Theory Student Seminar - University of Toronto CS Theory group

"A classic is something that
everybody wants to have read
and nobody wants to read."
- Mark Twain

About TSS

The Theory Student Seminar (TSS) is a student-run seminar which exists to save theory students time and effort in reading "classic" papers and keeping in touch with active research and open problems in theoretical computer science. We meet once a week, late afternoon, for about an hour in the theory lab. Though the TSS is driven by the graduate students of the theory group, we welcome everyone (undergrads, graduate students, postdocs, etc.) to attend.

Presentations are given by the body of attendees, though new students are not expected to give a talk during their first term. Some of the most successful presentations were tutorials on topics related to theoretical computer science, from model theory to Chernoff bounds. The TSS is also an appropriate place for practice talks. For a list of previous topics, click here.

Theory Student Seminar for 2026 Winter term will be on Mondays 5 - 6 pm (Thursday if Monday happens to be a holiday) in SF 3208-10. If you would like to be added to or removed from the mailing list where talk advertisements and abstracts are circulated, email tssadmin [at] cs.toronto.edu.

The topics are mostly graduate level but the presenters should make it more accessible to people without previous background in the specific research field. For undergraduate students at UofT who wants to attend the talks, passing second year theory courses like CSC236/240 and CSC263/265 would be a bare minimum. We expect the audience to be familiar with probability, linear algebra, algorithms analysis, and basics of complexity theory. We also recommend CS Theory Toolkit lecture series by Ryan O'Donnell, which helps you explore different topics in theoretical computer science.

Current Organizers

Haohua Tang

Siddharth Agarwal

Fall Winter 2027 Schedule

If you want to sign up to give a talk, feel free to email tssadmin [at] cs.toronto.edu or talk to any of the current organizers.

Date	Title	Speaker
2026 / 09 / 21	Bipartite Matching is in NC[show abstract] This is from the result of the recent breakthrough by Chatterjee, Ghosh, Gurjar, Raj, and Theireuff. This also has some cool connections with coding theory. We will explore the decision version of the problem in the talk.	Somnath Bhattacharjee
2026 / 10 / 05	Succinct Computational Secret Sharing Monotone Circuits[show abstract] In this talk, we will discuss the work titled "Succinct Computational Secret Sharing for Monotone Circuit" co-authored by George Lu, Shafik Nasser and Brent Waters. This work was published in ASIACRYPT 2025. In this paper, the authors present a novel computational secret sharing scheme for monotone Boolean circuits that achieves substantially shorter share sizes than previously known constructions in the standard model. Their scheme attains a public share size of 𝑛 + poly(𝜆, log \|𝐶 \|) and a user share size of 𝜆, where 𝑛 denotes the number of users, 𝐶 is the monotone circuit and 𝜆 is the security parameter, thus effectively eliminating the dependence on the circuit size. This marks a significant improvement over earlier approaches, which exhibited sizes that grew with the number of gates in the circuit. The construction makes use of indistinguishability obfuscation and injective one-way functions.	Siddharth Agarwal

Back to the theory group