Neel Patel

Neel Patel

PhD Student at USC

Hey, I am Neel, a third-year CS PhD student in the USC Theory Group, where I am very fortunate to be advised by Shaddin Dughmi and David Kempe. I am broadly interested in Combinatorial Optimization in the presence of Uncertainty or Incentives and Algorithmic Contract Theory. Recently, I have been working on problems in designing (fast) Dynamic Algorithms with Gramoz Goranci. I am also interested in designing AI/ML algorithms with the consideration of ethical aspects.

Before starting my Ph.D., I spent wonderful one and a half years at the National University of Singapore as a Research Assistant working with Yair Zick and Reza Shokri. Before that, I completed my B.Stat at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

You can find my updated CV here

Publications

  1. Limitations of Stochastic Selection Problems with Pairwise Independent Priors [Paper]
    Shaddin Dughmi, Yusuf Kalyaci and Neel Patel
    Under Submission

  2. On Supermodular Contracts and Dense Subgraphs [Paper]
    Shaddin Dughmi, Neel Patel, Aditya Prasad and Ram Deo-Campo Vuong
    To appear at Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2024)

  3. Combinatorial Stationary Prophet Inequalities [Upon request]
    Neel Patel and David Wajc
    To appear at Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2024)

  4. Sparsification of Stochastic Packing Problem [Paper]
    Yusuf Kalyaci, Shaddin Dughmi and Neel Patel
    In the proceeding of International Colloquium on Automata Languages and Programming (ICALP 2023)

  5. Delegated Pandora’s Box [Paper] [Talk]
    Curtis Bechtel, Shaddin Dughmi and Neel Patel
    In the proceeding of the Twenty-Third ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC 2022)

  6. Model Explanations with Differential Privacy [Paper]
    Neel Patel, Reza Shokri and Yair Zick
    In the proceedings of the fifth ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2022)

  7. High Dimensional Explanation for Black-Box Models: Axiomatic Approach [Paper]
    Neel Patel, Martin Strobel and Yair Zick In the proceedings of the fourth ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2021)

  8. The Price is (Probably) Right: Learning Market Equilibria From Samples [Paper]
    Omer Lev, Neel Patel, Vignesh Viswanathan and Yair Zick
    In the proceeding of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2021)

  9. Discrete Richman-bidding scoring games [Paper]
    Urban Larsson, Neel Patel, Ravi Kant Rai
    International Journal of Game Theory 1-34

  10. Keeping Your Friends Close: Land Allocation with Friends [Paper]
    Edith Elkind, Neel Patel, Alan Tsang and Yair Zick
    In the proceeding of the 29th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2020)

*Author list is alphabetical unless mentioned.

Teaching

  1. Teaching Assistant for CSCI 675, Convex and Combinatorial Optimization (Fall 2023)
  2. Teaching Assistant for CSCI 170, Discrete Methods in Computer Science (Summer 2023)
  3. Teaching Assistant for CSCI 270, CS270, Introduction to Algorithms and the Theory of Computing (Fall 2022)
  4. Teaching Assistant for CSCI 270, CS270, Introduction to Algorithms and the Theory of Computing (Fall 2021)

Mentoring

  1. Aditya Prasad (Undergraduate Student at USC CS)
  2. Ram Deo-Campo Vuong (Undergraduate Student at USC CS)