I am a fifth-year PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. I am advised by Guy Blelloch and supported by an NSF GRFP Fellowship. I will be joining Microsoft Azure as a Senior Researcher at the end of Spring 2024.

I am interested in designing parallel and concurrent algorithms for solving problems related to similarity search, information retrieval, and computing nearest neighbors, with a particular focus on similarity search in high dimensions. Much of my recent work can be found in the ParlayANN repository, a benchmark suite of high-dimensional nearest neighbor algorithms along with a set of useful tools for designing such algorithms.

In Summer 2022, I interned with Harsha Vardhan Simhadri at Microsoft Research Redmond. During my undergraduate studies at MIT, I benefited greatly from advice and mentoring from Ryan Williams, Haynes Miller, and David Spivak.

Published Papers

• ParlayANN: Scalable and Deterministic Parallel Graph-Based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Algorithms. Magdalen Dobson Manohar, Zheqi Shen, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Yan Gu, Harsha Vardhan Simhadri, and Yihan Sun.
  Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, PPoPP 2024.

• The Geometry of Tree-Based Sorting. Guy E. Blelloch and Magdalen Dobson.
  EATCS International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, ICALP 2023.

• Parallel Nearest Neighbors in Low Dimensions with Batch Updates. Guy E. Blelloch and Magdalen Dobson.
  Proceedings of the Symposium on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments, ALENEX 2022.

• Poster: The Problem-Based Benchmark Suite, V2. Daniel Anderson, Guy E. Blelloch, Laxman Dhulipala, Magdalen Dobson, and Yihan Sun.
  Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, PPoPP 2022.

• Multiagent Evaluation Mechanisms. Tal Alon, Magdalen Dobson, Ariel D. Procaccia, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, and Jamie Tucker-Folz.
  Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2020.

Teaching

• 15-451 Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Fall 2023
• 15-455 Undergraduate Complexity Theory, Spring 2022