Seminar Geometry: Combinatorics and Algorithms FS21 (263-4203-00L)

Bernd Gärtner,	CAB G31.1,	Tel: 044-632 70 26,	lastname@inf.ethz.ch
Michael Hoffmann,	CAB G33.1,	Tel: 044-632 73 90,	lastname@inf.ethz.ch
Emo Welzl,	CAB G39.2,	Tel: 044-632 73 70,	firstname@inf.ethz.ch
Manuel Wettstein,	CAB G38,	Tel: 044-632 32 22,	firstname.lastname@inf.ethz.ch

Contents

This seminar is held once a year and complements the course Geometry: Combinatorics & Algorithms. Students of the seminar will present original research papers, some classic and some of them very recent. The seminar is a good preparation for a master, diploma, or semester thesis in the area.

To attend the seminar, some background in (discrete and computational) geometry and in graphs and algorithms is required. Thus, previous participation in the course "Geometry: Combinatorics & Algorithms" is a prerequisite.

Dates

First meeting: Friday Feb 26th 2020, 14:15, online.

Topic and Papers

The title of the seminar is Succinct approximate representation of point sets and shapes.
(To be able to access some of the papers linked below, you may need to be within the ETH network, e.g. via VPN.)

Schedule

All talks are 45min. plus 15min. discussion. Between two talks on the same day there is a 15min. break. All talks are held online using Zoom. Details are available to the participants and on request only.

• Preparation. Read the following article: Satyan L. Devadoss. Giving Good Talks. Notices AMS 66, 1647-1650, 2019.
• April 16, 2021, 14:15-15:00, Alain Bastian:
  Gill Barequet, Sariel Har-Peled. Efficiently Approximating the Minimum-Volume Bounding Box of a Point Set in Three Dimensions. J. Algorithms 38(1): 91-109, 2001.
• April 16, 2021, 15:30-16:15, Manuel Wiedmer:
  Bernd Gärtner. Cuboids (excerpt from lecture notes). 2007.
• April 23, 2021, 14:15-15:00, Philip Jordan:
  Pankaj Agarwal, Sariel Har-Peled, Kasturi Varadarajan. Geometric Approximation via Coresets. 2004.
• April 23, 2021, 15:30-16:15, Bernhard Linn Hilmarsson:
  David Arthur, Sergei Vassilvitskii. k-means++: the advantages of careful seeding. Proc. 18th ACM-SIAM Sympos. Discrete Algorithms (SODA'07), 1027-1035.
• May 21, 2021, 14:15-15:00, Lukas Pierce:
  Sanjoy Dasgupta and Anupam Gupta. An elementary proof of a theorem of Johnson and Lindenstrauss. RSA 22(1):60-65, 2003.
• May 21, 2021, 15:30-16:15, Judy Beestermöller:
  Jon Kleinberg. Two algorithms for nearest-neighbor search in high dimensions. Proc. 29th Annu. ACM Sympos. Theory Comput. (STOC'97), 599-608.
• May 28, 2021, 14:15-15:00, Jan Tempus:
  Noga Alon, Bruno Jartoux, Chaya Keller, Shakhar Smorodinsky, Yelena Yuditsky. The Epsilon-t-Net Problem. Proc. 36th Internat. Sympos. Comput. Geom. (SoCG'20), 5:1-5:15.

Conditions

The seminar is held in English. Each talk is 45min. plus about 15min. discussion.
Every participant is expected to read, understand, and elaborate on a selected research paper. To this end, (s)he should give a 45-min. presentation about the paper. The process includes

1. getting an overview of the related literature;
2. understanding and working out the background/motivation: why and where are the questions addressed relevant?
3. understanding the contents of the paper in all details;
4. selecting parts suitable for the presentation;
5. presenting the selected parts in such a way that an audience with some basic background in geometry and graph theory can easily understand and appreciate it.

For more details, please refer to our guidelines for seminar talks. A number of additional related documents from different authors (both in English and German) are linked to from here.

A successful participation in the seminar requires the following:

1. a rehearsal talk, to be given in front of your supervisor at least one week prior to the plenary talk;
2. a satisfactory plenary talk;
3. attendance at all other talks.

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Last modified: Tue Feb 23 22:11:38 CET 2021 by Michael Hoffmann.

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