Hi, I’m Zoe, a first-year Ph.D. student in the EECS department at MIT. I’m fortunate to be advised by Yael Tauman Kalai and Ryan Williams. Before this, I was an undergrad at MIT, and then I was extremely lucky to be advised by Bill Kuszmaul and Virginia Vassilevska Williams.

I’m broadly interested in theoretical computer science. I’ve done research in graph algorithms, fine-grained complexity, and data structures. Lately I’ve become interested in exploring connections between complexity theory and cryptography and thinking about how we could apply ideas from these areas to study problems in AI safety.

You can reach me at zoexi at mit dot edu.

Publications

Amir Abboud, Nick Fischer, Ce Jin, Virginia Vassilevska Williams, and Zoe Xi, All-Pairs Shortest Paths with Few Weights per Node.
In STOC 2025.

Virginia Vassilevska Williams, Zoe Xi, Yinzhan Xu, and Uri Zwick, All-Hops Shortest Paths.
In SODA 2025.

William Kuszmaul and Zoe Xi, Towards an Analysis of Quadratic Probing.
In ICALP 2024.

Zoe Xi and William Kuszmaul, Approximating Dynamic Time Warping Distance Between Run-Length Encoded Strings.
In ESA 2022.
Best Student Paper. Invited as a Highlight Presentation at CPM 2023.

Preprints

Zoe Xi, Variants of Baranyai’s Theorem with Additional Conditions.

Nathan S. Sheffield and Zoe Xi, Graphs With the Same Edge Count in Each Neighborhood.