  In this paper, we establish a couple of results on extremal problems in
bipartite graphs. Firstly, we show that every sufficiently large bipartite
graph with average degree $D$ and with $n$ vertices on each side has a balanced
independent set containing $(1-\epsilon) \frac{\log D}{D} n$ vertices from each
side for small $\epsilon > 0$. Secondly, we prove that the vertex set of every
sufficiently large balanced bipartite graph with maximum degree at most
$\Delta$ can be partitioned into $(1+\epsilon)\frac{\Delta}{\log \Delta}$
balanced independent sets. Both of these results are algorithmic and best
possible up to a factor of 2, which might be hard to improve as evidenced by
the phenomenon known as `algorithmic barrier' in the literature. The first
result improves a recent theorem of Axenovich, Sereni, Snyder, and Weber in a
slightly more general setting. The second result improves a theorem of Feige
and Kogan about coloring balanced bipartite graphs.
