Rares-Darius Buhai

I am a PhD student at ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. David Steurer. I am interested in theoretical aspects of computer science and machine learning.

Contact me at rares dot buhai at inf dot ethz dot ch.

Education

• 2020-present: PhD, ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. David Steurer
• 2019-2020: MEng, MIT, advised by Prof. Guy Bresler
• 2015-2019: BSc, MIT

Papers

• Semirandom Planted Clique and the Restricted Isometry Property
  Jarosław Błasiok, RB, Pravesh K. Kothari, David Steurer
  preprint
• Computational-Statistical Gaps for Improper Learning in Sparse Linear Regression
  RB, Jingqiu Ding, Stefan Tiegel
  preprint
• Beyond Parallel Pancakes: Quasi-Polynomial Time Guarantees for Non-Spherical Gaussian Mixtures
  RB, David Steurer
  COLT 2023
• Algorithms approaching the threshold for semi-random planted clique
  RB, Pravesh K. Kothari, David Steurer
  STOC 2023
• Learning Restricted Boltzmann Machines with Sparse Latent Variables
  Guy Bresler, RB
  NeurIPS 2020
• Empirical Study of the Benefits of Overparameterization in Learning Latent Variable Models
  RB, Yoni Halpern, Yoon Kim, Andrej Risteski, David Sontag
  ICML 2020

Teaching

• ETH Zurich, TA: Algorithms and Data Structures (Fall 2021, 2022, 2023), Algorithmic Foundations of Data Science (Spring 2022), Optimization for Data Science (Spring 2021)
• MIT, TA: Machine Learning 6.867 (Spring 2020), Introduction to Probability 6.041 (Fall 2019)