[Colloquium] Date Correction: Talk by Eric Vigoda, Georgia Institute of Technology on Tuesday, April 8, 2008

[Katie Casey]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Date: Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Time: 12:00 p.m.
Place: Kent 120, 1020 E. 58th Street

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Speaker:	Eric Vigoda

From:		Georgia Institute of Technology

Web page:	http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vigoda/

Title: Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms

Abstract: In this talk, I'll look at the design and analysis of Markov  
Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms.  In the first part of the talk I  
will present MCMC algorithms which yielded the first polynomial-time  
algorithms for important combinatorial problems.  In particular, I'll  
present MCMC algorithms for sampling/counting 0-1 contingency tables  
with arbitrary row/column sums, and estimating the permanent of a non- 
negative matrix.  These algorithms require a sophisticated simulated  
annealing type approach, with a sequence of problem instances starting  
from a trivial instance (infinite temperature) and slowly moving to  
the instance of interest (zero temperature).

In the second part of the talk I will discuss the use of MCMC  
algorithms in evolutionary biology for phylogenetic reconstruction.   
I'll present some recent work in that setting where heterogeneous data  
causes the MCMC algorithms to be slow to converge to the desired  
posterior distribution.
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Host:	Stuart Kurtz
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