Date: 30th March (Thursday)
Time: 12:30 pm
Location: 3120 Trottier.
Speaker: Richard
Title: Models and algorithms to optimize submodular functions.
About Speaker:
Richard is a second year PhD student in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. He holds a Master’s degree in Mathematics and Statistics from McGill and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Madrid, Spain. His main research interests are in Discrete Optimization, and in particular in the areas of Approximation Algorithms and Submodular Optimization.
Summary :
Areas of Applied Math / Discrete Math / Theoretical Computer Science in optimization and especially models and algorithms for optimizing submodular functions, including their application to real world settings. Submodular functions appear naturally in many important optimization frameworks including graphs/networks, facility location problems, combinatorial auctions, analysis of social networks, feature selection, information gathering, sensor placement, document summarization and more. There has been a huge amount of work in the past years regarding the design of efficient algorithms to optimize (both maximize and minimize) these kind of functions subject to several kind of constraints.