Ashwin Padaki
apadaki (at) seas.upenn.edu
I am a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am lucky to be advised by Erik Waingarten and Sanjeev Khanna. I work on efficient data structures for nearest neighbor search and other problems involving high-dimensional data. I'm also interested in practical aspects of vector retrieval systems and am spending Summer 2026 interning at Pinecone.
Before Penn, I studied Math and Computer Science at
Columbia University.
I was fortunate to have amazing mentors in
Josh Alman,
Karthik C. S.,
and
Rocco Servedio.
My research is supported by an
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Publications
- Prune, Don't Rebuild: Efficiently Tuning α-Reachable Graphs for Nearest Neighbor Search
with Tian Zhang, Jiaming Liang, Zach Ives, Erik Waingarten
(in submission) - Sparse Navigable Graphs for Nearest Neighbor Search: Algorithms and Hardness
with Sanjeev Khanna, Erik Waingarten
SODA 2026 [slides] - A Polynomial Space Lower Bound for Diameter Estimation in Dynamic Streams
with Sanjeev Khanna, Krish Singal, Erik Waingarten
FOCS 2025 - Inapproximability of Maximum Diameter Clustering for Few Clusters
with Karthik C. S., Henry Fleischmann, Kyrylo Karlov, Styopa Zharkov
SODA 2025 - Smaller Low-Depth Circuits for Kronecker Powers
with Josh Alman, Yunfeng Guan
SODA 2023
Other
- Years ago, I interned as a quantitative trader at Optiver, an options market-making firm in Chicago.
- Outside of research, I like playing soccer and tennis, going on long walks and hikes, making music, and experimenting with wordplay.