• Quantum computing
  (quantum mechanics, quantum computer models, and quantum cryptography and algorithms)
• Distributed data management
  (dynamic distributed hashing, distributed caching, peer-to-peer systems)
• Local search heuristics
  (genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, AI and ant colony methods)
• Theory of data compression methods
  (zip, mpg, jpg, mp3,...)

Meetings:

• Sep 11: First, organizational meeting and selection of a topic
  
• Sep 18: "Minimizing the flow time without migration"
  (presented by Amitabha Bagchi)
  
• Sep 25: "Ant colony methods for optimization problems"
  (presented by Carolyn Cooper)
  
• Oct. 9: "Primality testing is in P"
  (presented by Ankur Bhargava)
  
• Oct. 16: "Compression of low entropy strings with Lempel-Ziv algorithms"
  (presented by Jatin Chughani)
  
• Oct. 23: "The non-stochastic multi-armed bandit problem"
  (presented by Kishore Kothapalli)
• Oct. 30: "Quantum cryptography, public key distribution and coin tossing"
  (presented by Seny Kamara)
• Further presentations will be given here...

References:

• S. Leonardi and D. Raz.
  Approximating total flow time on parallel machines.
  In Proc. of the 29th STOC, 110-119, 1997.
• B. Awerbuch, Y. Azar, S. Leonardi, and O. Regev.
  Minimizing the flow time without migration.
  In Proc. of the 31st STOC, 198-205, 1999.
• M. Dorigo and L.M. Gambarella.
  Ant colonies for the traveling salesman problem.
  BioSystems, 43:73-81, 1997.
• E. Bonabeau, M. Dorigo, and G. Theraulaz.
  Inspiration for optimization from social behaviour.
  Nature, 406:39-42.