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

Talks

(5) 11 April 2025 : Looking for logic in social practices

  • Speaker: Prof. R. Ramanujam (Azim Premji University)
  • Venue: Room A01-102, Saraswati, Sahyadri Campus
  • Abstract: There are many algorithms implicit or explicit in the way society works: for example, an election, or vaccine distribution policy. These algorithms rely on logical properties of underlying physical and social structures. For instance, in many social procedures, people act in a specific way because 'everybody does this'. But this can lead to runaway phenomena. In an election, every voter would like a guarantee that their vote has been counted, and many such properties. Can we prove that these requirements are even consistent (something that we take for granted)? Many insights from mathematical logic, computer science, game theory and dynamical systems theory seem useful for such exploration.

(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.