Please join us for our first (of three) department seminars this semester where our own faculty present teasers of their research, in a way accessible to all graduate students.

Title: Faculty Research Presentation – Julien Langou & Burt Simon

Where: Student Commons Building Room 4125, with cookies

When: Monday September 18th from 12:30pm to 1:45pm

Who: Julien Langou and Burt Simon

Abstract:

12:30 Julien Langou
Numerical Linear Algebra

Dr. Langou will be presenting his current research: the general framework of the research, some recent results and future work, as well as some software efforts. The general setting is Numerical Linear Algebra, High Performance Computing, Parallel Algorithms, and Scheduling.

1:05 Burt Simon
LUPI and other Poisson Games

The Lowest Unique Positive Integer game (a.k.a. Limbo) is perhaps the simplest strategic game that can be played by any number of players. It is very hard to analyze LUPI (e.g., find a Nash equilibrium strategy) as a standard n-player game, but it becomes tractable when it is recast as a Poisson game - a game with a (random) Poisson distributed number of players. I will describe LUPI, explain why the Poisson assumption is appropriate for games like this, and describe some interesting things recently proven about the Poisson version of LUPI. I will then describe ``Generalized LUPI'' and some other Poisson games that are waiting to be similarly analyzed.