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)

Achievements during my academic carreer

• 6 STOC/FOCS papers
• Erdős number 2
• Continued Commitment award in

Achievements 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

Achievements 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)
• English (fluent)

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

• undisclosed: software engineer at a hedge fund from August 2016.
• Google: software engineer at the headquarters in Moutain View as of October 2007, senior position as of October 2009, staff position as of December 2011, and senior staff position from November 2015 to July 2016.
• 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.