September 2020
With everyone working remotely the arrival of the 2020 postdocs at DIMACS is less obvious but no less welcome. We are delighted to introduce Ariel Schvartzman Cohenca and Ewerton Rocha Vieira as DIMACS postdocs!
Ariel joined DIMACS in August after receiving his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University advised by S. Matthew Weinberg. 
While at DIMACS he will work under the supervision of David Pennock and aims to expand on two lines of research begun during his graduate studies. The first is to understand the tradeoff between optimality and simplicity in the design of multi-dimensional auctions. The second is to understand the tradeoff between fairness and manipulability in tournament design. He is already getting to know people around Rutgers by helping to launch a new reading group on recent work on strategic matchings covering topics that range from theoretical results to modelling papers to real-world applications like school choice and the “medical match.”
At Princeton, Ariel was awarded the Department of Computer Science's Graduate Student Teaching Award in 2017 and the School of Engineering and Applied Science's Award for Excellence in 2018. During the summer of 2018, he was a research intern at Google-Mountain View under the supervision of Gagan Aggarwal. He obtained his B.S. in Mathematics with Computer Science from MIT in 2015.
Though he is coming from nearby Princeton, Ariel is new to New Brunswick and is getting to know the city and the campus. On a personal note, he says, "I have recently become very interested in modern board games and have an ever-growing collection. I also enjoy spy novels, independent films, running by the canal and cooking. Feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in playing board games virtually!"
If you want to learn more about Ariel’s research here are a few of his recent papers:
Nikhil Devanur, Kira Goldner, Raghuvansh R. Saxena, Ariel Schvartzman, and S. Matthew Weinberg, Optimal Mechanism Design for a Single-Minded Agent, Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC 2020), pp. 193‒256, 2020. [arXiv]
Ariel Schvartzman, S. Matthew Weinberg, Eitan Zlatin, and Albert Zuo, Approximately Optimal Strategyproof Tournament Rules: On Large Manipulation Sets and Cover Consistence, Proceedings of the 11th Innovations of Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2020). [arXiv]
Pravesh Kothari, Divyarthi Mohan, Ariel Schvartzman, Sahil Singla, and S. Matthew Weinberg, Approximation Schemes for a Unit-Demand Buyer with Independent Items via Symmetries, Proceedings of the 60th IEEE Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2019). [arXiv]
Ewerton joined DIMACS in September as a postdoctoral researcher associated with the DATA-INSPIRE TRIPODS Institute. 
His primary research interest is in topological data analysis applied to dynamical systems. His postdoctoral research is focused on developing a new modeling approach based on combinatorics and algebraic topology to obtain information from time-varying systems. Working with Rutgers mathematics professor Konstantin Mischaikow, he will use this approach to address data-informed dynamical systems in order to understand the global dynamics, non-linearities, oscillations, and other complex dynamics.
Ewerton received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil under the supervision of Ketty Abaroa de Rezende, and he had a one-year Ph.D. internship at Northwestern University under the supervision of John Franks. Before coming to DIMACS, he held visiting positions at the University of Maine, University of Brasília, and the Rutgers University Department of Mathematics. Ewerton is currently a tenured adjunct professor on sabbatical leave at Federal University of Goiás.
On a personal note, he says, "During my free time, I enjoy reading science fiction books, cross-country cycling, playing board games, drinking tea, listening to live music, and talking with friends in a bar. I am a quiet person (I don't talk much), but I like to interact with others, so feel free to contact me for anything."
If you want to learn more about Ewerton’s research here are a few of his recent papers:
Dahisy V. S. Lima, Mariana R. da Silveira, and Ewerton R. Vieira, Covering Action on Conley Theory, to appear. [arXiv]
Raimundo Bastos, Noraí R. Rocco, and Ewerton R. Vieira, Finiteness of Homotopy Groups Related to the Non-Abelian Tensor Product, Annali di Matematica 198, pp. 2081–2091, 2019. [arXiv]
Robert Franzosa and Ewerton R. Vieira, Transition Matrix Theory, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 369(11), pp. 7737–7764, 2017. [arXiv]
Ariel and Ewerton are among thirteen incoming Rutgers postdocs highlighted in the Rutgers Office of Postdoctoral Affairs Newsletter in honor of National Postdoc Appreciation Week, September 21-25, 2020. Please join us in welcoming them to DIMACS and to Rutgers!