Past Events

The problem of fair allocation of indivisible items becomes more challenging when certain item pairs conflict with each other, rendering those pairs incompatible while allocating them to the same agent.

Some strings are incompressible. We'll see one way to exploit this fact, giving alternate takes on a selection of problems mostly combinatorial.

A common obstacle in the design of effective mechanisms in the presence of strategic self interested agents is the need for preference elicitation This often arises when the participating agents hold some of the information regarding their private preferences that the designer needs in order to reach a desired outcome

We discuss a proof that for every graph H, every n-vertex graph with no induced subdivision of H and with bounded clique number has chromatic number at most polylog(n). This

We study online selection problems in both the prophet and secretary settings when arriving agents have interdependent values. In the interdependent values model, introduced in the seminal work of Milgrom

A convex corner is a convex set contained in R_{>= 0}^n which is also a downset (under the product order). A VIP among convex corners is the vertex packing polytope

In cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security DHS Supply Chain Resilience Center the Center for Accelerating Operational Efficiency CAOE at Arizona State University The Command Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis CCICADA at Rutgers University and the Cross Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense Center CBTS

Postnikov has shown that generalized permutohedra, polytopes whose edges are parallel to vectors of the form e_i - e_j, have remarkable formulas for their volumes and lattice point counts. Additionally,

When a holomorphic function $f:C to C$ has a fixed point f(0)=0 with derivative λ=f'(0) of unit size, the question arises of conjugating f to the rotation z ->λ z.

The PCP Theorem [FGLSS,AS,ALMSS] is a cornerstone of theoretical computer science, with many applications in hardness of approximation, cryptography and interactive protocols. We construct 2-query, quasi-linear size probabilistically checkable proofs

I recently went to a talk that assumed some knowledge of symmetries of tilings that I didn't have. So come learn about possible symmetries of one and two colored tilings.

Events such as "two vertices are connected by an open path" naturally emerge in Bernoulli percolation. In this talk, we will examine the dependencies between these events for various vertex

Multimodal information systems (e.g., face matching systems) are now pervasive and mediate important aspects of human lives. Hence, it is important to maintain their fairness, i.e., equal performance for different

In 1978, Apery found a "miraculous" proof that zeta(3) is irrational, by finding an explicit pair of sequences of rational numbers a_n and b_n satisfying a recurrence relation so that

I will introduce posets and antichains, and then we will discuss various results that tell us what antichains look like in the Boolean lattice.

In this talk, we present a new method to solve algorithmic and combinatorial problems by (1) reducing them to bounding the maximum, over x in {0,1}^n, of homogeneous degree-q multilinear

The Turan problem for hypercubes asks: how few vertices of the n-dimensional cube can we take so that they meet every d-dimensional subcube? A longstanding conjecture states that the best

Richard (Dick) Askey had monumental influence on the mathematics associated with special functions and orthogonal polynomials. I will describe his legacy. Link to video: https://vimeo.com/1010593856?share=copy

Algorithms with predictions is a recent framework for decision-making under uncertainty that leverages the power of machine-learned predictions without making any assumption about their quality. The goal in this framework

This talk will be about metric distortion in social choice. I will cover several major results (by us and others) in this area, and discuss open questions and directions. In