Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In this talk I will address the problem of the computation of the jointspectral radius (j.s.r.) of a set of matrices.This tool is useful to determine uniform stability properties of non-autonomous discrete linear systems. After explaining how to extend the spectral radius from a single matrixto a set of matrices and illustrate some applications where such conceptplays an important role I will consider the problem of the computation ofthe j.s.r. and illustrate some possible strategies. A basic tool I willuse to this purpose consists of polytope norms, both real and complex.I will illustrate a possible algorithm for the computation of the j.s.r. ofa family of matrices which is based on the use of these classes of norms.Some examples will be shown to illustrate the behaviour of the algorithm.Finally I will address the problem of the finite computability of the j.s.r.and state some recent results, open problems and conjectures connected withthis issue.

Linear boundary value problems occur ubiquitously in many areas of science and engineering, and the cost of computing approximate solutions to such equations is often what determines which problems can, and which cannot, be modelled computationally. Due to advances in the last few decades (multigrid, FFT, fast multipole methods, etc), we today have at our disposal numerical methods for most linear boundary value problems that are "fast" in the sense that their computational cost grows almost linearly with problem size. Most existing "fast" schemes are based on iterative techniques in which a sequence of incrementally more accurate solutions is constructed. In contrast, we propose the use of recently developed methods that are capable of directly inverting large systems of linear equations in almost linear time. Such "fast direct methods" have several advantages over existing iterative methods: (1) Dramatic speed-ups in applications involving the repeated solution of similar problems (e.g. optimal design, molecular dynamics). (2) The ability to solve inherently ill-conditioned problems (such as scattering problems) without the use of custom designed preconditioners. (3) The ability to construct spectral decompositions of differential and integral operators. (4) Improved robustness and stability. In the talk, we will also describe how randomized sampling can be used to rapidly and accurately construct low rank approximations to matrices. The cost of constructing a rank k approximation to an m x n matrix A for which an O(m+n) matrix-vector multiplication scheme is available is O((m+n)*k). This cost is the same as that of the well-established Lanczos scheme, but the randomized scheme is significantly more robust. For a general matrix A, the cost of the randomized scheme is O(m*n*log(k)), which should be compared to the O(m*n*k) cost of existing deterministic methods.

We propose a fast multi-way spectral clustering algorithm for multi-manifold data modeling, i.e., modeling data by mixtures of manifolds (possibly intersecting). We describe the supporting theory as well as the practical choices guided by it. We first develop the case of hybrid linear modeling, i.e., when the underlying manifolds are affine subspaces in a Euclidean space, and then we extend this setting to more general manifolds. We exemplify the practical use of the algorithm by demonstrating its successful application to problems of motion segmentation.

We consider ordered sequences of digital images. At a given pixel a time course is observed which is related to the time courses at neighbour pixels. Useful information can be extracted from a set of such observations by classifying pixels in groups, according to some features of interest. We assume to observe a noisy version of a positive function depending on space and time, which is parameterized by a vector of unknown functions (depending on space) with discontinuities which separate regions with different features in the image domain. We propose a variational method which allows to estimate the parameter functions, to segment the image domain in regions, and to assign to each region a label according to the values that the parameters assume on the region. Approximation by \Gamma-convergence is used to design a numerical scheme. Numerical results are reported for a dynamic Magnetic Resonance imaging problem.