Nayantara Bhatnagar

Email: nayan @ stat.berkeley.edu
Office: Room 325,
Department of Statistics,
University of California, Berkeley.

Research Interests: Theoretical Computer Science, Randomized Algorithms, the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method, Statistical Physics.

2007-09 : Visiting Neyman Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics, UC Berkeley.
2007: PhD in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization, Georgia Tech. My advisors were  Dana Randall and Eric Vigoda.


Teaching and other activities in Spring 2008:

Probability Seminar

Markov Chain Monte Carlo and Applications (STAT 260)



Research Papers
:   (titles link to abstract)


Reconstruction for Colorings on Trees
N. Bhatnagar, J. Vera, E. Vigoda
preprint ps/pdf

Sampling Stable Marriages: Why Spouse-Swapping Won't Work
N. Bhatnagar, S. Greenberg, D. Randall
SODA 2008 
ps   pdf


Analysis of Top-Swap Shuffling for Genome Rearrangements
N. Bhatnagar,  P. Caputo, P. Tetali, E. Vigoda
Annals of Applied Probability, 2007 
ps   pdf


The Effect of Boundary Conditions on Mixing Rates of Markov Chains
N. Bhatnagar, S. Greenberg, and D. Randall
RANDOM 2006  ps   pdf

Random Bichromatic Matchings
N. Bhatnagar, D. Randall, V. Vazirani and E. Vigoda
LATIN 2006  ps   pdf

Sampling Binary Contingency Tables with a Greedy Start
I. Bezakova, N. Bhatnagar and E. Vigoda
Random Structures and Algorithms   ps   pdf
SODA 2006  ps  pdf

Polynomials that Sign Represent Parity and Descartes Rule of Signs
N. Bhatnagar, S. Basu, P. Gopalan and R. J. Lipton
CCC 2004  ps   pdf

Torpid Mixing of Simulated Tempering on the Potts Model
N. Bhatnagar and D. Randall
SODA 2004  ps  pdf

The Degree of Threshold mod 6 and Diophantine Equations
N. Bhatnagar, P. Gopalan and R. J. Lipton
ECCC Report TR04-022   ps   pdf
Appears combined with "Symmetric Polynomials over Zm and Simultaneous Communication Protocols" in JCSS

Symmetric Polynomials over Zm and Simultaneous Communication Protocols

N. Bhatnagar, P. Gopalan and R. J. Lipton
Full version in JCSS Special Issue for FOCS 2003   ps  pdf 
FOCS 2003  ps  pdf






Slides from Some Talks :

Sampling Binary Contingency Tables with a Greedy Start  ppt

Simulated Tempering Mixes Torpidly on the Mean-field Ferromagnetic Potts Model  ppt

Symmetric Polynomials over Zm and Simultaneous Protocols   ppt