Swati Gupta, MIT. When someone is denied a job, offered a different price for the same goods or services, or declined a loan, intent to discriminate is often not the case. The decision system applies the same data and rules to all and yet has a disproportionate effect on various groups. The causes of such… Read More »New Algorithmic Challenges for Ethical Decision-Making

Chandrajit Bajaj, UT Austin Reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous state and action spaces is arguably one the most challenging problems within the field of machine learning.  Most current learning methods focus on integral identities such as value (Q) functions to derive an optimal strategy for the learning agent. In this talk we present the dual… Read More »Global Search and Discovery with Differential Policy Optimization

Deepak Bansal, Microsoft Abstract: Customer networks have grown, mostly organically, large and complex in cloud environments like Azure. Customers are often afraid to make changes and find it hard to diagnose when things go wrong. In this talk, I am going to share how Microsoft is using LLMs to simplify network operations at scale in… Read More »Leveraging LLMs for Networking & Security in Cloud Environments

Vijay V. Vazirani , University of California, Irvine. It is well known that the proof of some prominent results in mathematics took a very long time --- decades and even centuries. The first proof of the Micali-Vazirani (MV) algorithm, for finding a maximum cardinality matching in general graphs, was recently completed --- over four decades… Read More »A Theory of Alternating Paths and Blossoms, from the Perspective of Minimum Length

Rajeev Barua, University of Maryland. The battle between cyber attackers and attack detection teams is an arms race that is not letting up. Attackers constantly devise new ways of exploiting system vulnerabilities, and new methods to hide from detection. In response, detection teams have responded with new technologies to detect attacks. This talk will overview… Read More »Cybersecurity: Why its hard, solutions, and careers

Allan Borodin, University of Toronto What can and cannot be computed by “conceptually simple algorithms"? In this regard, my primary interest is in approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems and the relation of such problems to areas such as scheduling, algorithmic game theory and computational social choice. Why do we care about conceptual simplicity, and… Read More »Online, greedy, and conceptually simple algorithms

Sourav Chakraborty  (Indian Statistical Institute) We will present a very simple streaming algorithm on F0 estimation that also caught the eye of Donald E. Knuth.  In a recent article, Donald E. Knuth started with the following two paragraphs:   "Sourav Chakraborty, N. V. Vinodchandran, and Kuldeep S. Meel have recently proposed an interesting algorithm for the following… Read More »Distinct Elements in Streams and the Klee’s Measure Problem

Speaker: Raghuvansh Saxena (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) We show how to convert any circuit of poly-logarithmic depth and polynomial size into a functionally equivalent circuit of polynomial size (and polynomial depth) that is resilient to adversarial short-circuit errors. Specifically, the resulting circuit computes the same function even if up to $epsilon d$ gates on… Read More »Polynomial Size, Short-Circuit Resilient Circuits for NC