Bryce Sandlund

About

About me:

Waterloo TCS PhD, '21
Tech Lead and Principal Software Engineer of the Optimization Team at gopuff, '21-'25, determining:
- Batching decisions (matching orders to vehicles)—VRP
- Packing queue order—job scheduling
Software Engineer, Xbox One Launch Team, Microsoft, before graduate school
PhD intern, Google, summer '18, F1 Database System
Competitive programmer ('12 and '15 ICPC World Finals)

Building in AI. Hobbies.

Research

Two highlighted works:

We generalize the theory of efficient priority queues to binary search trees, improving the complexity of extracting k elements from a priority queue from O(k log n) to O(k log (n/k)) time, which we prove optimal (FOCS '20, SODA '22).
We apply a top tree to Karger's classic min-cut algorithm (J. ACM, '00), arriving at a simplified algorithm (SWAT '20) which helped bring about current state-of-the-art algorithms for the problem (Gawrychowski, Mozes, Weimann, ICALP '20, Mukhopadhyay & Nanongkai, STOC '20).

I left academia after my PhD. Reading AI.

Publications

Efficient Data Structures for Partial Orders, Range Modes, and Graph Cuts

Bryce Sandlund

PhD Thesis, source

Selectable Heaps and Optimal Lazy Search Trees

Bryce Sandlund and Lingyi Zhang

SODA 2022

Lazy Search Trees

Bryce Sandlund and Sebastian Wild

FOCS 2020, talk, slides

A Simple Algorithm for Minimum Cuts in Near-Linear Time

Nalin Bhardwaj, Antonio Molina Lovett, and Bryce Sandlund

SWAT 2020, talk, slides

On Approximate Range Mode and Range Selection

Hicham El-Zein, Meng He, J. Ian Munro, Yakov Nekrich, and Bryce Sandlund

ISAAC 2019

Space-Efficient Data Structures for Lattices

J. Ian Munro, Bryce Sandlund, and Corwin Sinnamon

SWAT 2020, talk, slides

Optimal Offline Dynamic 2,3-Edge/Vertex Connectivity

Richard Peng, Bryce Sandlund, and Daniel D. Sleator

WADS 2019

Improved Time and Space Bounds for Dynamic Range Mode

Hicham El-Zein, Meng He, J. Ian Munro, and Bryce Sandlund

ESA 2018

On Euclidean Methods for Cubic and Quartic Jacobi Symbols

Eric Bach and Bryce Sandlund

Manuscript, ANTS Poster

Baby-Step Giant-Step Algorithms for the Symmetric Group

Eric Bach and Bryce Sandlund

Journal of Symbolic Computation (Preliminary version in ISSAC 2016 - pdf)

Numerical Tic-Tac-Toe on the 4x4 Board - pdf

Bryce Sandlund, Kerrick Staley, Michael Dixon, and Steve Butler

COCOON 2014

Projects

Total Annihilation Game Mod (TABA)

Largest independent project to date, despite being last updated in 2012. I spent 10-20 hours/week over the course of six years in high school and early undergrad building:

Unit upgrades into the Total Annihilation game engine.
The ability to build units without turrets, then match them with a turret. This effectively expanded the possible unit combinations quadratically, by decoupling unit and weapon.

2006 - 2012. Tech:

Unit scripts
3D modeling (Wings 3D, unit I modeled)
Texturing (3DO Builder, another custom TABA unit)
Eventually a Java API

We started playing games again recently—join us!

Upgrades in TABA. Re: graphics—the game runs on Windows 95.

Drink Count

I made a small iPhone / Apple Watch app to track alcoholic drinks. I found none of the other apps on the market to be easy enough to use, especially when drinking, so I made my own.

2023 - current? (It needs some love 😊). Tech:

Drink Count on Apple Watch.

Myself and Max Bennedich built a site that plays Spotify songs based on a text prompt. Unfortunately, working with Spotify has been difficult—they took two months to respond to our request for a production API key and then denied our request due to use of an AI model. Hoping to get it sorted shortly.

2024 - current? Tech: