During his studies, Sudarshan Shyam studied problems related to fair division of resources, minimizing discrepancy and packing items in bins efficiently. While the three problems don't seem to have much in common, a common thread is how they are all concerned with satisfying multiple constraints simultaneously. Fair division is concerned with distribution of resources among people in a fair manner. Discrepancy, on the other hand, is a toy problem where one seeks coloring of objects so that each set contains approximately equal number of each color. Bin Packing is about assigning items of varying sizes to bins so that they can be packed into a minimum number of bins.The research findings uncover key structural properties of these settings  and leverage them to obtain new algorithms and hardness results.

The PhD study was completed at Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Natural Sciences, Aarhus University.

This summary was prepared by the PhD student.

Time: Monday, 16 March, 2026 at 9:00
Place: Building 5342, room 333, Lecture Theatre Ada,  Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Åbogade 34, 8200 Aarhus N.
Title of PhD thesis: Algorithms and Complexity  for Constrained Fair Division, Discrepancy, and Packing
Contact information: Sudarshan Shyam e-mail: shyam@cs.au.dk, tel.: +45 91105197
Members of the assessment committee:
Professor Dimitris Fotakis School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Professor Martin Hoefer, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Professor Ira Assent (chair), Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark
Main supervisor: Professor Ioannis Caragiannis, Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark
Language: The PhD dissertation will be defended in English

The defence is public.
The PhD thesis is available for reading at the Graduate School of Natural Sciences/GSNS, Ny Munkegade 120, building 1521, 8000 Aarhus C