Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In the first part of the talk, I am going to give an introduction and overview of linear and semidefinite programming hierarchies. I will mostly review known integrality gaps for such programs and try to give an intuition of why we currently lack strong techniques for designing rounding algorithms. In the second part of the talk I will focus on the stronger SDP Lasserre hierarchy. In contrast with the previous LP and SDP hierarchies, very few examples of integrality gap instances are known to date. I will present a recent technique for designing such instances and discuss open problems in the area.