Course: CS262: Algorithms and Data Structures (2010 Winter)

	This will be an advanced seminar in algorithms, designed specifically for the benefit of students planning to do research in the theoretical design and mathematical analysis of approximation algorithms. A good understanding of advanced background topics such as linear programming, linear programming duality, randomized rounding, Chernoff bounds, etc will be assumed. If you don't know these topics well, please do not take this seminar. News forum discussion forum please read this if you enrolled after the first class Resource

1	Network Design via Primal-Dual -- covering cuts by edges [GW-CH4] "The Primal-Dual Method For Approximation Algorithms And Its Application To Network Design Problems" by Goemans and Williamson PDF document [GW-CH4] Thm. 4.7 --- proof summary Resource [GW95a] - Thm. 4.7 (2-approx for 0/1 proper fns) of [GW-CH4] PDF document [GGP+94] Thm. 4.9 (2H(k)-approx for [0-k] proper fns) of [GW-CH4] PDF document [WGMV95] - 2k-approx for 0/1 proper fns PDF document [GGW93] (journal version) 2k-1 improvement to [WGMV95] PDF document [Jain01Factor] 2-approx for all cases via "iterative rounding" PDF document [Lau08Iterative] - Accessible notes on Jain's iterative rounding result PDF document

2	Balanced Separators via Rounding [Shmoys-CH5] - "Cut Problems And Their Application To Divide-And-Conquer" by Shmoys PDF document notes on finding a near-min-cost balanced cut Resource

3	Embeddings / Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) Proof of Bourgain's theorem Resource Gupta and Ravi's course Algorithmic Applications of Metric Embeddings file Roughgarden's course Metric Embeddings and Algorithmic Applications file Indyk's survey and talk (24 pages) file [Ch8-Indyk] Indyk and Matousek's chapter (20 pages) PDF document

4	Degree-Bounded Spanning trees [may skip]

5	Algorithmic Game Theory [Halpern07] "Computer Science and Game Theory: A Brief Survey" PDF document [NisanAlgorithmic] Algorithmic Game Theory (book) PDF document errata PDF document Nisan's blog on AGT file (See in particular "AGT decade in review") file courses Chekuri's course Algorithmic Game Theory file Daskalakis' course Topics in Algorithmic Game Theory file Hartline's course Algorithmic Mechanism Design file Papadimitriou's seminar on Algorithmic Aspects of Game Theory file Roughgarden's course Topics in Algorithmic Game Theory file Tardos' course Algorithmic Game Theory file Game Theory .net (list of computer-science-related game-theory courses) file PPAD and the hardness of computing a Nash equilibrium On the Complexity of the Parity Argument and Other Inefficient Proofs of Existence. Papadimitriou'94. PDF document Wikipedia entry on PPAD file "What is PPAD?" short blog post by Lance Fortnow file CACM summary version of Daskalakis et al's paper PDF document [Daskalakis05Complexity] - "The complexity of computing a Nash equilibrium" (multiplayer) file [Goldberg05Reducibility] - "Reducibility Among Equilibrium Problems" (reducing graphical games to 4-player matrix games) file [Chen05Hardness] - "Settling the Complexity of 2-Player Nash-Equilibrium" file Kearns survey on graphical games PDF document

This topic 6	Multiplayer optimization games [Charikar08Online] "Online Multicast with Egalitarian Cost Sharing" PDF document

7	Auctions [Roughgarden08Auctions] -- Lectures on Combinatorial Auctions PDF document

8	Mechanism design [Hartline06Mechanism] -- Lectures on Optimal Mechanism Design PDF document

9	Related courses Arora's Seminar in Algorithms and Complexity file Avrim Blum's course Approximation and Online algorithms file Cheriyan and Ravi's course on Approximation Algorithms for Network Problems file