Krzysztof Onak
Shibulal Family Career Development Assistant Professor of Computing & Data Sciences
Krzysztof Onak is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences at Boston University. Krzysztof comes to BU after years as a research scientist in the Mathematics of AI group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. His main research interests concern big data computation with limited resources, including algorithms for modern parallel and distributed systems, sublinear-time algorithms, and streaming. During his time at IBM Research, he participated in a broad range of cross-disciplinary applied projects.
Krzysztof's research aims to design efficient algorithms for both fundamental computational problems and machine learning applications in the context of big data; it spans many subfields related to processing big data—such as sublinear algorithms, streaming, sketching, property testing, communication complexity, and distributed algorithms. Recently, he has worked on several projects related to algorithms on modern parallel and distributed systems, fairness in machine clustering, analysis of evolving probability distributions, and mining graph patterns. His work on massive combinatorial graph problems (Nguyen, Onak 2008; Hassidim, Kelner, Nguyen, Onak 2009) has inspired several follow-up works in the area of sublinear-time algorithms. His work on dynamic graph algorithms (Onak, Rubinfeld 2010) initiated an already decade-long line of very active research on matching problems in evolving graphs. His works on modern massive parallelism (Andoni, Nikolov, Onak, Yaroslavtsev, 2014; Czumaj, Łącki, Mądry, Mitrović, Onak, Sankowski 2018) helped establish the research goals for the Massively Parallel Computation framework and showed how to obtain exponential improvements for fundamental computational problems. His papers in top computer science conferences have been recognized by invitations to special journal issues and allocated an extended oral presentation. He also has extensive experience working with applied industrial projects involving clustering, graph mining, resource allocation, and scheduling.
Krzysztof received his master’s degree from the University of Warsaw and his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before joining IBM, he was a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.