Project Information

Thursday November 30:
• Rishi Saket: [Dyer-Frieze-Jerrum] On counting independent sets in sparse graphs
• Subrhmanyam Kalyanasundaram: [Hayes] A simple condition for rapid mixing.
• Bradley Green: [Gore-Jerrum] Swendsen-Wang process does not always mix rapidly.
• Giovanni Ciriello: [Miklos] MCMC Genome Rearrangement

Tuesday December 5:
• Varun Kanade: [Diaconis] Bose-Einstein Markov Chain
• Giorgos Amanatidis: [Bhatnagar-Randall] Torpid mixing of simulated tempering on the Potts model
• Ashok Ponnuswami: [Radmeacher-Vempala] Dispersion of Mass
• Spencer Brubacker: [Dyer-Sinclair-Vigoda-Weitz] Mixing in time and space

Thursday December 7:

• Stephen Young: [Gkantsidis-Mihail-Saberi] Conductance and Congestion of Power Law Graphs
• Brian Williams and Danupon Nanogkai: [Peres-Morris] Evolving Sets and [Morris] Thorp Shuffle
• Gagan Goel: [Morris] Improved Bounds for Sampling Contingency Tables

• First you need to choose a paper. I expect you will learn a fair bit just in looking around for an appropriate paper. A starting point is to look at the abstracts of papers of some people in the area. Here are a few people, and from their co-authors you'll find others. This is just a sample of people, feel free to choose papers from other people.
  David Aldous ,
  Persi Diaconis ,
  Martin Dyer ,
  Leslie Goldberg ,
  Tom Hayes (suggestion: FOCS '06 paper)
  Mark Jerrum ,
  Laszlo Lovasz ,
  Milena Mihail,
  Ben Morris (suggestion: Thorp shuffle or Evolving sets) ,
  Alistair Sinclair ,
  Dana Randall (suggestion: simulated tempering)
  Prasad Tetali,
  Santosh Vempala (suggestion: lower bound for volume paper in FOCS'06)
  Dror Weitz
  David Wilson
• Come by my office to discuss your project choice. You are supposed to do individual projects, unless the topic clearly warrants multiple people.
• You will prepare a short (3-4 pages) set of lecture notes. The goal is to express the main ideas of the proof. It is not to simply re-do the intro or give a full proof as is done in the original paper. I want you to explain the key idea to make sure you can give a clear talk. This will be due before Thanksgiving.
• You will give a short (20 minute) presentation during the last week of classes. We will arrange this for the last week of classes: Tuesday December 5 and Thursday December 7. You need to give a computer talk (i.e., latex or powerpoint).