Thomas Watson
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR
COMPUTER SCIENCE
The University of Memphis
United States of America
Biography
Dr. Thomas Watson joined the Department as an assistant professor in Fall 2016. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013 and was supported by an NSF graduate research fellowship. Dr. Watson's research focuses on computational complexity theory, especially on communication complexity and on the role of randomness in computation. His work has been published in top theory venues, such as STOC, FOCS, ITCS, CCC, ICALP, and SICOMP. Several of his conference papers have been invited to special journal issues. He received a Best Student Paper Award from ITCS'13, and has given invited talks at workshops at Dagstuhl and Banff.
Research Interest
Theoretical computer science, computational complexity
Publications
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Mika Göös, Rahul Jain, and Thomas Watson. Extension Complexity of Independent Set Polytopes. FOCS 2016.
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Thomas Watson. Communication Complexity of Statistical Distance. RANDOM 2017.
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Mika Göös, Toniann Pitassi, and Thomas Watson. Query-to-Communication Lifting for BPP. FOCS 2017.
