Barna Saha

Timeline

1. 2011

   A Maryland doctorate

   The doctorate at the University of Maryland, College Park, is completed in 2011 under Samir Khuller.

2. 2014–2019

   Faculty at UMass Amherst

   In 2014 the College of Information and Computer Science at UMass Amherst adds Saha to its faculty. The UMass post runs for five years, first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor.

3. 2019–2020

   PECASE and a Kavli Fellow

   The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) goes to Saha in 2019. In 2020 the National Academy of Sciences names Saha a Kavli Fellow.

4. 2022

   Joining UC San Diego

   Saha joins the computer science faculty at UC San Diego in January 2022 as a theoretical computer scientist and mathematician. Before that, Saha held a tenured associate professorship at UC Berkeley.

5. 2024

   The Gruber chair and EnCORE

   In 2024 the CSE department celebrates Saha as the Harry E. Gruber Endowed Chair. Saha also directs EnCORE, the NSF TRIPODS institute for emerging CORE methods in data science.

6. 2024

   I/O complexity of attention

   In 2024 Saha and Christopher Ye give an ICML oral presentation on the I/O complexity of attention, a format with a 1.5% acceptance rate. Self-attention is at the heart of the Transformer architecture, and the paper examines its I/O complexity.

7. June 2026

   A proof discovered by ChatGPT

   In June 2026 Saha, Yinzhan Xu, and Christopher Ye submit a preprint titled "Furthest Pair Requires Quadratic Time in Superconstant Dimension under SETH." Its proof was initially discovered by ChatGPT 5.5 Pro, and the authors validated and substantially edited it.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor at UC San Diego

   Saha is the Harry E. Gruber Endowed Chair Professor of Computer Science and Information Technologies at UC San Diego, and directs EnCORE.