About me

I am a student at Harvard University studying Math/Stat with a concurrent masters in CS. I have previously interned at Zoom, Vertica and Jane Street.

Check out my GitHub profile and LinkedIn. Contact me at raxu at college dot harvard dot edu.

I write a lot and have done many presentations, with topics from cutting edge CS research to reflections on religion in the modern world. However, I don’t feel comfortable leaving much of them on public domain. If you’re interested, please reach out!

Academics

Courses I teach:

• CS 121: Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science (Fall 2019, Fall 2020),
• CS 124: Introduction to Algorithms (Spring 2021, 2022),
• CS 227: Cryptography (Fall 2021),
• CS 234r: Advanced EconCS (Spring 2021),
• Stat 111: Introduction to Statistical Inference (Spring 2020, Spring 2021),
• Math 55a/b (Fall 2020, Spring 2021).

Undergraduate Research (Unpublished):

• Market for Congestion: VCG Traffic Tolls in Beijing. Richard Xu, Bonnie Liu (2019). (For CS 136: Economics and Computation, D. Parkes)
• Pricing Time: Mechanism for Destination Preference in Ridesharing Platforms. Richard Xu (2019). (For Econ 2099: Market Design, S. Kominers)
• A Survey of Adaptive AMQs. Eric Knorr, Richard Xu, Zachary Yedidia (2019). (For CS 223: Randomized Algorithms, M. Mitzenmacher)
• Constant Factor Approximation for the Asymmetric TSP problem. Zuzanna Skoczylas, Richard Xu (2020). (For MIT 6.854: Advanced Algorithms, D. Karger)
• Hot Fuzz: A Black Box Database Fuzzer. Daniel Halpern, Andrew Sabot, Richard Xu (2020). (For CS 263: Systems Security, J. Mickens. No paper link becuase of IP constraints with Vertica.)

Math Research:

• Algebraicity regarding Graphs and Tilings. Richard Xu (2018), advised by Sergiy Merenkov. (For the MIT PRIMES program)

Extracurriculars

Club work:

• Crimson Technology Comp: semester-long training program in Python, JS, React that onboards students to the Crimson tech stack. Richard Xu, Zuzanna Skoczylas (2020). (For the Harvard Crimson)
• I ran the Crimson Tech board with Zuzanna Skoczylas in 2021.

Competition Writeups:

• Traders @ MIT 2020, a trading competition at MIT. With Olivia Jorasch.
• GIDER: Sensory Technology to Improve Navigation for the Visually Impaired. Minjun Chen, Venky Konanur, Jeremy Ney, Shubham Sharma, Vanja Srivastava, Katie Stevo, Will Wang, Richard Xu (2018). (For MIT Hack for Inclusion)
• X-MAS CTF 2019, a security competition organized by HTsP.