CATS-Sept-25-2015
Title
Lassere Hierarchy
Speaker
Karthik A Sankararaman
Abstract
Lassere Hierarchy is an important tool for systematically reducing the size of a feasible polytope in many optimization problems. This tool has been used extensively in the last decade in a variety of approximation algorithms. In this talk, we will go over a beautiful survey written by Thomas Rothvoss on this subject(http://www.math.washington.edu/~rothvoss/lecturenotes/lasserresurvey.pdf). This will be a two-part talk. In the first part, we will go over some of the basic definitions and properties. In the second part, we will have a look at some of the applications and the power of this tool. This talk is a good mix of convex optimization and algorithmic techniques with very little pre-requisites needed. People working outside theory might also find it relevant and interesting.