Arpon Basu

Talks, Workshops and Teaching, Outreach

Talks and Workshops

  1. ACM-SIAM Symposium On Discrete Algorithms (SODA), Vancouver, Canada: Presented my work on Sparsifying Sums of Positive Semidefinite Matrices at SODA, 2026.
  2. IEEE Symposium On Foundations Of Computer Science (FOCS), Sydney, Australia: Presented my work on Improved Lower Bounds for all Odd-Query Locally Decodable Codes at FOCS, 2025.
  3. Eastern Great Lakes Theory of Computation Workshop, Rochester, USA: Presented a poster on my work on “Solving noisy k-XOR below the nk/2 Threshold“.
  4. Workshop on Local Algorithms, 2025, Chicago, USA: Presented a talk on my work on “Solving Random Planted CSPs below the nk/2 Threshold“.
  5. QWEST, California, USA: Invited to QWEST, 2025, where 12 Princeton students were selected for a week-long visit to top quantum computing research facilities in Southern California such as the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, Caltech, UCLA, Q-CTRL, Google Quantum AI, UCSB, Microsoft Station Q, Qolab and the USC Information Sciences Institute.
  6. Swiss Winter School on Theoretical Computer Science, Zinal, Switzerland: Invited to the Swiss Winter School on Theoretical Computer Science, 2025, where 60 top graduate students are selected for a fully-funded winter school in Zinal.
  7. University of California, San Diego (UCSD), San Diego, USA: Invited to present a talk on “Improved Lower Bounds for All Odd Query LDCs” at the Theory Lunch, January 2025.
  8. Tessellate, CMI, Chennai, India: Invited to Tessellate Camp 2024, where about 30 of the best scorers in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics in the STEMS (Scholastic Test of Excellence in Mathematical Sciences) exam are selected for a fully-funded camp at CMI.
  9. CMMRS research school, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken, Germany: Invited to the Cornell, Maryland and Max Planck pre-doctoral research school (CMMRS), where about 60 top UG and Masters students are selected for an orientation on PhD programs.

Teaching and Outreach

I TA’d 6 courses at IIT Bombay, and I enjoyed this experience a lot. Among other things, I was involved in conducting tutorials (recitations), grading assignments and examination papers, and clearing student queries personally. The courses I TA’d for are:

  1. MA109 (Calculus), Fall 2021
  2. MA106 (Linear Algebra), Spring 2022
  3. CS228 (Logic for Computer Science), Spring 2023: I prepared LaTeXed solutions to the tutorials for this course, which were referred to by hundreds of sophomores.
  4. CS215 (Data Analysis and Interpretation), Fall 2023
  5. CS208 (Automata and Logic), Spring 2024
  6. CS786 (Randomized Algorithms), Spring 2024

In addition to the above, I also instructed students (grades 8-12) on polynomials and functional equations for Math Olympiads, at a Mathematics Olympiad Orientation Program (December ‘23) conducted by AEES. Find the recordings of my talks here, and here.