The Boot Camp is intended to acquaint program participants with the key themes of the program. Each speaker will give a sequence of three lectures on the topics below.

Click on the titles of individual talks for abstract, slides and archived video.

All events take place in the Calvin Lab Auditorium.

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Coffee and Check-In
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Opening Remarks
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Spectral Graph Theory I: Introduction to Spectral Graph Theory
Luca Trevisan (Bocconi University)
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Break
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Graph Sparsification I: Sparsification via Effective Resistances
Nikhil Srivastava (Simons Institute, UC Berkeley)
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Lunch
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Spectral Graph Theory II: Expanders and Eigenvalues
Luca Trevisan (Bocconi University)
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Break
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Graph Sparsification II: Barrier Functions and Rank-one Updates
Nikhil Srivastava (Simons Institute, UC Berkeley)
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Coffee and Check-In
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Spectral Graph Theory III: Small-set Expanders, Clustering, and Eigenvalues
Luca Trevisan (Bocconi University)
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Break
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Graph Sparsification III: Interlacing Polynomials and Ramanujan Graphs of Every Degree
Nikhil Srivastava (Simons Institute, UC Berkeley)
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Lunch
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Semidefinite Programming Hierarchies I: Convex Relaxations for Hard Optimization Problems
David Steurer (Cornell University)
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Break
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Laplacian Systems and Electrical Flows I: Intro to Laplacian Systems, Iterative Methods, and Preconditioning
Jon Kelner (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Coffee and Check-In
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Laplacian Systems and Electrical Flows II: Solving Laplacian Systems Using Recursive Preconditioning
Jon Kelner (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Break
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Semidefinite Programming Hierarchies II: Hierarchies of Relaxations and their Strengths and Limitations
David Steurer (Cornell University)
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Lunch
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Laplacian Systems and Electrical Flows III: A Simple, Combinatorial Solver without Recursive Preconditioning
Jon Kelner (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Break
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Electrical Flows, Optimization, and New Approaches to the Maximum Flow Problem I: Electrical Flows as a New Primitive for Graph Algorithms
Aleksander Mądry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Coffee and Check-In
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Electrical Flows, Optimization, and New Approaches to the Maximum Flow Problem II: Approximating Maximum Flow with Electrical Flows
Aleksander Mądry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Break
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Semidefinite Programming Hierarchies III: Applications of the Sum-of-squares Method
David Steurer (Cornell University)
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Lunch
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Electrical Flows, Optimization, and New Approaches to the Maximum Flow Problem III: Maximum Flows and Interior-point Methods
Aleksander Mądry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)