Yichen Huang

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Harvard University under the wise guidance of Prof. Michael Mitzenmacher. Prior to Harvard, I completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Oxford, where I had the pleasure of working with Prof. Christian Coester and Prof. Standa Živný. I am currently visiting Peking University during Spring 2026, hosted by Prof. Shaofeng Jiang.

I am broadly interested in theoretical computer science, especially in decision making under uncertainty. More concretely, I study uncertainty arising from not knowing the future (online algorithms), from making use of unreliable predictions (learning-augmented algorithms), and from strategic agents with private information (mechanism design). I also enjoy turning observations and insights from real-world phenomena into clean mathematical questions and solutions, often in an EconCS setting.

I enjoy talking to people with different backgrounds and perspectives. If you are interested in collaborating, or simply want to chat about anything, feel free to reach out at [{firstname}{lastname}]@g.harvard.edu.

Working Papers

Competitive Online Clustering with Movement Cost
Christian Coester, Yichen Huang, Michael Mitzenmacher

Form vs Information: The Regimes of Data Property Rights
Yichen Huang, Zhen Sun, Xinzhen Xu, Bozhong Zheng

Selected Publications

Online Monotone Metric Embeddings (10 min)
Christian Coester, Yichen Huang
ICALP 2026

The Mixed Birth-death/death-Birth Moran Process (20 min)
David A. Brewster, Yichen Huang, Michael Mitzenmacher, Martin A. Nowak
ITCS 2026

Talks

Online Monotone Metric Embeddings
TGINF (Harvard Student Theory Seminar) 2025
Workshop on Local Algorithms 2025
ICALP 2026

Competitive Online Clustering with Movement Cost
Dagstuhl Workshop 26131: New Trends in Clustering, 2026
Highlights of Algorithms 2026

The Mixed Birth-death/death-Birth Moran Process
ITCS 2026

Service, Organizations, and Teaching

I currently co-organize TGINF, a theory seminar for graduate students and postdocs at Harvard.

PC: EC 2026.
Subreviewer: ITCS 2026, ICALP 2026.

I have been (or will be) the TA for the following classes:

Harvard CS 2380 Optimized Democracy, Fall 2025.
Harvard CS 2242 Probabilistic Analysis and Algorithms, Fall 2026.

Misc

My Erdős number is 3 via the chain YH → Michael Mitzenmacher → Joel H. Spencer → Paul Erdős.

Outside academia, I enjoy playing poker and have recently gotten quite into bouldering. I also spend some time in (Mandarin Chinese) competitive debating. I currently lead the Harvard Chinese Debate Team, and I previously captained Oxford’s Chinese Debate Team, with whom I was the runner-up at the Chinese Debate World Cup.

(Are you looking for physicist Yichen Huang?)