BARC welcomes three new postdocs

Boel Nelson joined the team on August 1 2022, and will be working at DIKU hosted by Rasmus Pagh.

Boel specializes in privacy, and works on all aspects of how data can be protected as data flows through systems—from data collection to data publication. Her research interests include data privacy, detection and mitigation of side-channels, and privacy enhancing technologies. At BARC, Boel will be part of Rasmus Pagh’s Providentia project, a project focused on designing differentially private algorithms. More generally, Boel is looking forward to finding opportunities to combine the BARC team’s expertise in theoretical computer science with her practical experience, e.g. from designing differentially private solutions for smart electricity grids, connected vehicles, and online surveys. 

Prior to joining BARC, Boel worked as a postdoc in the Logic and Semantics group at Aarhus University, where she conducted research on anonymous communication. Boel earned her PhD from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, with a dissertation titled “Differential Privacy—A Balancing Act”. Additionally, Boel holds a MSc in Computer Systems and Networks with a security specialization, and a BSc in Software Engineering.

For more information on the Providentia project led by Rasmus Pagh click here

Mingmou Liu joined the team on September 1, 2022 and will mostly be working with Mikkel Thorup and Rasmus Pagh.

Mingmou’s work mainly focuses on data structures, including the data structure design and data structure lower bound. His recent works are about succinct data structures and dimensionality reduction. Succinct data structure aims to solve problems using an amount of space “close” to the information-theoretic limitation. Dimensionality reduction aims to transform data from a high-dimensional space into a low-dimensional space so that the meaningful information is retained. Succinct data structure and dimensionality reduction are very useful for big data.

Before joining BARC, Mingmou was research fellow in the Division of Mathematical Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, hosted by Li, Yi. He obtained his PhD degree in 2020 at the Nanjing University, under the supervision of Yin, Yitong.

Mingmou enjoys playing video games and playing with his cat. 

Niv Dayan joined the team on September 1, 2022, and will be working at Copenhagen University with his host Rasmus Pagh and others at BARC. 

Niv is designing efficient data structures for modern database systems. With the amount of data that our civilization is producing growing at an exponential rate, Niv is investigating faster ways for databases to ingest new data while still being able to quickly search it. 

Niv spent the last three years as a research scientist in industry (Pliops & Speedb). Before that, he was a research associate at Harvard, and his Ph.D. is from the IT University of Copenhagen. Niv is starting as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in January, 2023. 

In his spare time, Niv is a dilettante in yoga, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and music.