600.469 / 600.669 Approximation Algorithms - Spring 2015

Instructor: Michael Dinitz
Lecture: T Th 3:00 - 4:20 pm, Hodson 316
Office Hours: Th 4:30 - 5:30 pm

Syllabus

Resources: There is no required textbook, but many lectures will cover topics from the following.

Scribe Notes

Template: .tex and .pdf

Students will take turns taking scribe notes, so that everyone ends up scribing the same number of lectures (up to rounding).

WS = the Williamson and Shmoys textbook

Please point out any typos in the notes.

Date Topic Reference Scribe Notes
 Jan 27   Intro, Vertex Cover, Steiner Tree   WS - Chapter 1.1   N/A    
 Jan 29   Steiner Tree and TSP   WS - Chapter 2.4, Exercise 2.5  Katie Henry 
 Feb 3   Greedy: k-Center and Set Cover   WS - Chapter 2.2 and 1.6  Trevor Fisher 
 Feb 5   Greedy: Set Cover and Max-Coverage   WS - Chapter 1.6, Exercise 2.11  Zeyu Zhang 
 Feb 10   Local Search: Max-Cut and Min Degree Spanning Tree   WS - Chapter 2.6  Kuan Cheng 
 Feb 12   Local-Search: Min Degree Spanning Tree and Weighted Max-Cut   WS - Chapter 2.6  David Gong  HW1 released
 Feb 17   Rounding and Dynamic Programming: Knapsack and Min-Makespan Scheduling   WS - Chapters 3.1, 3.2  Alexander Schiffhauer 
 Feb 19   Rounding and Dynamic Programming: Min-Makespan Scheduling and Bin Packing   WS - Chapters 3.2, 3.3  Gabriel Kaptchuk  HW1 due
 Feb 24   Intro to Linear Programming for Approximation Algorithms   WS - Chapters 1.2, 1.3, Appendix A  Runze Tang 
 Feb 26   No class -- Mike out of town       HW2 released
 March 3   Metric Facility Location   WS - Chapter 4.5  Poorya Mianjy 
 March 5   Snow day!       HW2 due
 March 10   Randomized Rounding: Set Cover and Minimizing Congestion   WS - Chapters 1.7, 5.11  Torrey Kelly 
 March 12   Chernoff bounds: Minimizing Congestion and 3-Coloring   WS - Chapters 5.10, 5.11, 5.12  Zeyu Zhang 
 March 24   Randomized Rounding: Group Steiner Tree   GKR paper, Notes from CMU  David Gong  HW3 released
 March 26   Tree Embeddings I   WS - Chapter 8.5  Alexander Schiffhauer 
 March 31   Tree Embeddings II  WS - Chapters 8.5, 8.6  Kuan Cheng  HW3 due
 April 2   LPs as Metrics: Min-Cut and Multiway Cut   WS - Chapters 8.1, 8.2  Gabriel Kaptchuk 
 April 7   LPs as Metrics II: Multicut  WS - Chapter 8.3  Trevor Fisher 
 April 9   LP duality   WS - Chapter 1.6, Appendix A  Katie Henry 
 April 14   Dual Fitting and Primal-Dual  WS - Chapters 1.6, 7.1, 7.3  Poorya Mianjy  HW4 released
 April 16   Primal-Dual: Steiner Forest  WS - Chapters 7.4  Runze Tang 
 April 21   Semidefinite Programming: Max-Cut  WS - Chapters 6.1, 6.2  Torrey Kelly  HW4 due
 April 23   SDP II: Correlation Clustering and Max-2SAT  WS - Chapter 6.4  Michael Dinitz 
 April 28   Class Canceled     
 April 30   PCP Theorem and Hardness of Approximation  WS - Chapter 16   



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