Christian Coester received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Elias Koutsoupias. He received his first degrees in mathematics and computer science and his Master’s degree in mathematics from Technical University (TU) Dortmund. His studies for his Master’s degree included a semester abroad at MIT. His postdoctoral research at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam was hosted by Nikhil Bansal.

 

Christian’s research interests lie in the area of theoretical computer science and especially in the design and analysis of algorithms. He is particularly interested in online algorithms: Here, the input of the algorithm arrives over time (for example, as a sequence of requests that have to be serviced), and the algorithm has to make an immediate irrevocable decision upon the arrival of each part of the input, without knowledge of future parts of the input. Due to the incomplete nature of the information, making only optimal decisions (which remain optimal in hindsight) is usually impossible. The goal is to design algorithms that have provable performance guarantees regardless of how the input evolves. A recent development is that of algorithms with additional access to predictions about the future (e.g. machine-learned): If the predictions are good, the algorithm’s decisions will be near-optimal, but even with bad predictions it will still satisfy worst-case performance guarantees.

 

Christian is looking forward to advancing with his research as a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University, where he will be hosted by Prof. Niv Buchbinder.