Caterina VIOLA

I am a mathematician and a computer scientist. 

Since March 2023, I am a researcher with RTD-a contract at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Catania. I work on quantum algorithms, in particular for text processing problems, within the National Center for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing project.

My Erdős number is 3.

During the winter semester of the a.y. 2023/2024 I teach the class Laboratorio di Algoritmi for the Bachelor study program in Computer Science (L31) at DMI.

Since 2023, I teach the class Informatica for the Bachelor study program in Scienze e lingue per la comunicazione (L20) at DISUM.

I got a master degree in Mathematics from the University of Catania with a thesis on Numerical Semigroups, written during a semester at the Universidad de Granada within the Erasmus project. After my graduation, I was an intern at the Max Plank Institute in Bonn, to study some topics in Number Theory. I obtained the title of Doctor rerum naturalium in Mathematics from the Technische Universitaet Dresden in Germany, where I studied the complexity of certain computational optimization problems, called Valued Constraint Satisfaction Problems, on infinite domains. After obtaining my PhD, I was a Senior Associate Post-doctoral Researcher for over two years at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, where I studied approximation algorithms and was a tutor for the Computational Complexity course. Afterwards, I worked for 7 months as a post-doc researcher at the Karlova University in Prague, focussing on the constant-factor inapproximability of some computational optimisation problems.