Note: This webpage is still under consideration. More details will be added soon!

CSE 725: Expanders, Property Testing and the PCP Theorem - II

Here's the webpage for Part I of the seminar series.

Instructor

Hung Ngo

Email:
Phone:	(716) 645-3180 x 160
Office:	238 Bell Hall

Instructor

Atri Rudra

Email:
Phone:	(716) 645-3180 x 117
Office:	123 Bell Hall

Class Meetings

Monday, Wednesday. 3:30pm-5:00pm

224 Bell Hall

Course Announcement

Course Blog

We will be using a blog for the course in lieu of a course newsgroup. All announcements will be made on the blog. If you are attending the course, you must check the blog regularly (and consider subscribing to the RSS feed).

Reference material

Not surprisingly, we will not follow any particular textbook. We will mostly follow papers. Here are some resources relevant to the seminar.

Lecture notes on the proof of the PCP theorem from a course by Venkatesan Guruswami and Ryan O'Donnell. The course was offered in Fall 2005 at the University of Washington.
A survey on expanders by Shlomo Hoory, Nati Linial and Avi Wigderson. This is perhaps the survey on expanders. The survey won the AMS Levi L. Conant Prize in 2008.
Two surveys on property testing: one by Eldar Fischer and another by Dana Ron. (Some more here.)

Class Schedule

Here is a tentative schedule for the seminar: there will be roughly 27 lectures (in 15 weeks, but we have a week off for Spring break and one Monday off for Martin Luther King's day), of which 17 are presented by Atri and Hung, and 10 are student presentations. Each student will present 2 lectures: 1 on a PCP Theorem related topic (such as constructing specialized PCPs), and 1 on hardness of approximation.

Dates	Topic	Lecturer
Week 1, Mon Jan 12	Recap on expanders and overview of PCP theorem's proof	Hung
Week 1, Wed Jan 14	Recap on property testing	Atri
Week 2, Mon Jan 19	No lecture -- Martin Luther King day.
Week 2, Wed Jan 21	Proof of PCP Theorem	Atri/Hung
Week 3, Mon Jan 26
Week 3, Wed Jan 28
Week 4, Mon Feb 02
Week 4, Wed Feb 04
Week 5, Mon Feb 09
Week 5, Wed Feb 11
Week 6, Mon Feb 16
Week 6, Wed Feb 18		Student
Week 7, Mon Feb 23		Student
Week 7, Wed Feb 25		Student
Week 8, Mon Mar 02		Student
Week 8, Wed Mar 04		Student
Week 9, Mon Mar 09	No lectures this week. Spring recess!
Week 9, Wed Mar 11	No lectures this week. Spring recess!
Week 10, Mon Mar 16	The hardness of approximation connection	Hung/Atri
Week 10, Wed Mar 18
Week 11, Mon Mar 23
Week 11, Wed Mar 25
Week 12, Mon Mar 30
Week 12, Wed Apr 01
Week 13, Mon Apr 08
Week 13, Wed Apr 10	Chuzhoy et al, On the approximability of some network design problems, SODA 2007	Yang
Week 14, Mon Apr 15	Irit Dinur, Shmuel Safra: The importance of being biased. STOC 2002: 33-42	Nathan
Week 14, Wed Apr 17	On the hardness of approximating multicut and sparsest cut, CCC 2005	Swapnooneel
Week 15, Mon Apr 22	Cheng and Wan, A Deterministic Reduction for the Gap Minimum Distance Problem, STOC 2009	Steve
Week 15, Wed Apr 24	Matthew Andrews, Lisa Zhang, Logarithmic hardness of the undirected edge-disjoint paths problem, JACM 2006	Thanh

Workload

The workload will be pretty light. Other than attending the lectures, students will have to do the following:

Present a paper (or two) related to the seminar. Here is a list to get started. Note that this list is just meant to be a starting point: by all means feel free to choose a paper related to what we cover in the lectures that is not there is the list (but do get approval from Hung or Atri). Students can pair up to present a paper or present papers individually.
The students are expected to think about research problems related to the seminar. You are expected to submit a 1-2 page report at the end of the semester.

Grades

A grade of satisfactory/unsatisfactory will be assigned at the end of the course. If you want a letter grade, talk to the instructors about more details.

Academic Honesty

We have zero tolerance for cheating and will follow the CSE Department Policies on Academic Integrity.