Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Cannon: "A f.g. negatively curved group with boundary homeomorphic to the round two sphere is Kleinian". We shall outline a combinatorial (complex analysis motivated) approach to this interesting conjecture (following Cannon, Cannon-Floyd-Parry). If time allows we will hint on another approach (Bonk-Kleiner) (as well as ours). The talk should be accessible to graduate students with solid background in: complex analysis, group theory and basic topology.

In 1968, Vizing proposed the following conjecture which claims that if G is an edge chromatic critical graph with n vertices, then the independence number of G is at most n/2. In this talk, we will talk about this conjecture and the progress towards this conjecture.

So far, likelihood-based interval estimate for quantiles has not been studied in literature for interval censored Case 2 data and partly interval-censored data, and in this context the use of smoothing has not been considered for any type of censored data. This article constructs smoothed weighted empirical likelihood ratio confidence intervals (WELRCI) for quantiles in a unified framework for various types of censored data, including right censored data, doubly censored data, interval censored data and partly interval-censored data. The 4th-order expansion of the weighted empirical log-likelihood ratio is derived, and the 'theoretical' coverage accuracy equation for the proposed WELRCI is established, which generally guarantees at least the 'first-order' accuracy. In particular for right censored data, we show that the coverage accuracy is at least O(n^{-1/2}), and our simulation studies show that in comparison with empirical likelihood-based methods, the smoothing used in WELRCI generally gives a shorter confidence interval with comparable coverage accuracy. For interval censored data, it is interesting to find that with an adjusted rate n^{-1/3}, the weighted empirical log-likelihood ratio has an asymptotic distribution completely different from that by the empirical likelihood approach, and the resulting WELRCI perform favorably in available comparison simulation studies.

The theory of geometric discrepancy studies different variations of the following question: how well can one approximate a uniform distribution by a discrete one, and what are the limitations that necessarily arise in such approximations. Historically, the methods of harmonic analysis (Fourier transform, Fourier series, wavelets, Riesz products etc) have played a pivotal role in the subject. I will give an overview of the problems, methods, and results in the field and discuss some latest developments.