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CS Colloquium
Mon, Feb 28, 2011 @ 03:30 PM - 01:00 PM
Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Sasha Alexander Sherstov, Microsoft Research
Talk Title: Limits of Communication
Abstract: Consider a function f whose arguments are distributed among several parties, making it impossible for any one party to compute f in isolation. Initiated in 1979, communication complexity theory studies how many bits of communication are needed to evaluate f. I will prove that:
1. some natural and practical problems require high communication to achieve any advantage at all over random guessing;
2. solving n instances of any known communication problem on a quantum computer incurs Omega(n) times the cost of a single instance, even to achieve exponentially small correctness probability.
The proofs work by recasting the communication problem geometrically and looking at the dual problem in a novel way. Our results resolve open problems dating back to 1986.
Biography: Alexander Sherstov earned his Ph.D. in computer science in August 2009 at the University of Texas at Austin, under the direction of Prof. Adam Klivans, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. He has broad research interests in theoretical computer science, including complexity theory, computational learning theory, and quantum computing.
Host: Prof. Ming-Deh Huang
Location: SAL 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kanak Agrawal
