Bryce Sandlund

Bryce Sandlund

Computer Scientist & Software Engineer

About

About me:

  • Co-Founder and Research Scientist at AI Leap
  • Waterloo TCS PhD, '21
  • Tech Lead and Principal Software Engineer of the Optimization Team at gopuff, '21-'25, owning:
    • 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)

Research

Two highlighted works:

  1. TCS: We unify efficient priority queues, binary search trees, and selection, improving binary search tree insertion time and the complexity of extracting k elements from a priority queue from O(k log n) to optimal O(k log (n/k)) time (FOCS '20, SODA '22).
  2. ML: We consider the flat minima hypothesis (flat minima generalize better) and the volume hypothesis (SGD biases towards high-volume minima) as dataset size is varied. We find minima from models trained on large datasets are sharp in small dataset loss landscapes (arXiv preprint).

Publications

Sharp Minima Can Generalize: A Loss Landscape Perspective on Data

Raymond Fan, Bryce Sandlund, and Lin Myat Ko

arXiv preprint, video, blog post, code

Selectable Heaps and Optimal Lazy Search Trees

Bryce Sandlund and Lingyi Zhang

SODA 2022

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

Bryce Sandlund

PhD Thesis, source

Lazy Search Trees

Bryce Sandlund and Sebastian Wild

FOCS 2020, talk, slides, code

Faster Dynamic Range Mode

Bryce Sandlund and Yinzhan Xu

ICALP 2020

A Simple Algorithm for Minimum Cuts in Near-Linear Time

Nalin Bhardwaj, Antonio Molina Lovett, and Bryce Sandlund

SWAT 2020, talk, slides, code

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

ICPC Achievements

2011 - ICPC Regional

2nd / 230

North Central North America

2012 - ICPC World Finals

Honorable Mention

Warsaw, Poland

2012 - ICPC Regional

5th / 239

North Central North America

2014 - ICPC Regional

1st / 273

North Central North America

2015 - ICPC World Finals

64th / 128

Marrakech, Morocco

ICPC Service

2015/16 - Coach for UW-Madison Teams

Our teams placed 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 11th, and 33rd out of 223 teams in the Regional and received Honorable Mention at the World Finals.

2016/17 - Coach for UW-Madison Teams

Our teams placed 1st, 5th, and 19th out of 225 teams in the Regional and received 82nd place among 128 teams at the World Finals.

2017 - co-Chief Judge for North Central North America ICPC Regional

2018 - Chief Judge for North Central North America ICPC Regional

2019 - co-Chief Judge for North Central North America ICPC Regional

2020 - Judge for North American Championship

2020 - Chief Judge for North Central North America ICPC Regional

2021 - Judge for North American Division Championship

2021 - Chief Judge for North Central North America ICPC Regional

ICPC Further Reading

For coaches—an idea for how to determine team composition.
A few of my favorite contest problems:

  1. Cat and Mouse
  2. Atlantis (disclaimer: I wrote this one)
  3. Pipe Marbles
  4. Routing
  5. Indoorienteering
  6. Train Line (disclaimer: I also wrote this one and it is currently ranked the hardest on the NADC '21 set)

They are hard and fantastic. Good luck!

Misc.

Various writing, more about me:

Contact

Email: bcsandlund@gmail.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brycesandlund

GitHub: github.com/brycesandlund

Google Scholar: profile link

Location: San Francisco, CA