CS270

Combinatorial Algorithms and Data Structures

Spring 2017


Announcements Course Staff Course Outline Assessment Homeworks Notes and Handouts

Announcements

Homework

Lecture slides.

Notes.

Course Outline

This course will focus on some of the most important modern algorithmic problems, such as clustering, and a set of beautiful techniques that have been invented to tackle them. The techniques include the use of geometry, convexity and duality, the formulation of computational tasks in terms of two person games and algorithms as two dueling subroutines. We will also explore the use of randomness in MCMC type algorithms and the use of concentration bounds in creating small core sets or sketches of input data, which can be used to quickly get a reasonable solution. We will also explore the use of these new techniques to speed up classical combinatorial optimization problems such as max-flow.


Course Staff


Satish Rao (satishr@cs.berkeley.edu)
Benjamin Weitz (bsweitz@cs.berkeley.edu)

Office hours.

  • See Piazza.


  • Scheduling

    The class meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-11:00 in 306 Soda.

    Assessment

    The grading will be based on regular homeworks (40 %) where collaboration, full credited, is allowed, 1 homework/midterm (25 %) where collaboration is prohibited, and a project (35 %). The project can be done in groups of 2 or 3 and should either be connecting your research to topics in this class, or digesting a topic of interest related to this class. The main output of the project is a report and a presentation to the course staff.