I am an assistant professor at Oregon State University. My research area is theoretical computer science, with an emphasis on lattices and geometric algorithms.

Previously, I was a postdoc at the University of Michigan working with Chris Peikert, and before that I was a postdoc at Northwestern University. I completed my Ph.D. at New York University advised by Daniel Dadush (CWI, Amsterdam) and Chee Yap. My CV is available here. My email address is huck.bennett (at) oregonstate (dot) edu.

Research

Publications:

  1. Parameterized Inapproximability of the Minimum Distance Problem over all Fields and the Shortest Vector Problem in all l_p Norms (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Mahdi Cheraghchi, Venkatesan Guruswami, João Ribeiro
    STOC 2023.
  2. Lattice Problems Beyond Polynomial Time (arXiv)
    Divesh Aggarwal, Huck Bennett, Zvika Brakerski, Alexander Golovnev, Rajendra Kumar, Zeyong Li, Spencer Peters, Noah Stephens-Davidowitz, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
    STOC 2023.
  3. The Complexity of the Shortest Vector Problem (ECCC)
    Huck Bennett
    ACM SIGACT News 54 (1), pp. 37-61, 2023.
  4. Just how hard are rotations of Z^n? Algorithms and cryptography with the simplest lattice (ePrint)
    Huck Bennett, Atul Ganju, Pura Peetathawatchai, and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
    EUROCRYPT 2023.
  5. Hardness of the (Approximate) Shortest Vector Problem: A Simple Proof via Reed-Solomon Codes (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett and Chris Peikert
    RANDOM 2023.
  6. Improved Hardness of BDD and SVP Under Gap-(S)ETH (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Chris Peikert, and Yi Tang
    ITCS 2022.
  7. Reconstructing Weighted Voting Schemes from Partial Information about their Power Indices (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Anindya De, Rocco Servedio, and Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis
    COLT 2021.
  8. Fine-grained hardness of CVP(P)--- Everything that we can prove (and nothing else) (arXiv, blog post)
    Divesh Aggarwal, Huck Bennett, Alexander Golovnev, and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
    SODA 2021.
  9. Hardness of Bounded Distance Decoding on Lattices in l_p Norms (arXiv, CCC talk)
    Huck Bennett and Chris Peikert
    CCC 2020.
  10. An Enumeration Technique for Lattice Basis Reduction (local copy)
    Huck Bennett
    Preprint.
  11. On the Quantitative Hardness of CVP (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Alexander Golovnev, and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
    FOCS 2017.
  12. On the Lattice Distortion Problem (arXiv)
    Huck Bennett, Daniel Dadush, and Noah Stephens-Davidowitz
    ESA 2016.
  13. Planar Minimization Diagrams via Subdivision with Applications to Anisotropic Voronoi Diagrams
    Huck Bennett, Evanthia Papadopoulou, and Chee Yap
    SGP 2016.
  14. On Percolation and NP-hardness (ECCC)
    Huck Bennett, Daniel Reichman, and Igor Shinkar
    Random Structures & Algorithms 54 (2), pp. 228-257, 2019. Preliminary version in ICALP 2016.
  15. Amortized Analysis of Smooth Quadtrees in All Dimensions (link)
    Huck Bennett and Chee Yap
    Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications 63, pp. 20-39, 2017. Preliminary version in SWAT 2014.

Selected talks:

  • AlphaGo and Artificial Intelligence, guest lecture in "The Game of Go and Society" at Occidental College, October 2018 (pptx, pdf, blog post).
  • On the Quantitative Hardness of the Closest Vector Problem, 68th Midwest Theory Day (invited talk), April 2018 (pptx).

Teaching

As Lead instructor:

  • Honors Analysis of Algorithms, Oregon State University, Winter 2023.
  • Analysis of Algorithms, Oregon State University, Fall 2021, Winter 2023.
  • Foundations of Computer Science, University of Michigan, Fall 2019 (joint with Chris Peikert and Ilya Volkovich).
  • Lattices in Computer Science, Northwestern University, Spring 2019 and Oregon State University, Spring 2022.
  • Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, Northwestern University, Winter 2018, Spring 2018, Fall 2018.
  • Computational Geometry, Northwestern University, Fall 2017, Winter 2019.
Notes on background material for discrete math are available here.

As Teaching Assistant:

  • Programming Languages (master's level), New York University, Summer 2015.
  • Programming Languages (junior level), University of Colorado, Spring 2012.

About

In my spare time I enjoy running, skiing, climbing, and mountaineering especially in my beloved home state of Colorado. Additionally, I enjoy reading and playing Go.

Before coming to Oregon State, I did postdocs at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University. Before that, I received my Ph.D. in computer science from NYU's Courant Institute, my master's degree in computer science from the University of Colorado's CUPLV group, and my bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin. I am originally from the bustling metropolis of Hygiene, CO, which was named for the sanitarium that it once housed, and which is now most famous as the home of Apple the Cow.

My full first name, Huxley, is actually an English last name.