Aaron Roth

Photo of me

About Me

I am a Raj and Neera Singh Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania computer science department, associated with the theory group and our new program in Market and Social Systems Engineering. I spent a year as a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England. Before that, I received my PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, where I was fortunate to have been advised by Avrim Blum. My main interests are in algorithms and theoretical computer science, and specifically in the area of database privacy, game theory and mechanism design, and learning theory. In 2012 I won the Yahoo Academic Career Enhancement award.

My lovely wife Cathy just got her PhD in math at MIT. At her insistence, I link to her website

Contact Information

Office: Levine 603
Phone: 215-746-6171
Email: aar...@cis.upenn.edu

Teaching
I'm currently teaching: CIS 262 -- Automata, Computability, and Complexity.

Previous courses:
I'm fortunate to be able to work with several excellent graduate students and postdocs.
Professional Activities

Workshop Organizer: Program Committee Member For:
Selected Publications
 (See DBLP for a more complete list)
Click for abstract/informal discussion of results
  1. Exploiting Metric Structure for Efficient Private Query Release. Joint work with Zhiyi Huang. Manuscript.
  2. Beyond Worst-Case Analysis in Private Singular Vector Computation. Joint with Moritz Hardt. Manuscript.
  3. Differential Privacy for the Analyst via Private Equilibrium Computation. Joint with Justin Hsu and Jon Ullman. Manuscript.
  4. Private Equilibrium Release, Large Games, and No-Regret Learning. Joint with Michael Kearns, Mallesh Pai, and Jon Ullman. Manuscript.
  5. Efficiently Learning from Revealed Preference. Joint with Morteza Zadimoghaddam. In the proceedings of WINE 2012.
  6. Conducting Truthful Surveys, Cheaply. Joint with Grant Schoenebeck. In the proceedings of EC 2012.
  7. Distributed Private Heavy Hitters. Joint with Justin Hsu and Sanjeev Khanna. In the proceedings of ICALP 2012.
  8. Take it or Leave it: Running a Survey when Privacy Comes at a Cost. Joint with Katrina Ligett. To appear in the proceedings of WINE 2012.
  9. Beating Randomized Response on Incoherent Matrices. Joint with Moritz Hardt. In the proceedings of STOC 2012.
  10. Fast Private Data Release Algorithms for Sparse Queries. Joint with Avrim Blum. Manuscript.
  11. Iterative Constructions and Private Data Release. Joint with Anupam Gupta and Jonathan Ullman. In the proceedings of TCC 2012.
  12. Privately Releasing Conjunctions and the Statistical Query Barrier. Joint with Anupam Gupta, Moritz Hardt, and Jonathan Ullman. In the proceedings of STOC 2011.
  13. Selling Privacy at Auction. Joint work with Arpita Ghosh. In the proceedings of EC 2011, and invited to a special issue of Games and Economic Behavior.
  14. New Algorithms for Preserving Differential Privacy. PhD Thesis.
  15. Interactive Privacy via the Median Mechanism. Joint with Tim Roughgarden. In the proceedings of STOC 2010.
  16. Constrained Non-Monotone Submodular Maximization: Offline and Secretary Algorithms. Joint with Anupam Gupta, Grant Schoenebeck, and Kunal Talwar. In the Proceedings of WINE 2010.
  17. Differentially Private Combinatorial Optimization. Joint with Anupam Gupta, Katrina Ligett, Frank McSherry, and Kunal Talwar. In the Proceedings of  SODA 2010.
  18. Auctions with Online Supply. Joint with Moshe Babaioff and Liad Blumrosen. In the Proceedings Of EC 2010.
  19. A Learning Theory Approach to Non-Interactive Database Privacy. Joint with Avrim Blum and Katrina Ligett. In the proceedings of STOC 2008: The 40th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing.
  20.  The Price of Stochastic Anarchy. Joint with Christine Chung, Katrina Ligett, and Kirk Pruhs. In the proceedings of SAGT 2008: The first Annual Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory.
  21. Regret Minimization and the Price of Total Anarchy. Joint with Avrim Blum, MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, and Katrina Ligett. In the proceedings of STOC 2008: The 40th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing.
Presentations
(Slides Available Upon Request)