Advanced Algorithm Design

COS 521
Fall 2020

General Information:


Instructor: Sahil Singla (singla at cs dot princeton dot edu) (office hours: Tuesday and Thursday 3:00-4:00 PM)
TAs: Kritkorn Karntikoon, Antonio Molina Lovett, and Barak Nehoran.
Meeting time: Tuesday and Thursday 1:30-2:50 PM, Zoom Link
Course Information Sheet: Link
Piazza: Link
CodePost Use your princeton email to signup here
Final Project/Exam Guidelines

For a headstart, you may want to consult course notes from previous years: 2019 and 2018.

Homework: Homeworks will be posted below when they become available. Here is a LaTeX template you may use for the homework, and here is a short guide to LaTeX. Submit your homework on codePost.

Tentative Schedule:

Date Topic Notes
Sep 1 Introduction and Randomized Min-Cut Lecture 1
Sep 3 Hashing Lecture 2
Sep 8 Concentration Bounds Lecture 3
Sep 10 Hashing to Reals Lecture 4
Sep 15 Linear Programs and LP Rounding Lecture 5
Sep 17 LP Based Approximation and Duality Lecture 6
Sep 22 Strong Duality and Dual Fitting Lecture 7
Sep 24 Multiplicative Weights Lecture 8
Sep 29 (Online) Gradient Descent Lecture 9
Oct 1 Ellipsoid Algorithm Lecture 10
Oct 6 Semi-Definite Programs Lecture 11
Oct 8 Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lecture 12
Oct 13 Fall Break
Oct 15 Counting and Sampling Problems Lecture 13
Oct 20 Random Walks and Markov Chains Lecture 14
Oct 22 Low-Rank Approximations and SVD Lecture 15
Oct 27 Combinatorial Discrepancy Theory Lecture 16
Oct 29 Submodular Minimization Lecture 17
Nov 3 Online Algorithms Lecture 18
Nov 5 Online Primal-Dual Algorithms Lecture 19
Nov 10 Stochastic Optimization and Adaptivity Gaps using LPs Lecture 20
Nov 12 Combinatorial Auctions Lecture 21
Nov 17 Communication Complexity Lecture 22
Nov 19 Coding Theory Lecture 23
Nov 24 Differential Privacy Lecture 24