ADAM POLAK

I work as an assistant professor in the Department of Computing Sciences at Bocconi University. Prior to joining Bocconi, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Algorithms and Complexity Department at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and in the theory group at EPFL. I finished my PhD in fall 2019, in the theory group at Jagiellonian University, advised by Paweł Idziak. In spring and summer of 2019 I was at MIT, hosted by Virginia Vassilevska Williams.

I am broadly interested in algorithms, and I particularly focus on two fields: fine-grained complexity and learning-augmented algorithms. A big part of my research revolves around the question: What makes a computational problem hard to solve efficiently? I also try to understand how to improve algorithms efficiency by using imperfect predictions in a robust way – retaining worst-case guarantees of classic algorithms – yet achieving a better than worst-case performance when the predictions are accurate.