Barna Saha is an Indian-American

theoretical computer scientist Theoretical computer science is a subfield of computer science and mathematics that focuses on the abstract and mathematical foundations of computation. It is difficult to circumscribe the theoretical areas precisely. The ACM's Special Inter ...

whose research interests include

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

ic applications of the

probabilistic method In mathematics, the probabilistic method is a nonconstructive method, primarily used in combinatorics and pioneered by Paul Erdős, for proving the existence of a prescribed kind of mathematical object. It works by showing that if one randomly c ...

probabilistic database Most real databases contain data whose correctness is uncertain. In order to work with such data, there is a need to quantify the integrity of the data. This is achieved by using probabilistic databases. A probabilistic database is an uncertain da ...

s, fine-grained complexity, and the analysis of

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

. She is an associate professor and Jacobs Faculty Scholar in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

Education and career

Saha is originally from

Siliguri Siliguri (, ; ), also known as Shiliguri, is a major Tier ii cities in india, tier-II city in West Bengal. It forms the twin cities, Twin Cities with the neighbouring city of Jalpaiguri. The city spans areas of the Darjeeling district, Darjeel ...

, and grew up intending to follow her mother into a career in chemistry. She was an undergraduate at

Jadavpur University Jadavpur University ( abbr. JU) is a public state funded research university with its main campus located at Jadavpur, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It was established on 25 July in 1906 as ''Bengal Technical Institute'' and was converted into ...

, and earned a master's degree at

IIT Kanpur The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IIT- Kanpur or IIT-K) is a public institute of technology located in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. As an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), it was declared an Institute of National Importance by th ...

in 2006. She completed her Ph.D. in 2011 at the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD i ...

, with Samir Khuller as her

doctoral advisor A doctoral advisor (also dissertation director, dissertation advisor; or doctoral supervisor) is a member of a university faculty whose role is to guide graduate students who are candidates for a doctorate, helping them select coursework, as well ...

. Her dissertation was ''Approximation Algorithms for Resource Allocation''. After completing her doctorate, she became a senior member of the technical research staff at the Shannon Research Laboratory of

AT&T Labs AT&T Labs, Inc. (formerly AT&T Laboratories, Inc.) is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster, New Jersey; Middletown Township, New J ...

. In 2014 she moved to the College of Information and Computer Science at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system and was founded in 1863 as the ...

as an assistant professor. She worked there for five years, earning tenure as an associate professor, and then moved to the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, before moving again to the University of California, San Diego in 2022. She is a co-founder of TCS Women, a network for women in theoretical computer science.

Research

Saha's research publications include work on algorithms for finding

dense subgraph In graph theory and computer science, a dense subgraph is a subgraph with many edges per vertex. This is formalized as follows: let be an undirected graph and let be a subgraph of . Then the ''density'' of is defined to be: :d(S) = The dens ...

s, a version of the

algorithmic Lovász local lemma Algorithmic may refer to: *Algorithm, step-by-step instructions for a calculation **Algorithmic art, art made by an algorithm **Algorithmic composition, music made by an algorithm **Algorithmic trading, trading decisions made by an algorithm **Algo ...

for large numbers of random events,

data quality Data quality refers to the state of qualitative or quantitative pieces of information. There are many definitions of data quality, but data is generally considered high quality if it is "fit for tsintended uses in operations, decision making and ...

, and the

stochastic block model The stochastic block model is a generative model for random graphs. This model tends to produce graphs containing ''communities'', subsets of nodes characterized by being connected with one another with particular edge densities. For example, e ...

for

random graph In mathematics, random graph is the general term to refer to probability distributions over graphs. Random graphs may be described simply by a probability distribution, or by a random process which generates them. The theory of random graphs l ...

community modeling. She has also collaborated with

Virginia Vassilevska Williams Virginia Vassilevska Williams (née Virginia Panayotova Vassilevska) is a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician known for her research in computational complexity theory and algorithms. She is currently the Steven and Renee Finn Care ...

and others on the fine-grained complexity of computing

edit distance In computational linguistics and computer science, edit distance is a string metric, i.e. a way of quantifying how dissimilar two String (computing), strings (e.g., words) are to one another, that is measured by counting the minimum number of opera ...

and predicting

RNA structure Nucleic acid structure refers to the structure of nucleic acids such as DNA and RNA. Chemically speaking, DNA and RNA are very similar. Nucleic acid structure is often divided into four different levels: primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaterna ...

Selected publications

Recognition

In 2019, Saha won the

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) is the highest honor bestowed by the United States federal government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. T ...

, and was named a

Sloan Fellow The Sloan Fellows program is a middle and senior-career master's degree program in general management and leadership offered at MIT, Stanford University, and London Business School (LBS). Initially supported by a grant from Alfred P. Sloan, fo ...

. In 2020, IIT Kanpur gave her their Young Alumnus Award.

Personal life

Saha is married to Arya Mazumdar, a coding theorist and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

researcher who is also a computer science faculty member at the University of California, San Diego.

References

External links

Home page
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Saha, Barna Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists American women computer scientists Indian computer scientists Indian women computer scientists IIT Kanpur alumni University of Maryland, College Park alumni University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty University of California, Berkeley faculty University of California, San Diego faculty Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers