Speakers & Panelists

Johanne Cohen (National Centre for Scientific Research, France)

Talk title. The Canadian Traveller Problem: Shortest Paths When Roads Close

Talk abstract. You leave home with a map, and on the way some roads turn out to be closed at the last minute. If at most k roads can be blocked, how do you find your way? This is the Canadian Traveller Problem: reach your destination at the lowest cost when up to k edges may be blocked, and you only learn that a road is closed when you get near it. This talk shows how a classic problem, the shortest path, changes once roads can close and, on top of that, once they only open at certain times. We model the problem as a game between two players, and we show how the information known by the traveller changes how hard the problem is.

Inge Li Gørtz (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark)

Talk title. Compressed Computation

Talk abstract. Data compression is an essential tool for storing and communicating large data sets. Especially for highly repetitive data, compression tools can dramatically reduce the size of the data to a tiny fraction of its original size. To perform computation on compressed data, the standard approach requires first decompressing the data, incurring a huge overhead in space and time and limiting the amount of data we can feasibly handle.

In this talk, we will first introduce the basic ideas behind lossless compression through the classical LZ77 algorithm. We then explore a different question: once data has been compressed, can we still access and process it efficiently without decompressing everything first?

Qi Qi (Renmin University of China, China)

Talk title: TBA.

Talk abstract: TBA.