Georgia Tech faculty, postdocs, and students had 5 papers accepted to appear at the upcoming 57th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) conference in New Brunswick, New Jersey from October 9-11, 2016.  FOCS (together with STOC which occurs in the spring) are the premier venues for publishing algorithms research.  

The authors included ACO Ph.D. students David Durfee and Kevin Lai, ARC Postdoctoral Fellows Charilaos Efthymiou and Anup Rao, and ARC Professors Richard Peng, Santosh Vempala, and Eric Vigoda.  In addition, Anand Louis is a recent graduate from Georgia Tech with an ACO PhD, and is now a postdoc at Princeton University.

The five FOCS papers are the following: 

• Accelerated Newton Iteration for Roots of Black Box Polynomials

               - Anand Louis (Princeton) and Santosh Vempala (Georgia Tech).

• Agnostic Estimation of Mean and Covariance

                - Kevin Lai (Georgia Tech), Anup Rao (Georgia Tech), and Santosh Vempala (Georgia Tech).

• Convergence of MCMC and Loopy BP in the Tree Uniqueness Region for the Hard-Core Model  

                - Charilaos Efthymiou (Georgia Tech), Thomas P. Hayes (New Mexico), Daniel Stefankovic (University of Rochester), Eric Vigoda (Georgia Tech), and Yitong Yin (Nanjing University).

• Faster Algorithms for Computing the Stationary Distribution, Simulating Random Walks, and More

                 - Michael B. Cohen (MIT), Jonathan Kelner (MIT),  John Peebles (MIT), Richard Peng (Georgia Tech), Aaron Sidford (Microsoft), and Adrian Vladu (MIT).

• On Fully Dynamic Graph Sparsifiers   

                 - Ittai Abraham (VMware), David Durfee (Georgia Tech), Ioannis Koutis (Puerto Rico), Sebastian Krinninger (Max Planck), and Richard Peng (Georgia Tech).