601.435/635 Approximation Algorithms - Spring 2021

Instructor: Michael Dinitz
Lecture: T Th 9am - 10:15am, Zoom link
Office Hours: Tuesdays 1:30pm - 2:45pm and by appointment, Zoom link
Teaching Assistant: Aditya Krishnan. Office Hours: by appointment

Resources:

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    



Assignments

Please submit homeworks using Gradescope (entry code 5VJB3K).

Additional Resources

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