Theory Since Your Quals

1
Theory Since Your Quals

• Omid Madani

2
Whats Happening

• Traditional research
• Design and analysis of algorithms
• Computational Complextiy
• Lower bounds
• approximation algorithms (randomized rounding)

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Whats Happening

• Relatively new
• Quantum computation (Traditional research in a
  new model of computation)
• Surprising results in algorithms, complexity,
  lower bounds search in unordered
  lists, factoring in poly expected time
• interesting quirks (complex coefficients,
  reversible computation)!
• cs.umbc.edu/lomonaco/qcomp/Qcomp.html

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Whats new (cont.)

• Other novel forms of computing DNA computations
  (massive shallow depth parallelism?)
• (Interestingly) Bounding error in both models to
  make them a reality (but many other apps ...)

5
Meetings

• Many conferences (algorithms, computation
  complexity, etc.)
• STOCS (ACM Symp. On Theory of Comp.)
• FOCS (IEEE Foundations of Comp Sci)
• SODA (Symp. On Discrete Algs.)
• Many others ...

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Theory Here

• Current
• Karlin randomized algorithms, problems arising
  in systems research (data placement), etc.
• Ruzzo and Tompa Comp. Biology (genomics, etc)
• Anderson text layout, etc.
• Beame space/time tradeoffs and lower bounds
• Ladner on sabbatical, but error correcting
  codes, data compression, etc.

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Theory Here (cont.)

• Students graduating
• I am graduating, advisors Anderson and Hanks
  (AI), on analysis of Markov decision problems
• Jim Fix, away already, but should be back for
  defense, advisor Ladner, algorithms using
  multi-resolution techniques (computational
  geometry)
• Dont think I forgot any one..