Stop Worrying and Start Sampling: The Power of Randomness in Computation.
Abstract:
If we worry less about what happens in the worst-case scenario and shift our focus to more plausible
scenarios, we can achieve a lot of things. The focus of this talk is to demonstrate how randomness
helps in designing very fast, simple, and elegant algorithms that only have a little chance of
failing. These techniques find many applications, ranging from calculating pi to rendering video
games.
Speaker Bio
K. V. N. Sreenivas is a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru, advised by Dr.
Arindam Khan. He did his BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay and MTech
(Research) from IISc. He is a recipient of the Google PhD Fellowship and Recipient of Dr. MNS Swamy
Medal for Best MTech (Research) Thesis. His research interests mainly lie in Approximation and
Online algorithms, and Beyond worst-case models.