Date |
Topic |
Reference |
Notes |
Jan 26 |
Intro, Vertex Cover |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 1.1 |
|
Jan 31 |
Steiner Tree, TSP |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 2.4, Exercise 2.5 |
|
Feb 2 |
Greedy: Set Cover |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 1.6 |
|
Feb 4 |
Greedy: Max Coverage, k-Center |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 2.2, Exercise 2.11 |
|
Feb 9 |
Local Search: Max Cut and Weighted Max Cut |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video |
HW1 released |
Feb 11 |
Local Search: Min Degree Spanning Tree |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 2.6, 9.3 |
|
Feb 16 |
Rounding and Dynamic Programming: Knapsack |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 3.1 |
|
Feb 18 |
Rounding and Dynamic Programming: Min Makespan Scheduling |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 3.2 |
HW1 due, HW2 released |
Feb 23 |
Intro to LPs for Approximation Algorithms |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 1.2, 1.3, 4.3, Appendix A |
|
Feb 25 |
Deterministic Rounding: Metric Uncapacitated Facility Location |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 4.5 |
|
Mar 2 |
Randomized Rounding: Set Cover and UFL |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 1.7, 5.8 |
|
Mar 4 |
Randomized Rounding: Integer Multicommodity Flow |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 5.10, 5.11 |
HW2 due, HW3 released |
Mar 12 |
Randomized Rounding: Group Steiner Tree |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Notes from CMU, GKR paper |
|
Mar 14 |
Tree Embeddings and Group Steiner Tree |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video |
|
Mar 16 |
Tree Embeddings: FRT |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 8.5 |
|
Mar 18 |
LPs as Metrics: s-t Mincut and Multiway Cut |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 8.1, 8.2 |
HW3 due, HW4 released |
Mar 23 |
LPs as Metrics: Multiway Cut and Multicut |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 8.2 |
|
Mar 25 |
LPs as Metrics: Multicut |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 8.3 |
|
Apr 1 |
LP duality and flow/cut gaps |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 1.4, Appendix A |
HW4 due, HW5 released |
Apr 6 |
Dual Fitting and Primal-Dual Algorithms |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 1.5, 1.6, 7.1, 7.3 |
|
Apr 8 |
Primal-Dual: Steiner Forest |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 7.4 |
|
Apr 13 |
Strengthening Relaxations: Knapsack-Cover Inequalities |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 7.5 |
|
Apr 15 |
Semidefinite Programming: Max-Cut |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 6.1, 6.2 |
HW5 due |
Apr 20 |
Semidefinite Programming: Correlation Clustering and Max-2SAT |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 6.4 |
|
Apr 27 |
Hardness of Approximation and the PCP Theorem |
Lecture Board, Video, Chapters 16.1, 16.2, 16.3 |
|
Apr 29 |
Hardness of Approximation: Two-Prover Proof Systems and Label Cover |
Lecture Notes, Lecture Board, Video, Chapter 16.4 |
|