Previous Conferences & Workshops

Nov
06
2007

Arithmetic Combinatorics

The Rank of Symmetric Matrices
Kevin Costello
2:00pm|S-101

Let Q(n,p) denote the adjacency matrix of the Erdos-Renyi graph G(n,p), that is to say a symmetric matrix whose entries above the main diagonal are independently set to 1 with probability p and 0 with probability 1-p. We will examine the behavior of...

Nov
06
2007

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar II

Locally Decodable Codes from Nice Subsets of Finite Fields and Prime Factors of Mersenne Numbers
10:30am|S-101

A k-query Locally Decodable Code (LDC) encodes an n-bit message x as an N-bit codeword C(x), such that one can probabilistically recover any bit x_i of the message by querying only k bits of the codeword C(x), even after some constant fraction of...

Nov
05
2007

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar I

Markets and the Primal-Dual Paradigm
Vijay Vazirani
11:15am|S-101

The notion of a ``market'' has undergone a paradigm shift with the Internet -- totally new and highly successful markets have been defined and launched by companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, MSN and Ebay. These markets are computationally...