Monday, April 11, marked the seventh annual ARC Theory Day, which brought together some of the country’s and Georgia Tech’s furthermost experts in computer science and related fields. The event featured young leaders in the arena of theoretical computer science including Stanford’s Virginia Williams, Rocco Servedio from Columbia University, Aaron Sidford of Microsoft Research, and Luca Trevisan from the University of California at Berkeley.

“This year’s event was exceptional,” said ARC Director Dana Randall. It showcased “tremendous breakthroughs” and displayed the breadth of activity in the realm of theoretical computer science that is propelling the field, she added.

Since its inception, ARC Theory Day has been a hallmark event for Georgia Tech’s Algorithms and Randomness Center (ARC). ARC identifies problems connected to algorithms and randomness and suggests provable algorithms and algorithmic explanations. Now in its seventh year, ARC Theory Day is a highly-respected event that attracts top-tier minds in many connected fields.

“We have many theory-related fields across Georgia Tech, so events like Theory Day are really important to bring everyone together,” said Randall, “This is one of the great events ARC does to bring people together to solve problems.”

One of the highlights was Williams, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University, and her presentation on “Fine-Grained Algorithms and Complexity,” which identifies meaningful relationships between computational problems so that bounds on the time required for solutions to one can be related to time required for the other.

Trevisan, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, presented a history and recent finding on Ramanujan graphs. He explained the recent discovery that special expanders known as Ramanujan Graphs can be constructed for any number of vertices and degrees.

Servedio, associate professor of computer science at Columbia University, and Postdoctoral Researcher Aaron Sidford also gave enlightening presentations explaining their recent work on “Circuit Lower Bounds via Random Projections” and “Recent Advances in the Theory of Interior Point Methods,” respectively.

For more information on the ARC Center or to read the abstracts from this year’s speakers, follow the links provided:

ARC Website: http://arc.gatech.edu

ARC Theory Day: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/calendar/day/2016/04/11/9941