Rate My Professor Igor Carboni Oliveira

Oliveira specializes in computational complexity theory, exploring its connections to algorithms, combinatorics, and mathematical logic, with focus areas including meta-complexity, probabilistic Kolmogorov complexity, hardness magnification, and unprovability results. His research is funded by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, an ERC Starting Grant through UKRI Frontier Research Guarantee, and an EPSRC New Horizons Grant. He received the Best Paper Award at LATIN 2018 for “An average-case lower bound against ACC⁰” (with R. Chen and R. Santhanam). Key publications include “A theory for probabilistic polynomial-time reasoning” (STOC 2026, with L. Chen, J. Li, and R. Williams), “Polynomial-time pseudodeterministic construction of primes” (FOCS 2023, JACM 2026, with L. Chen, Z. Lu, H. Ren, and R. Santhanam), “Unprovability of strong complexity lower bounds in bounded arithmetic” (STOC 2023, with J. Li), “Probabilistic Kolmogorov complexity with applications to complexity theory” (CCC 2022, with H. Goldberg, V. Kabanets, and Z. Lu), “Hardness magnification near state-of-the-art lower bounds” (CCC 2019, ToC 2021, with J. Pich and R. Santhanam), and “Beyond natural proofs: hardness magnification and its applications” (ITCS 2020, JACM 2022, with L. Chen et al.). Oliveira serves as editor for the SIGACT News Complexity Theory Column (2025) and organizes the Online Complexity Seminar.