TITLE:  Branch Decompositions and Matroids:  Computational Techniques

ABSTRACT:

This talk gives a general overview of practical computational methods for computing branch decompositions of matroids and their usage for problems related to matroids such as solving integer programs and others.  The concept of branch decompositions and its related invariant branchwidth were first introduced by Robertson and Seymour in their proof of the Graph Minors Theorem and can be easily generalized for any symmetric submodular set function.  This talk is based on joint work with John Arellano, Edray Goins, Jing Ma, Susan Margulies, Nolan McMurray.

Bio:

Illya V. Hicks was born and raised in Waco, TX.  He received a BS in mathematics (1995) from Southwest Texas State University (currently Texas State University at San Marcos).  He also received an MA and PhD in Computational and Applied Mathematics (2000) from Rice University.  Illya served as faculty member in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Texas A&M University (2000-2006) and is currently a professor in the Computational and Applied Mathematics Department at Rice University where he also serves as faculty advisor to the president of Rice University.

In terms of research, his interests are in combinatorial optimization, graph theory, and integer programming with applications big data, imaging, social networks, and logistics.  Illya is also the recipient of the 2005 Optimization Prize for Young Researchers from the Optimization Society of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and the 2010 Forum Moving Spirit Award from INFORMS for his work with the Minority Issues Forum of INFORMS.