James R. Lee

James R. Lee is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Washington, with a focus on algorithms, complexity, and the theory of computation. He is affiliated with the UW Theory Group and currently on leave at Microsoft Research, which may delay responses to UW emails.

• Research Interests: Algorithms, complexity, geometry/discrete-continuous interfaces, probability, stochastic processes, metric embeddings, spectral graph theory, convex optimization.
• Recent Work Trends: Sparsification of generalized linear models and norms, spectral hypergraph methods, entropic regularization for metrical task systems, and analysis of scaling exponents in random graphs. His papers address sparsifier existence, lower bounds for SDP/LP relaxations, and geometric random walk properties.
• Scientific Awards: Best Paper Award at STOC 2015.
• Students: Farzam Ebrahimnejad, Ewin Tang, Yichuan Deng (co-advised with Shayan Oveis-Gharan, Shirshendu Ganguly, and others).
• Email: jrl@cs.washington.edu