2011-2012 Seminars

Oct
03
2011

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar I

Mechanism Design With Set-Theoretic Beliefs
11:15am|S-101

In settings of incomplete information, we put forward (1) a very conservative ---indeed, purely set-theoretic--- model of the beliefs (including totally wrong ones) that each player may have about the payoff types of his opponents, and (2) a new and...

Sep
27
2011

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar II

Tight Lower Bounds for 2-query LCCs Over Finite fields
10:30am|S-101

A locally correctable code (LCC) is an error correcting code mapping d symbols to n symbols, such that for every codeword c and every received word r that is \delta-close to c, we can recover any coordinate of c (with high probability) by only...

Sep
26
2011

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar I

Nonnegative k-Sums, Fractional Covers, and Probability of Small Deviations
Benny Sudakov
11:15am|S-101

More than twenty years ago, Manickam, Miklos, and Singhi conjectured that for any integers $n \geq 4k$, every set of $n$ real numbers with nonnegative sum has at least $\binom{n-1}{k-1}$ $k$-element subsets whose sum is also nonnegative.

In this...

Sep
20
2011

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar II

Existence of Small Families of t-wise Independent Permutations and t-Designs Via Local Limit Theorems
10:30am|S-101

We show existence of rigid combinatorial objects that previously were not known to exist. Specifically, we consider two families of objects: 1. A family of permutations on n elements is t-wise independent if it acts uniformly on tuples of t elements...