This page lists the colloquiums conducted by the Department of CSE, IIT Palakkad.

Talks

(5) 25 October 2023 : Secure Multi-party Computation: The holy grail of Cryptography

  • Speaker: Dr. Arpita Patra (CSA, IISc)
  • Venue: Room No. A01-102, Saraswathi
  • Abstract: Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) is the standard-bearer and holy-grail problem in Cryptography that permits a collection of data-owners to compute a collaborative result, without any of them gaining any knowledge about the data provided by the other, except what is derivable from the result of the computation. This talk will discuss the fundamental concept of garbled circuits and the Yao's two-party computation which is the first MPC construct in literature. In the end, I will briefly touch upon various applications of MPC.

(4) 17 August 2023 : A tour through conflict-free coloring and minimum membership dominating set

  • Speaker: Prof. N. S. Narayanaswamy (IIT Madras)
  • Venue: Room A01-002, Ground Floor, Academic Building Sahyadri Campus
  • Abstract: Conflict-free coloring has been a problem of fundamental combinatorial interest over the last two decades. In this talk, I will survey the current results and present some connections to a different optimization problem related to the minimum dominating set. The results can be found in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.01459.pdf, https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06656, and https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.00387.pdf

(3) 27 February 2023 : Winding number and circular 4-coloring of (signed) graphs

  • Speaker: Dr. Reza Naserasr (IRIF, France)
  • Venue: Board Room, Ahalia Campus
  • Abstract: In this talk first we explore an extension of the notion of circular coloring form graphs to signed graphs. In particular we present a bipartite analogue of the generalized Mycielski graphs on odd cycles and investigate their circular chromatic number. To prove the lower bound of 4 we use an elementary notion of the algebraic topology, namely the winding number of a closed curve, thus presenting in an elementary manner a strong connection between the two subjects.

(2) 15 February 2023 : Space Efficient Suffix Trees -- Theory meets Practice

  • Speaker: Prof. Venkatesh Raman (The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai)
  • Venue: Room no 33, Ahalia Campus
  • Abstract: Suffix Trees discovered in 1973 is a powerful data structure for string processing. They are at the heart of many search engines like Google and of modern genome sequencing packages in Computational Biology. Their practical implementations were possible through a lot of developments in space efficient data structures. We will see a guided tour of suffix trees, their applications and space efficient data structures in this talk.

(1) 01 February 2023 : Selecting Vertices at Random

  • Speaker: Prof. Saket Saurabh (The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai)
  • Venue: Room no 33, Ahalia Campus
  • Abstract: We survey some recent graph algorithms that are based on picking a vertex at random and declaring it to be a part of the solution. This simple idea has been deployed to obtain state-of-the-art parameterized, exact exponential time, and approximation algorithms for a number of problems, such as Feedback Vertex Set and 3-Hitting Set. We will also discuss a recent 2-approximation algorithm for Feedback Vertex Set in Tournaments that is based on picking a vertex at random and declaring it to /not/ be part of the solution.