Keren Censor-Hillel, Technion

18 December 2019, Room ALG, 9:20am

Keren Censor-Hillel, Technion

Distributed Optimization And Approximation: How Difficult Can It Be?

We know that exact distributed algorithms for optimization problems cannot be fast. To overcome these barriers, very efficient approximation algorithms have been designed in various distributed settings. But for very small approximation factors, a mystery remains: Why do we not have fast distributed algorithms for very small approximations factors in bandwidth restricted settings? This talk will overview the state-of-the-art of distributed optimization and approximation algorithms and discuss the major challenges in determining the complexity of small approximations.

Keren is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Technion. Her research interests are mainly in distributed computing, especially probabilistic algorithms and lower bounds, and theory of computing in general. Among others, she is the recipient of an ERC starting grant (2017), and a Henry Taub research grant (2018).