Today, I start as a research scientist at Simons/ Berkeley!

Simons Institute and UC Berkeley
samidavies [at] berkeley.edu
davies [at] berkeley.edu
I like problems in combinatorial optimization---think hypergraph matchings, scheduling, clustering, etc.
I was a post-doc at Northwestern for 2 years. In June 2021, I graduated with my Ph.D. in math from the University of Washington, where I worked between the Department of Mathematics and the theory group in the Allen School. I was advised by Thomas Rothvoss.
News
More on correlation clustering with Ben and Heather! We showed that with a small tweak, our fast, combinatorial algorithm that worked for the Min Max objective actually produces a constant factor approximate solution for all \ell_p norms.
Two papers accepted to this year’s ICML! One is on learning-augmented Ford-Fulkerson, where we use learned predictions to improve the run-time of Ford-Fulkerson methods, both theoretically and empirically. The other is on a combinatorial, fast algorithm for Min Max Correlation Clustering.
Heading to a Dagstuhl workshop on scheduling this coming week.
Getting ready to head to EECS Rising Stars in Austin!
Really excited to release this new paper with Josh Brakensiek on robust tensor factorization! We became interested in this while exploring the 3-coloring problem during our internships at MSR, enjoy!
I’ll be giving a talk at the TCS Women Meeting at STOC this year as part of the Rising Star talks.
Papers
Personal, but work related
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I love to climb. The past 2 years, I’ve been focusing on bouldering and have found such a great community within it.
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I’m vegan. I love to bake, cook, and drink matcha lattes.
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In a prior life, I ran a lot. I still run sometimes with my menace of a dog. At UW, I made a lot of friends and ran a lot with Race Condition Running.
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I completed my 200 RYT in the summer of 2019. I taught yoga classes at UW for a year or so.
- I was a mentor with the Washington Directed Reading Program during the following quarters: Spring 2019, Fall 2020, Winter 2021. I lead projects with undergraduates outside of the WDRP during the Fall 2019 and Winter 2020 quarters.
- I co-taught the course Math in Society to an amazing groups of people during the Summer of 2018 through FEPPS. FEPPS provides college education for incarcerated women, trans-identifying, and gender nonconforming people in Washington. I have tutored and done other work through FEPPS, as well.