU Eindhoven. I was also a Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (hosted by Prof. Yair Bartal) from Oct 2017 - Jan 2018 and a Visiting Postdoc at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, participating in the Algorithms and Uncertainty (Fall 2016) and Fine-Grained Complexity (Fall 2017) programs. I received my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was blessed to be co-advised by Profs. Shuchi Chawla (Wikipedia) and Eric Bach (Wikipedia). I also have an MSc in Computer Science and a BSc majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics, all from UW-Madison.

Fun fact: I was advised by advisees of Manuel Blum (Eric) and Avrim Blum (Shuchi and Nikhil).

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