Patrick White
white@cs.cornell.edu
4104 Upson Hall
Cornell University

I am a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University in beautiful Ithaca, New York. My research interests all seem to fall under the general category of 'approximate proof'. That is, I'm concerned with things that can be trusted (or proven) quickly, but not inscrutably. This includes probabilistically-checkable-proofs (PCPs), result-checking, spot-checking, property testing. My advisor is Ronitt Rubinfeld.

The field of computer science is in an exciting stage now, leaving its infancy in conceding that not all interesting questions can be solved precisely. Though some classicists skoff at the notion of approximate computation, a necessary evil which uncomfortably fills a vacancy until an optimal deterministic algorithm can be discovered, a more enlightened philosophy realizes that nothing is certain, even our own existence. But I have to go now.. South Park is on. I also play the piano and study celestial mechanics. And my favorite i-Mac color is "lime". And I love Ithaca. It is gorgeous.

Selected papers:

Tugkan Batu, Ronit Rubinfeld, Patrick White. Verification of Remotely Executed Code using probabilisitcally checkable-proof systems. 1999

Tugkan Batu, Ronit Rubinfeld, Patrick White. Fast approximate PCPs for multidimensional bin-packing. 1999