Picture of Piotr Faliszewski
homepage [http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~pfali/]
area Theory/Computational Complexity
advisor Lane A. Hemaspaandra
citizenship Poland
What are your research interests?
My primary interest is in structural complexity theory. For example, I am interested the properties of complete sets, what is the nature of the sets between NP and P, etc. My secondary interest is in the field of computational social choice theory. Here the idea is that one could seek security and fairness of elections by proving that certain attacks on them, while possible in theory, are hard to execute in practice. This is modeled by showing that certain class of problems involving manipulation, control, and bribery within elections are NP-hard. NP-hardness results in this field are as important as P-membership results that show that certain voting systems are vulnerable to attacks.

Where are you from originally?
I come from Krakow, Poland, where I attended AGH University of Science and Technology. Krakow is one of Poland's major cities, and a very livable one. With its 1000 years of history and a pub on every street, it is something I certainly miss and always look forward to visit :)

What do you do on a typical day?
A "typical day" is a bit of an artificial concept to me. Each day of the week is quite different. Though, each week is fairly similar ;) Nonetheless, to try to answer the question: I come to school about 9am and I "work". This involves either reading some papers, talking to Lane, walking around the department with a smirk saying "hey, I am a theory student so even if I walk around aimlessly, it is still called work!". I used to stay fairly long hours in the department, but these days I leave around 6pm. Evenings I spend either hanging out in pubs and coffee shops or playing sports. In fact, I don't think I ever played sports as much as I do now.

What are your goals for this year?
I need to defend a thesis proposal. Also, during the summer, I am planning to teach at RIT. I will be teaching some courses that I haven't before, so preparing and conducting those is both challenging and exciting.

What do you plan to do after you graduate?
I definitely want to stay in academia. A much bigger question for me is as to which country do I want to live. Poland? USA? New Zealand? Ireland? Spain?

How do you like to spend your free time?
I listen to music a lot. My taste ranges from Irish folk to European style power metal. I enjoy reading, though mostly fun/funny stuff and science fiction. Favorite authors are Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Umberto Eco, Andrzej Sapkowski (watch out! Soon his early stories will be available in English!). Also, I've recently become much more sporty. I play basketball and volleyball through the graduate organizing group and, outside the university, I attend classes with the local Capoeira Mandinga group.

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