Curriculum vitae of Robert Špalek

University studies

• 2002-2006: PhD study at Quantum Computing Project at Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• studies finished in September, 2006, obtained Doctoral Degree (PhD)
• PhD thesis topic is Quantum Algorithms, Lower Bounds, and Time-Space Tradeoffs, advised by Prof. dr. Harry Buhrman and Dr. Ronald de Wolf.

• 2001-2002: studying computer science at the Faculty of Computer Science, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• it is a so-called One Year Master's Program (the credits for the first 4 years of the study are taken from the Charles University)
  
• studies finished in July, 2002, obtained Master's Degree (doctorandus, M.Sc.)
• Master's Thesis topic is Quantum Circuits with unbounded fan-out, supervised by Prof. dr. Harry Buhrman, CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica)
  

• 1996-2002: studying computer science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
• studies finished in May, 2002, obtained Master's Degree (magistr, Mgr.)
• all theoretical university courses passed with grade 1 (US grade A)
• Master's Thesis topic is Space Complexity of Quantum Computation, supervised by RNDr. Pavel Pudlák, DrSc., MÚ AV (Matematický ústav Akademie věd)

Research papers

Given talks

Teaching experience

Software projects

Research interests

• quantum computation
• search engines
• complexity theory
• cryptography, data compression, error correcting codes
• algorithms
• lower bounds

Research grants

• Invited speaker at WQACT, NUS, Singapore, November 2008
• Invited speaker at NEC workshop, Princeton, New Jersey, September 2007
• Visiting Caltech, February 2007
• Visiting LRI, Orsay, Paris-Sud, December 2006 and November 2005
• Visiting University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, February 2006
• Visiting UC Berkeley, California, January 2006
• Visiting University of Calgary, Canada, August 2005
• Visiting University of Waterloo, Canada, July 2005
• Visiting Rutgers University and DIMACS, New Jersey, September 2004
• HLSC-support for young researchers, Dagstuhl, October 2002

Program committee membership

• AQIS 2007, Kyoto, Japan

Mentoring experience

• Google Summer of Code 2009: mentoring Denis Kasak to reimplement the adventure Dragon History in ScummVM

My activities (during university studies) for secondary school students

• member of the Scientific Committee of Central European Olympiad in Informatics 1999, Brno, Czech Republic
• organising of the national mathematical olympiad, category P (programming) (since 1997)
• organising the correspondence seminar in mathematics and physics M&M (since 1996)
• organising the correspondence seminar in programming (since 1996)

Awards and competitions during my university studies

• high scores (three times the 3rd) at the CUT Open Competitions 1997, 1998 and 1999 (part of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest)
• participant at the International Competition in Mathematics for University Students 1997, Plovdiv, Bulgaria
• participant at the 7th Annual Vojtech Jarnik International Mathematical Competition 1997, Ostrava, Czech Republic

Awards and competitions during my secondary school attendance

• the International Mathematics Olympiad 1996, Bombay, India
• the bronze medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics 1996, Veszprem, Hungary
• the gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics 1995, Eindhoven, the Netherlands
• the silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics 1994, Sweden
• the highest score of the national olympiad in informatics 1994
• honourable mention of the Ministry of Education of Czech Republic in recognition of my high scores at the international olympiads
• high scores at the national olympiads in informatics, mathematics and physics in 1994, 1995 and 1996
• the highest score at the International Contest in Programming 1994, 1995

Language skills

• Czech (native speaker)
• Slovak (native speaker)
• English (fluent)
• Polish (basic)

Computer skills

• Unix-like OSes: administrator/developer/user capabilities
• Linux-expert: full-text search engine Sherlock Holmes capable of indexing 110M of documents ; Apache modules and high-performance server applications (authentication system, advertisement server, and free web server); Partition Surprise - a GPL clone of Partition Magic;
• MS Windows: user/developer capabilities (factor analysis of on-line downloaded data, speculation automaton; Win32 application, ActiveX objects)
• ScummVM: multi-platform meta-engine for adventure game, reimplemented Dragon History in it
• C/C++, Python/SWIG, Perl and many more languages
• SQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL)
• plain TeX, LaTeX, METAFONT, MetaPost
• Mathematica, Matlab

Employers

• Google: software engineer at the headquarters in Moutain View as of October 2007, senior position as of October 2009.
• UC Berkeley: postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Umesh Vazirani from 2006 to 2007.
• CWI: PhD student of quantum computing from 2002 to 2006.
• NetCentrum, Internet portal centrum.cz: system programmer of Apache modules and advertisement systems from 1998 to 2002. Also, since 2000, external contractor of a search engine.
• SuSE CZ: developer of a filesystem resizer tool in 1999.
• Softec: Win32 and ActiveX programmer of statistical analysis tools and speculation automaton from 1996 to 1997.
• NoSense: game programmer of Dragons History and Catapult, distributed by Vochozka trading and Space Interactive, from 1994 to 1996.