# Seminar

We typically have seminars on Wednesday at noon in Malone 228.  All seminar announcements will be sent to the theory mailing list.

Nov
7
Wed
Nov 7 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Affiliation: JHU

Title: Differentially Private Spectral Sparsification of Graphs
Abstract:
In this talk, we will discuss differentially private spectral sparsification of graphs. We argue that traditional spectral sparsification where the output graph is a subgraph of the input graph is not possible with differential privacy. This motivates us to define a relaxed version of spectral sparsification of graphs.

We consider edge-level privacy, i.e., neighboring graphs differs in one edge with weight one. We give efficient $(\alpha,\beta)$-differentially private algorithms that, on input a dense graph G, construct a spectral sparsification of G. Our output graphs has $O(n/\eps^2)$ weighted edges, which matches the best known non-private algorithms.

We can use our private sparse graph to solve various combinatorial and learning problems on graphs efficiently while preserving differential privacy. Some examples include all possible cut queries, Max-Cut, Sparse-Cut, Edge-Expansion, Laplacian eigenmaps, etc.

This talk is based on a joint work with Raman Arora and Vladimir Braverman.

Nov
16
Fri
Capital Area Theory Day @ Georgetown University
Nov 16 all-day
Dec
5
Wed
[Theory Seminar] Ke Wu
Dec 5 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Speaker: Ke Wu
Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University

Title: Synchronization Strings: Efficient and Fast Deterministic Constructions over Small Alphabets
Abstract:
Synchronization strings are recently introduced by Haeupler and Shahrasbi (STOC 2017) in the study of codes for correcting insertion and deletion errors (insdel codes). They showed that for any parameter ε>0, synchronization strings of arbitrary length exist over an alphabet whose size depends only on ε. Specifically, they obtained an alphabet size of O(ε^{−4}), which left an open question on where the minimal size of such alphabets lies between Ω(ε^{1}) and O(ε^{−4}). In this work, we partially bridge this gap by providing an improved lower bound of Ω(ε^{−3/2}), and an improved upper bound of O(ε^{−2}). We also provide fast explicit constructions of synchronization strings over small alphabets.

Further, along the lines of previous work on similar combinatorial objects, we study the extremal question of the smallest possible alphabet size over which synchronization strings can exist for some constant ε<1. We show that one can construct ε-synchronization strings over alphabets of size four while no such string exists over binary alphabets. This reduces the extremal question to whether synchronization strings exist over ternary alphabets.

Jan
16
Wed
[Theory Seminar] Sami Davies
Jan 16 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Speaker: Sami Davies
Affiliation: University of Washington

Title: A Tale of Santa Claus, Hypergraphs, and Matroids
Abstract:
A well-known problem in scheduling and approximation algorithms is the Santa Claus problem. Suppose that Santa Claus has a set of gifts, and he wants to distribute them among a set of children so that the least happy child is made as happy as possible. Here, the value that a child i has for a present j is of the form p_{ij} \in \{0,p_j\}. A polynomial time algorithm by Annamalai et al. gives a 12.33-approximation algorithm and is based on a modification of Haxell’s hypergraph matching argument.

In this paper, we introduce a matroid version of the Santa Claus problem. Our algorithm is also based on Haxell’s augmentation tree, but with the introduction of the matroid structure we solve a more general problem with cleaner methods. Our result can then be used as a blackbox to obtain a (4 +\varepsilon)-approximation for Santa Claus. This factor also compares against a natural, compact LP for Santa Claus.

Feb
13
Wed
[Theory Seminar] Martin Farach-Colton
Feb 13 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Speaker: Martin Farach-Colton
Affiliation: Rutgers University

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA