Anke van Zuylen -- Postdoctoral Associate

---

About me I was born in Hilvarenbeek, a small town in the south of the Netherlands. I did my undergraduate and Master's studies in Operations Research and Econometrics at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. After graduation, I worked as an internal consultant for TNT Post, where I worked on OR-related projects such as optimization of delivery routes from post offices to sorting centers, and determining the locations for new advertisement bundling and wrapping centers. I joined Cornell as a temporary instructor/teaching assistant in the spring of 2003, and started the PhD program in January 2004. My academic advisor at Cornell was David P. Williamson. I defended my dissertation on May 14, 2008. Since August 2008, I have been working as a post doc at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing. My most time-consuming activity in Beijing, besides research, teaching and trying to pick up some Mandarin, is eating. Chinese food is amazing!

Research and Publications

My research interests are in combinatorial optimization problems arising in information science, network design and mechanism design. In particular, I am interested in developing algorithms that have good theoretical properties, using techniques from mathematical programming such as linear programming and the primal-dual method. Besides developing algorithms with theoretical guarantees, I am interested in studying what these guarantees mean in practice, and comparing these algorithms to approaches which may not necessarily have theoretical guarantees.

The following is a list of links to my papers.

• Deterministic pivoting algorithms for constrained ranking and clustering problems with David P. Williamson. To appear in Mathematics of Operations Research. Journal version combining
  • part of the results in Deterministic pivoting algorithms for constrained ranking and clustering problems with Rajneesh Hegde, Kamal Jain and David P. Williamson. ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), 2007,
  • and the results in Deterministic Algorithms for Rank Aggregation and Other Ranking and Clustering Problems with David P. Williamson. 5th Workshop on Approximation and Online Algorithms (WAOA), 2007.
• Deterministic Sampling Algorithms for Network Design. To appear in Algorithmica, Special Issue on European Symposium on Algorithms. Preprint.
  • Journal version of Deterministic Sampling Algorithms for Network Design. European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), 2008. Winner of Best Student Paper Award (Track A).
  • Generalizes and extends A simpler and better derandomization of an approximation algorithm for Single Source Rent-or-Buy with David P. Williamson. Operations Research Letters, Volume 35, Issue 6, Pages 707-712.
• Linear Programming Based Approximation Algorithms for Feedback Set Problems in Bipartite Tournaments. Conference on Theory and Applications of Models of Computation (TAMC), 2009. Invited to special issue of Theoretical Computer Science
• Rank Aggregation: Together We Are Strong with Frans Schalekamp. Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX), 2009.
• Maximizing Influence in a Competitive Social Network: A Follower's Perspective with Tim Carnes, Chandrashekhar Nagarajan and Stefan Wild. International Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC), 2007. Nominated for Best Paper Award.
• The Achilles' Heel of the GSR Shuffle: A Note On New Age Solitaire with Frans Schalekamp. Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences, Volume 18 , Issue 3 (July 2004)
• Partitio et Emergo: A Note on Computation of Eigenvalues of a Shuffle Matrix with Frans Schalekamp. unpublished manuscript.
• Master's thesis: Over het schudden van kaarten (In Dutch) with Frans Schalekamp. August 2000 - winner of VVS-Thesis Award 2001 for best Dutch Master's thesis in Operations Research.

Talk

• Linear Programming Based Approximation Algorithms for Feedback Set Problems in Bipartite Tournaments, Theory and Applications of Models of Computation (TAMC), Changsha, China, May 2009.
• Deterministic Sampling Algorithms for Network Design, Workshop on Current Trends in Algorithms, Complexity Theory, and Cryptography, Beijing, China, May 2009.
• The Rank Aggregation Problem, ITCS-GSIS Joint Workshop on Theoretical Computer Science, Tohoku University, Japan, April 2009.
• Deterministic Sampling Algorithms for Network Design, City University of Hong Kong, January 2009.
• Deterministic Sampling Algorithms for Network Design, Institute for Theoretical Computer Science and Communications, Chinese University of Hong Kong, January 2009.
• Deterministic Pivoting Algorithms for Rank Aggregation and Other Ranking and Clustering Problems, Nicholson Student Paper Competition, INFORMS, Washington D.C., October 2008.
• Deterministic Sampling Algorithms for Network Design, European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), Karlsruhe, Germany, September 2008.
  
  
  
  
  

Teaching

In the fall of 2008 and 2009, I co-teach a new course for freshmen in the Tsinghua University Special Pilot Class together with Frans Schalekamp. The Special Pilot Class was founded by professor Andrew Yao, and contains the very best of the Computer Science students at Tsinghua. It is very exciting (and humbling!) to be allowed to teach such smart and motivated students. The goal of our course is to give students a broad introduction to (theoretical) Computer Science, and to make them excited about studying this fascinating field! Some of the topics we cover are algorithms, theory of computation, efficient computation, randomization, Boolean logic, circuits, internet, web search, game theory, auctions and mechanism design and cryptography.

The teaching evaluations for the fall 2008 class (with a rough translation from Chinese to English) are available here.

At Cornell, I was a teaching assistant for Optimization I, Optimization II, Engineering Probability and Statistics II, Introductory Engineering Stochastic Processes I, Basic Engineering Probability and Statistics and Engineering Applications of Operations Research. I really enjoyed teaching at Cornell, and was very happy when in 2008, I won the Undergraduate Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award! Here are complete student evaluations for the most recent courses for which I was a teaching assistant: Optimization II Spring 2006, Optimization II Spring 2007 and Optimization II Spring 2008.

Contact

Anke van Zuylen
Institute for Theoretical Computer Science
1-208 FIT Building
Tsinghua University
Beijing 100083
P.R. China

My first name "at mail dot tsinghua dot edu dot cn"

Spelling and Alphabetizing my Name

My last name is "van Zuylen". "Van" means "of, coming from" and is a very common (and somewhat confusing) prefix in Dutch last names. It is ignored when alphabetizing, so my name should be alphabetized under "Z", not under "v". When my first name, or initial, precedes my last name, the "v" in "van" is lower case. Otherwise, the "v" should be capitalized. So it is "A. van Zuylen", but "Williamson and Van Zuylen".