Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Ravi Kannan from Microsoft Research India will present the ACO Distinghished Lecture on November 1, 2011 at 4:30 pm in Klaus 1116.

Ravindran (Ravi) Kannan is Principal Researcher in the Algorithms Research Group at Microsoft Research Bangalore. Previously he was a professor at CMU, MIT, and Yale, where he was the William Lanman Professor of Computer Science. His research areas span Algorithms, Optimization and Probability. He is widely known for introducing several groundbreaking techniques in theoretical computer science, notably in the algorithmic geometry of numbers, sampling and volume computation in high dimension, and algorithmic linear algebra. He received the Knuth Prize in 2011, and the Fulkerson Prize in 1992. He is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Bombay.

Vectors, Sampling and Massive Data

Modeling data as high-dimensional (feature) vectors is a staple in Computer Science, its use in ranking web pages reminding us again of its effectiveness. Algorithms from Linear Algebra (LA) provide a crucial toolkit. But, for modern problems with massive data, these algorithms may take too long. Random sampling to reduce the size suggests itself. I will give a from-first-principles description of the LA connection, then discuss sampling techniques developed over the last decade for vectors, matrices and graphs. Besides saving time, sampling leads to sparsification and compression of data.

There will be a reception in the Atrium of the Klaus building at 4PM.