A number of faculty and students represented the Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing this week in Barcelona, Spain, presenting five research papers at the 2017 ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2017).

The papers featured contributions from faculty and students in the School of Computer Science (SCS) and the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE), both in the College of Computing.

Ph.D. student Matthew Fahrbach presented one of the five papers, which he coauthored with fellow Ph.D. Student Ben Cousins and Former SCS Graduate Student Prateek Bhakta. SCS ADVANCE Professor and Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) Co-Executive Director Dana Randall also made contributions to the paper. Other College of Computing faculty presenting at SODA 2017 included SCS Assistant Professor Richard Peng, who presented research done in conjunction with colleagues at three peer institutions, SCS Professor Santosh Vempala, and CSE Research Scientist Sharma Thankachan.

Along with accepted research papers, Georgia Tech was represented at the planning level for the event, as well. Randall is in the second-term of a multiyear position with the SODA Steering Committee, helping to organize the conference. In addition to her steering committee role, Randall also aided the program committee for the annual Analytic Algorithmics and Combinatorics (ANALCO17). One of two satellite conferences collocated with SODA. Chair David Bader served on the program committee for Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX17), ANALCO’s sister event.

Sponsored jointly by ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory and the SIAM Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics, SODA is one of the most prominent conferences on discrete algorithms. It focuses on research topics related to efficient algorithms and data structures for discrete problems. In addition to the design of such methods and structures, the scope of the conference also includes implementation, performance analysis, and mathematical problems related to the development and limitations of discrete algorithms.

The SODA took place between Jan. 16-19.

Georgia Tech College of Computing Supported Papers at SODA 2017:

A Framework for Analyzing Resparsification Algorithms

Rasmus Kyng  (Yale University); Jakub Pachocki (Harvard University); Richard Peng (Georgia Institute of Technology); Sushant Sachdeva (Google)

Parameterized Pattern Matching – Succinctly

Arnab Ganguly (Louisiana State University); Rahul Shah (Louisiana State University); Sharma V. Thankachan (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Statistical Query Algorithms for Mean Vector Estimation and Stochastic Convex Optimization

Vitaly Feldman (IBM Research – Almaden); Cristobal Guzman (Escuela de Ingenier ́ıa Pontificia Universidad Cato ́lica de Chile); Santosh Vempala (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Adaptive Matrix Vector Product

Santosh Vempala (Georgia Institute of Technology); David P. Woodruff (IBM Research – Almaden)

Approximately Sampling Elements with Fixed Rank in Graded Posets

Prateek Bhakta (University of Richmond); Ben Cousins (Georgia Institute of Technology); Matthew Fahrbach (Georgia Institute of Technology); Dana Randall (Georgia Institute of Technology)