Delegating the chore of data entry is not a new idea. In the past, physicians have utilized dictation software and transcriptionists to document patient records. As more and more hospitals and private practitioners are transitioning to an electronic medical record to be in compliance with “meaningful use,” a new class of medical professional has emerged to alleviate the burden of documentation....

Scribe notes from the 2012 Barbados Workshop on Computational Complexity. A series of lectures on Analysis of Boolean Functions by Ryan O'Donnell, with a guest lecture by Per Austrin.

We define a RELOAD Usage for Application Layer Multicast as well as a mapping to the RELOAD experimental message type to support ALM. The ALM Usage is intended to support a variety of ALM control algorithms in an overlay-independent way. Two example algorithms are defined, based on Scribe and P2PCast.

Access-control lists (ACLs) are a traditional way to enforce permissions for access control. A trusted entity (e.g., operating system) knows which principals (e.g., users, programs) have access to which resources (e.g., files). One problem with ACLs is that they do not keep track of why each principal was granted a certain set of permissions. This allows a malicious entity to misuse permissions...

Recall that many combinatorial problems of interest can be encoded as integer linear programs. Solving integer linear programs is in general NP-hard, so we nearly always relax the integrality requirement into a linear constraint like nonnegativity during our analysis. Our previous algorithms for solving these problems never solved the relaxed program explicitly (e.g. using simplex). In LP round...

Proof The theorem is from the 90's [KS92, Raz92] and the proofs were a little complicated, but information theoretic ideas helped simplify the proofs, at least conceptually [BYJKS04]. The main idea is that if we solve this problem using o(n) bits of communication, then for some pair of bits, xi, yi, we convey very little amount of information, and hence we have no idea what xi ∧ yi is. It requi...

When people think of ancient Egypt, they tend to think of temples and tombs decorated with hieroglyphs and of rich and powerful rulers controlling all aspects of the lives of their subjects. Since the draft manuscript that I have been checking this year included the letter P, and since the letter P includes a word for king, I thought it might be interesting to think about the phrases and titles...

Sometimes the edge set of an undirected graph is defined as a collection of doubleton subsets of the vertex set V . To unify the discussion, we will adopt the convention that the edge set E of a digraph G is a subset of V 2 and that G is undirected iff ∀i, j ∈ V ((i, j) ∈ E ↔ (j, i) ∈ E). Let G = (V,E) be a digraph with V = [n] = {1, . . . , n}. We can associate with G its adjacency matrix adj(...

Since 3-SAT is NP-complete, checking if a given assignment satisfies φ can be (trivially) accomplished in polynomial time, but finding such an assignment or proving that φ is unsatisfiable requires exponential time in general. Letting m, n, and l be (respectively) the number of clauses, variables, and literals in φ, the naive “try everything” or “guess and check” algorithm runs in O(2n ∗ l) tim...

Today we will look at a matrix analog of the standard scalar Chernoff bounds. This matrix analog will be used in the next lecture when we talk about graph sparsification. While we’re more interested in the application of the theorem than its proof, it’s still useful to see the similarities and the differences of moving from the proof of the result for scalars to the same result for matrices. Sc...