Syllabus for CS 591-006 "Algorithms in the Real World"

Meeting Time and Place: Tuesdays and Thursdays 2:00-3:15 in Mechanical Engineering 208

Course Description:
In the past several years, the algorithms research community has had several major breakthroughs in designing algorithms which have both strong theoretical and strong empirical properties. For example, the very successful companies Google and Akamai were both built on provably good algorithms first described at major research conferences (WWW '96 and STOC '97 respectively). Additionally, the company Celera attributes much of its success in genome sequencing to its algorithm engineers.

In this course, we will study several algorithms which have been successful in the real world. We will learn some new algorithmic tools that have proven successful for real world problems including: ways to create approximation algorithms for NP-Hard problems, ways to exploit the power of randomness, and ways to create tractable abstract problems from messy real-world problems. We will also study some important open algorithmic problems whose solutions would have a big "real-world" impact.
Texts: There is no required text but the following texts are recommended for reference: "Approximation Algorithms for NP-Hard Problems" Edited by Dorit S. Hochbaum and "Randomized Algorithms" by Raghavan and Motwani.

Topics

Topics will include:

Advanced graph theory
- Hall's Theorem and Data Migration.
  "On Algorithms for Efficient Data Migration" by Joe Hall, Jason Hartline, Anna Karlin, Jared Saia and John Wilkes. Symposium on Discrete Algorithms 2001. ( ps , pdf).
- Expander graphs and Attack-Resistant P2P Networks.
  "Censorship Resistant Peer-To-Peer Content Addressable Networks" by Amos Fiat and Jared Saia. Journal of Algorithms 2002 ( ps , pdf).
- Szemeredi's Regularity Lemma ???
Randomized Algorithms
- Random Construction of Expander Graphs
  "Censorship Resistant Peer-To-Peer Content Addressable Networks" by Amos Fiat and Jared Saia. Journal of Algorithms 2002 ( ps , pdf).
- Web Caching with Consistent Hashing (the Akamai problem)
  "Consistent Hashing and Random Trees: Tools for Relieving Hot Spots on the World Wide Web" by David Karger, Eric Lehman, Tom Leighton, Matthew Levine, Daniel Lewin and Rina Panigrahy. STOC 1997. ( ps ). See also the simpler paper in WWW8 located here
- Pattern Matching and Fingerprinting ???
Spectral Analysis and Search Engines
- Clever Paper: "Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment" by Jon Kleinberg in Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1998 (.ps)
- Google Paper: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page in www7 ( html )
Online Algorithms
- Randomized Caching Algorithms
  Pages 374-377 in the "Randomized Algorithms" textbook
- Online Learning Algorithms
  Section 3.2 (The "Winnow Algorithm") of the survey paper "Online Algorithms in Machine Learning" by Avrim Blum. (.ps)
  See also "Empirical Support for Winnow and Weighted-Majority Algorithms: Results on a Calendar Scheduling Domain" by Avrim Blum in 12th International Conference on Machine Learning (.ps)
- Online Auctions ???
Miscellanious Algorithmic Tricks
- The String Alignment Algorithm for Computational Biology

Tentative Grading Weights

Homeworks (No more than four) (60%)
Presentation (40%)

Prerequisites

A necessary prerequisite for this class is a standard undergraduate algorithms course (equivalent to our CS 461). Some basic familiarity with discrete probability is also helpful although not required.

Policies

Assignment deadlines are strict: late homework will automatically receive a grade of zero, unless reasonable cause can be shown (which is easy for one, possible for two, and very hard for three or more!); no make-up. Collaboration is encouraged on all of the homeworks although the solutions should be written up individually. Usual university policies for withdrawals, incompletes and academic honesty.