TITLE: Continuous Approaches in Submodular Optimization

ABSTRACT:

The study of combinatorial problems with a submodular objective has attracted much attention in recent years, and is partly motivated by the fact that such problems arise in diverse settings such as combinatorial optimization, algorithmic game theory, economics, machine learning and social networks. This talk will survey some of the continuous approaches used in the last decade for constrained submodular maximization. One approach of particular interest that will be discussed is the continuous greedy algorithm and its applications.

BIO: Roy Schwartz in currently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Technion.

His research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, the geometry of metric spaces and its applications, submodular optimization, and randomized algorithms