CSE 642-01 (#49404): Seminar in Algorithms, Fall 2017

CSE 642-01 (#49404): Seminar in Algorithms, Fall 2017

Location and Hours. Friday 11:00 am - 12:30 pm, Room 220 of New CS Building

Course Description. This reading group provides a meeting place for Stony Brook faculty, postdocs, and students interested in the analysis of algorithms. We meet once a week, with one of three different missions:

Open Problems Sessions -- We pose and attempt to solve brand new research problems.
Paper Presentations -- This is fairly informal, with one person (often a student) responsible each time for leading the discussions. Nobody will have to lead for more than one paper per semester. We highly encourage students to volunteer for paper presentations, as it is a good opportunity to learn how to give a technical presentation and our reading group is a friendly group of audience to start with.
Road Trips -- We make road trips to the special computational geometry or theory days at NYU, Columbia, and the like.

Course Credit. You can get one credit for participating by simply registering for CSE 642. You are also welcome to come without registering.

Mailing List. We have a Google group. Future announcements will be distributed through the group forum and email. Please apply here to join the group.

Instructors. Esther Arkin, Michael Bender, Jing Chen, Rezaul Chowdhury, Jie Gao, Rob Johnson, Joe Mitchell, Rob Patro, Steve Skiena, and other algorithms faculty.

Schedule.

Date	Activities	Notes / Reading Material
Fri, Sep 1	Prof. Steve Skiena poses a brand new problem on accepting conference papers	Tyler Meyer's scribe notes (distributed internally)
Fri, Sep 8	We continue to work on the "conference paper acceptance problem"	-
Fri, Sep 15	Prof. Joe Mitchell introduces brand new problems on "tours and trees that visit uncertain sites"	-
Fri, Sep 22	Prof. Rob Patro introduces the "expected total density problem" and the "consistent k-paths problem"	Shikha Singh's scribe notes (distributed internally)
Fri, Sep 29	We continue to work on the "consistent k-paths problem"	Updated scribe notes by Tyler Meyer and Shikha Singh (distributed internally)
Fri, Oct 6	We continue to work on the "consistent k-paths problem"	-
Fri, Oct 13	Prof. Joe Mitchell introduces the "minimum total aperture problem"	Ankit Aggarwal's scribe notes (distributed internally)
Fri, Oct 20	Prof. Francesco Orabona gives a mini-tutorial on "online convex optimization"	-
Fri, Oct 27	We continue to work on the "minimum total aperture problem"	Shih-yu Tsai's scribe notes (distributed internally)
Fri, Nov 3	FWCG (no reading group meeting)	-
Fri, Nov 10	We continue to work on the "minimum total aperture problem"	-
Fri, Nov 17	Informal discussion with our special guest Prof. Nir Shavit of MIT (our DLS speaker)	Link to DLS Talk by Prof. Nir Shavit
Fri, Nov 24	Thanksgiving Break	-
Fri, Dec 1	Prof. Heather Lynch and PhD student Phillip McDowall (Ecology & Evolution / IACS) talk about algorithmic challenges in their research on understanding how spatial patterns in penguin colonies contribute to declines in penguin populations.	NCS 120
Fri, Dec 8	Prof. Zhenhua Liu (AMS) proposes a problem on scheduling multiple DAGs	Xiao Sun's scribe notes (distributed internally)

Past Offerings.