Renato Ferreira Pinto Jr.

I am a 4th-year PhD student in Computer Science under the supervision of Eric Blais, in the Algorithms & Complexity Group within the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. In the Fall 2024 term, I am fortunate to be visiting Boston University, where I am hosted by Sofya Raskhodnikova.

I am currently seeking a postdoc position for Fall 2025.

My research is guided by the following question: what kinds of decisions can algorithms make using little information? I am broadly interested in sublinear algorithms, randomness in computation, Boolean functions, high-dimensional functions and geometry, learning theory, and computational statistics.

In a previous life, I studied computational linguistics with a touch of cognitive science at the University of Toronto.

In submission

• Testing Support Size More Efficiently Than Learning Histograms
  RF, Nathaniel Harms [arXiv]

Papers

• Directed Isoperimetry and Monotonicity Testing: A Dynamical Approach (FOCS 2024)
  RF [arXiv] [slides] [animations: heat equation, directed heat equation] [TCS+ talk]
• Distribution Testing with a Confused Collector (ITCS 2024)
  RF, Nathaniel Harms [arXiv]
• Directed Poincaré Inequalities and L¹ Monotonicity Testing of Lipschitz Functions (RANDOM 2023)
  RF [arXiv]
• VC Dimension and Distribution-Free Sample-Based Testing (STOC 2021)
  Eric Blais, RF, Nathaniel Harms [arXiv]

Manuscripts

• Distribution Testing Under the Parity Trace
  RF, Nathaniel Harms [arXiv]