*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Tess Malone, Communications Officer
Summary Sentence: Title: Algebraic Tools in Algorithms and Complexity
Full Summary: No summary paragraph submitted.
Josh AlmanTITLE: Algebraic Tools in Algorithms and Complexity
ABSTRACT:
In this talk, I will speak about how algebraic tools can be used to solve problems throughout computer science. I will focus on two such tools: algorithms for quickly multiplying matrices and mathematical techniques for approximating functions by low-degree polynomials. I will survey how these two tools, when combined, yield a wide variety of new results, including:
- the fastest known algorithm for batch nearest neighbor search, where one is given many data points and wants to find the “most similar” pairs of points according to various metrics,
- state-of-the-art limitation results for threshold circuits, a loose model of neural networks,
- a new, efficient representation of the Walsh-Hadamard transform from signal processing, and
- limitations on all known approaches to designing fast matrix multiplication algorithms.
BIO:
Josh Alman is a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at MIT, where he is advised by Ryan Williams and Virginia Vassilevska Williams. He received his master’s in computer science from Stanford in 2016 and his bachelor’s in mathematics from MIT in 2014.
