Simon Fraser University

In this talk I will introduce a new semi-algebraic proof system, called Stabbing Planes that is in the style of DPLL-based modern SAT solvers. Stabbing Planes proofs extend the DPLL branching from single variables to branching on arbitrary linear...

How does representation of a problem affect the complexity of solving it? What is the interplay between the richness of a domain in which a statement is expressed and the complexity of proving that statement? Not only this is a fundamental question...

We will disucss some recent advances in the convergence of Anderson acceleration, an extrapolation technique that can be applied to general fixed-point iterations. The theory will be illustrated on some examples of systems arising from finite element...

Multiplayer games model the behavior of competing agents, and we are interested in the structure that emerges when the number of agents is large. The Dyson and Coulomb games are N-agent dynamic games that admit well studied models of statistical...

A double occurrence word w is a word (sequence of letters) in which each of its letters occurs exactly twice. Legal 2-coloring of w is a colouring of individual letters such that each letter occurs once red and once blue. Our goal is to find for a...

We consider the Dirichlet problem for a strongly-coupled nonlocal system of equations motivated by peridynamics, a model in continuum mechanics. The strain energy densities involve the magnitude of projected "directional" difference quotients of the...

Low Mach number equation sets approximate the equations of motion of a compressible fluid by filtering out the sound waves, which allows the system to evolve on the advective rather than the acoustic time scale. Depending on the degree of...

The aim of structured optimization is to assemble a solution, using a given set of atoms, to fit a model to data. Polarity, which generalizes the notion of orthogonality from linear sets to general convex sets, plays a special role in a simple and...

A challenge in descriptive complexity is to identify logics with low complexity that simultaneously express both fundamental reachability properties and counting properties on unordered structures. In this talk, we introduce a family of logics that...

Neural networks are remarkable families of non-linear functions that form the backbone for state-of-the-art algorithms in tasks from computer vision (self-driving cars), natural language processing (Google Translate) and reinforcement learning...