Annie Zeng

Year in School
Sophomore

Major
Computer Science

Research Interests
Architecture, Compilers, and Parallel Computing Artificial Intelligence Computers and Education Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Software Engineering Scientific Computing Theory and Algorithms

Research Mentor
Ruta Mehta

Research/Engagement Experience
I worked on Human-Computer Interaction at CS STARS last year, and I am transitioning into Theoretical CS research.

Interests
Theoretical Computer Science and Graph Theory

Project Title
TBD

How did I get interested in Computer Science?
Math has always fascinated me, with my favorite field of math being discrete math. I became interested in Computer Science after learning about various applications of discrete math in CS.

What social interests matter to me?
I am passionate about teaching math and CS to others, and encouraging women to pursue STEM.

What is my most impactful college experience?
The CS and Math classes I've taken here have shaped a lot of my interests, so those would probably be the most impactful for me.

These are a few of my favorite things!
Video games, reading, and talking to friends

Research Description
Fair division is the problem of distributing a set of items among agents with heterogeneous preferences. One of the most sought-after fairness notions is envy-freeness (EF). An allocation of items is said to be envy free if no agent values another agent’s bundle more than their own. In many instances, however, an envy-free allocation may not exist. Therefore, several relaxations of EF have been studied, for example, EF up to one item (EF1) and EF up to any item (EFX). EFX is considered the strongest analog of EF for invisible items, and proving the existence of EFX is one of the biggest open problems within fair division. My research will focus on proving the existence of EFX (and its relaxations) for restricted classes of valuation functions of the agents, and if they exist, design an efficient algorithm to find an EFX allocation. To answer these questions, I use techniques from game theory, theoretical computer science, and graph theory.

Biography
Annie Zeng is currently a sophomore at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, majoring in Computer Science with a minor in Physics. She grew up at San Diego. She is interested in learning more about theoretical computer science, especially CS fields that have a significant overlap with pure math.