Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

I will present work on a new application of Markov chains to distributed computing. Motivated by programmable matter and the behavior of biological distributed systems such as ant colonies, the geometric amoebot model abstracts these processes as self-organizing particle systems where particles with limited computational power move on the triangular lattice. Previous algorithms developed in this setting have relied heavily on leader election, tree structures that are not robust to failures, and persistent memory. We developed a distributed algorithm for the compression problem, where all particles want to gather together as tightly as possible, that is based on a Markov chain and is simple, robust, and oblivious. Tools from Markov chain analysis enable rigorous proofs about its behavior, and we show compression will occur with high probability. This joint work with Joshua J. Daymude, Dana Randall, and Andrea Richa appeared at PODC 2016. I will also present some more recent extensions of this approach to other problems, which is joint work with Marta Andres Arroyo as well.

Effective bounds play a very important role in algebraic geometry with many applications. In this talk I will survey recent progress and open questions in the quantitative study ofreal varieties and semi-algebraic sets and their connections with other areas of mathematics -- in particular,connections to incidence geometry via the polynomial partitioning method. I will also discuss some results on the topological complexity of symmetric varieties which have a representation-theoretic flavor. Finally, if time permits I will sketch how some of these results extend to the category of constructible sheaves.

The Ricci-Stein theory of singular integrals concerns operators of the form \int e^{i P(y)} f (x-y) \frac {dy}y.The L^p boundedness was established in the early 1980's, and the weak-type L^1 estimate by Chanillo-Christ in 1987. We establish the weak type estimate for the maximal truncations. This method of proof might well shed much more information about the fine behavior of these transforms. Joint work with Ben Krause.

A fundamental result in Harmonic Analysis states that many functions defined over the interval [-\pi,\pi] can be decomposed into a Fourier series, that is, decomposed as sums of sines and cosines with integer frequencies. This allows one to describe very complicated functions in a simple way, and therefore provides with a strong tool to study the properties of different families of functions.However, the above decomposition does not hold -- or holds but is not efficient enough-- if the functions are no longer defined over an interval,( e.g. if a function is defined over a union of two disjoint intervals). We will discuss the question of whether similar decompositions are possible also in such cases, with the frequencies of the sines and cosines possibly being no longer integers.