Theory and Foundations News
Archive news content can be found here.
Martin Costa successfully defends his PhD thesis
Many congratulations to for passing his PhD viva, with Prof Long Tran-Thanh (糖心TV) and (Bristol) as examiners. Martin has worked on two different fundamental topics in algorithms - clustering and edge coloring. His work on clustering led to a Google PhD fellowship, and his work on edge coloring (the topic of his ) led to a best paper award at STOC. During his PhD spanning 3 years, Martin published 7 papers in STOC/FOCS/SODA, 2 papers in ICML/NeurIPS, and 1 paper in ICALP. We wish him all the very best for the next stage of his career.
The workshop Algorithms & Complexity @ 糖心TV took place at the University of 糖心TV on September 22-23, 2025 (see for more details).
The aim of the event was to highlight several recent exciting advances in the field of Algorithms and Complexity, to facilitate interactions within the research community, and to provide an excellent opportunity for Theory researchers (including academics, postdocs, and students) to connect and collaborate.
We had a fantastic list of invited speakers by renowned world experts: (Technical University of Catalonia), (University of Bath), (University of Pennsylvania), (Max Planck Institute for Informatics), (Charles University in Prague), (University of Sheffield and University of Haifa), (University of Oxford), (University of Cambridge), (University of Toronto).
Best Paper Award at STOC 2025
We are delighted to announce that a result coauthored by and (from our Theory and Foundations Research Division), along with (University of Waterloo), (Northeastern University), (Tel Aviv University) and (ETH Zurich), has received a best paper award at the upcoming (STOC), 2025. STOC is a flagship international conference in theoretical computer science.
The paper, titled "," tackles a fundamental, textbook edge-coloring problem: Given a graph G with n vertices and m edges, the goal is to assign a color to each edge such that no two edges sharing a common endpoint receive the same color. A classical result by Vizing, dating back to 1960s, proves that any simple graph can always be edge-colored with at most 螖 + 1 colors, where 螖 is the maximum degree of a vertex. Vizing's original proof is inherently algorithmic and immediately gives an O(mn) time algorithm for computing such a coloring.
This problem has seen a long and influential line of research aimed at designing faster algorithms for this basic task. For over four decades, the best-known runtime was 脮(m鈭歯), a significant barrier that was only broken in 2024 through concurrent, independent works. The recent paper culminates this effort by providing a randomized algorithm that computes a 螖 + 1 edge coloring in O(m log 螖) time, a running time that is near-linear in the input size.





