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— optimisation · semidefinite programming · combinatorics
Adithya
Kumar
I work on optimisation: semidefinite relaxations, combinatorial problems, and the benchmarks used to test algorithms for them. I'm a Research Engineer at The Innovation Game. Before that I studied mathematics at Edinburgh and founded Descrai, which makes safety glasses that record lab work.
Work
Descrai v3: Smart Safety Glasses
Lab notebooks miss most of what happens at the bench, which makes experiments hard to reproduce. Descrai v3 is a pair of safety glasses with a camera and microphone. A vision-language-action (VLA) pipeline checks the work against the written protocol as it happens. The glasses are now in manufacture. I founded the company and led the technical work; others now run it day to day.
Lasserre Hierarchies for MAX-CUT
My dissertation. I derived Lasserre semidefinite relaxations for several formulations of MAX-CUT and compared them: how close each level of the hierarchy gets to the true optimum, how much it costs to compute, and where the formulations differ.
eGates Queue Simulation
A model of immigration queues at an international airport. Treating passengers as a continuous flow rather than individual arrivals made the simulation much cheaper to run while keeping the behaviour that determines throughput.
A PhD-level competition. I entered as an undergraduate and only found out at the finals.
About
I like problems where a mathematical model has to work in a real setting.
I graduated in Mathematics from the University of Edinburgh in 2026. My dissertation studied the Lasserre hierarchy, a sequence of semidefinite programming relaxations, applied to MAX-CUT. Before that I modelled airport immigration queues for the SIAM–IMA Modelling Competition, where the entry won third prize, and built reinforcement learning environments for chordal graph completion with Dr Miguel Anjos.
I founded Descrai in 2024. The first version measured foot traffic in shops, and the second did camera-based billing for retailers in India. Today Descrai makes safety glasses that record lab work and check it against the written protocol. Descrai won first place in the University of Edinburgh Student Summer Startup Accelerator in 2025 and now manufactures the glasses. I've stepped back from the day-to-day because the people running it now are better placed to take it forward.
I'm now a Research Engineer at The Innovation Game in Cambridge. TIG runs open competitions where people submit algorithms for hard optimisation problems, and the best ones are released open source. I design and stress-test the benchmark problems those algorithms are scored on. I also work on autoresearch, where AI agents search for better algorithms on their own, and the same benchmarks are used to judge them. In both cases, much of the job is finding and fixing ways to score well without a better algorithm.
Current threads
Optimisation
Semidefinite relaxations and the Lasserre hierarchy for combinatorial problems.
Benchmark design
Test problems where the only way to score well is a better algorithm, whether a person or an AI agent wrote it.
Autoresearch
AI agents that search for better algorithms on their own.
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