Daniel G. Alabi

Short Bio

I am an incoming assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Until 2025, I will remain a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, where I am a Junior Fellow in the Simons Society of Fellows. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard University where I was advised by Salil Vadhan. Also, I am the president and co-founder of NaijaCoder, Inc. NaijaCoder aims to proliferate early algorithms education in Africa with a focus on Nigeria.

Research Interests

Keywords: Privacy, Cryptography, Databases, Information/Communication Complexity.

My research interests primarily lie in topics related to data safety. In particular, I am interested in the tradeoffs in computational and statistical resources that result when we require provable privacy and security guarantees on statistical models and machine learning predictors. Example computational resources (whether classical or quantum) include communication, randomness, time, memory, and parallelism. Example statistical resources include samples (or labeled examples for classification or regression) drawn from an unknown distribution.

• Instructor, NaijaCoder, Summer 2022 & Summer 2023 & Summer 2024
• Teaching Fellow, Applied Privacy for Data Science (CS 208), Harvard, Spring 2022
• Teaching Fellow, Algorithms at the End of the Wire (CS 222), Harvard, Fall 2020
• Teaching Fellow, Algorithms & Data Structures (CS 124), Harvard, Spring 2018
• Teaching Assistant, Data Structures (CS 201), Carleton College, Winter & Spring 2014
• Teaching Assistant, Intro to Computer Science (CS 111), Carleton College, Fall 2013