Katherine J. Lai

I was an M.Eng. student at MIT working on problems in theoretical computer science and graduated in June and am now at Cornell pursuing a PhD in Computer Science. My research interests include but are not limited to data structures, graph algorithms, computational geometry, and other cool algorithms in general. My advisor was Prof. Erik Demaine.

Pictures from my grad school visits:

• Cornell (3/2-3/4)
• UT Austin (3/17-3/19)
• CMU (3/27-3/30) (pictures will be posted eventually...)
• Duke (4/3-4/6)

I TA-ed for 6.854J/18.415J: Advanced Algorithms Fall 2007 and for 6.046: Design and Analysis of Algorithms Spring 2008.

6.046 Handouts. To the 6.046 students: while I hope you find them useful in studying for the exam, note that not all topics in the handouts will be covered on the quiz. Not covered but there for your personal enrichment: edge classification, topological sort, and Hall's Theorem.

• Recitation 1 (Homework expectations, Recurrences)
• Recitation 5 (Quiz 1 Review)
• Recitation 6 (Greedy Algs: Fractional Knapsack, File Merging)
• Recitation 7 (Shortest paths, DFS)
• Recitation 9 (Convex Hull)
• Recitation 10 (Applications of FFT)
• Recitation 11 (Matching)
• Recitation 12 (Reductions)

My CV/resume can be found here.

Publications

1. Timothy G. Abbott, Katherine J. Lai, Michael R. Lieberman, Eric C. Price, Browser-Based Attacks on Tor, In the Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET 2007), Ottawa, Canada, 2007, pages 184-199.

Education

• B.S., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, 2007.
• B.S., Mathematics, MIT, 2007.
• M.Eng., Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT, 2008.

Contact information

• Name: Katherine J. Lai
• Email: k_lai at mit edu
• http://web.mit.edu/k_lai/www

Other Stuff

• SIPB, the Student Information Processing Board, which is devoted to improving computing at MIT.
• HMMT, the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament, a high school math tournament run entirely by Harvard and MIT students and gets more than 600 contestants each year. Seeing them descend on either Harvard or MIT (we switch locations each year) is always awe-inspiring.
• LSC, the Lecture Series Committee, which likes to project 35mm films and use the proceeds to bring interesting lectures to MIT. I held the position of Chairman for LSC for a year and was forever scarred (and probably bettered) by the experience.
• Random Hall, my undergraduate dormitory. I served as its Vice President/Treasurer (and got to handle many quarters) and was employed as its Desk Captain, where I oversaw the operation of the front desk. The more interesting part of the latter position was in the technical aspect of writing useful scripts.

• Reading - I seem to like to subject myself to the works of James Joyce, Victorian novels by the likes of the Brontë sisters and George Eliot, and somewhat more self-indulgent works like Star Wars novels and other sci-fi and fantasy novels.
• Webcomics - An out-of-date list of webcomics I read is here.
• German/other European style board games - Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico, Alhambra, Ticket to Ride (Europe), etc.
• Motorcycling - When the weather and my motorcycle permits, I like to go riding.
• Making models of things - LEGOs, plastic + plastic cement Star Wars models, paper models of dragons, etc.
• (Anime) - I used to watch anime like there was no tomorrow. That was of course when I was a freshman and had this thing called free time and no worries in the world. A list of anime I've watched is here.