Seminar Saturdays
Update: We are restarting Seminar Saturdays!
An initiative where students present something of their choice every alternate week. It could be a research paper/topic/field/concept etc. A short 30-60 minute presentation, followed by an audience interaction.
Usually hosted on Zoom or Discord. If the speaker and audience permit, talks are recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel too.
Upcoming Talks
- A brief introduction to metric TSP: Aditya Subramanian
- Time: 9PM
- Date: 22nd February, 2025
- Location: Vindhya A3-117 (link to join online will be shared on our Discord/Announcement group 10 minutes before the talk)
- Talk Abstract: The Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is one of the most well-known and extensively studied problems in combinatorial optimization. As an NP-hard problem, solving TSP optimally for large instances is infeasible, making approximation algorithms essential. This talk will explore Christofides’ Algorithm, which provides a 3/2-approximation for metric TSP. We will walk through the key steps of the algorithm, including Minimum Spanning Trees (MSTs), Minimum Weight Perfect Matchings (MWPM), Eulerian Tours, and Shortcuts, and analyze its correctness and complexity.
- (You could be here! Contact us)
Vision
The seminars were initially started as a way to share ideas and learn theory together. We hosted talks on various topics given by current students. With time, we shifted the focus to research seminars. Research students in different fields would come and talk about their line of work, open problems and how it is in general. For the newer edition, we plan to host expository talks on various theoretical topics, balancing between breadth and depth.
We are looking for active researchers (both current students and alumni; primarily graduate and post-doc students) to come and give talks, and share their knowledge and experience with young aspiring researchers. If you are interested or know someone who is interested in giving a talk, please contact our team