Rate My Professor Igor Carboni Oliveira

Igor Carboni Oliveira is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Warwick, affiliated with the Division of Theory and Foundations (FoCS) and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP). He joined the Department of Computer Science in 2019 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. Prior appointments include Researcher in the Algorithms and Complexity Theory Group at the University of Oxford (2017-2019), Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague (2015-2017), and Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley (Fall 2018 and Spring 2023). Oliveira earned his PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2015, with a thesis titled “Unconditional Lower Bounds in Complexity Theory” advised by Rocco Servedio and Tal Malkin. He previously obtained his MSc in Computer Science from the University of Campinas in Brazil in 2010 and his BSc in 2008, earning awards such as the Brazilian Computer Society Prize and the Euler Prize for distinguished undergraduate performance.

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.