Hi, I’m Naren. I’m a PhD student at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, a philanthropically endowed CS research institution located on the University of Chicago campus with close ties to UChicago computer science. I’m fortunate to be advised by Avrim Blum and Yury Makarychev. As of Fall 2021, I am generously supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

I graduated with my BS from the UT Austin computer science department in 2018. I spent the following year interning at several companies in New York and the Bay Area.

Research Interests

I’m generally interested in problems in which the input is restricted or misleading. To this end, I’ve thought about adversarial robustness in machine learning, sketching algorithms, and problems in query models of computation.

Publications

Several of my publications have authors ordered alphabetically, as is customary in theoretical computer science.

• An Optimal Algorithm for Certifying Monotone Functions
Meghal Gupta,
Naren Sarayu Manoj
SOSA 2023 (ECCC) (arXiv)

• Streaming Algorithms for Ellipsoidal Approximation of Convex Polytopes
Yury Makarychev,
Naren Sarayu Manoj, Max Ovsiankin
COLT 2022 (
arXiv)

• Excess Capacity and Backdoor Poisoning
Naren Sarayu Manoj, Avrim Blum
NeurIPS 2021 (Spotlight) (
arXiv)

• Development and Validation of a Deep Learning Algorithm for Gleason Grading of Prostate Cancer from Biopsy Specimens
Kunal Nagpal, Davis Foote, ...,
Naren Sarayu Manoj, ...,
JAMA Oncology (
journal)

• Random Smoothing Might be Unable to Certify $\ell_\infty$ Robustness for High-Dimensional Images
Avrim Blum, Travis Dick,
Naren Sarayu Manoj, Hongyang Zhang
JMLR 2020 (
arXiv)

Preprints

• Quantifying Perceptual Distortion of Adversarial Examples
Matt Jordan,
Naren Sarayu Manoj, Surbhi Goel, Alexandros G. Dimakis
arXiv 2019 (
arXiv)

For Fun

I play exceedingly amateurish chess.

I've been keeping track of every flight I've taken since starting college (Fall 2015 onwards).