Xing Gao

高 杏

xgao53@uic.edu

Why am I so happy?

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago. My area of interest is theoretical computer science, especially in Algorithms and Combinatorial Optimization. I am fortunate to be co-advised by Prof. Lev Reyzin and Prof. Yu Cheng (Brown University).

I graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2013, M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2014 with specialization in Electromagnetics, and M.S. in Computer Science in 2020 with specialization in Computational Perception and Robotics.

My CV.

My general field of interest lies in theoretical computer science, more specifically, learning and optimization between the worst case and the average case, also known as "beyond worst-case analysis".

Publications

Manuscripts

It looks better than it sounds.

I have been teaching myself to play the violin since 2017 with resources online. I started this journey as an experiment to observe "human learning" to gain insight into machine learning, but soon I realized human brain is more complicated than any machine ever built, and part of my learning process always seems like a blackbox.
While machine learning is Math, human learning is MAGIC.

I am somewhat of an expert on knots, not the Mathematical knots, but Chinese knots.
I have 2 cats: Ding Ding 鼎鼎 (left) and Da Ming 大铭 (right).
Ding Ding of House Gao, Little Ball of Fur.
Da Ming of House Gao, the Knight of the Dark.