COT 6936: Topics in Algorithms -- Spring 12
Course Homepage

• THIS WEBPAGE IS MERELY A PLACE HOLDER. ALL DETAILS ARE AT THE MOODLE WEBSITE INDICATED ABOVE. PLEASE VISIT THAT PAGE REGULARLY.
• The course details and format is very much in evolution. However, the course will not be taught out of any single text, but will cover material from a variety of sources and research papers. The first half of the course will follow a regular lecture/homework/exams format. The second half will be taught like a "readings/seminar" course with student presentations. The first graduate course in Algorithms or its equivalent (COT 5407) is a prerequisite. This course is geared toward research and is primarily targeted toward CS PhD students, although MS students with strong background are welcome. The course should be available for registration on Panthersoft by next week.

Useful Books

• Introduction to Algorithms, (Third Edition) by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein, MIT Press, 2009.
• Probablility and Computing, by Mitzenmacher and Upfal, Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Randomized Algorithms, by Motwani and Raghavan, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
• Approximation Algorithms , by Vijay Vazirani, Springer Verlag, 2001.
• Approximation Algorithms for NP-hard Problems, by Dorit Hochbaum, PWS Publishing Co., 1997.
• Algorithmic Game Theory, by Nisan, Roughgarden, Tardos, Vazirani, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Algorithms in C++ (Parts 1-4; Part 5), by Sedgewick
• Computer Algorithms S. Baase and A. van Gelder, 3rd Edition, Addison Wesley, 2000. ISBN: 0-201-61244-5.
• Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness, by M. Garey and D.S. Johnson, 1979 (Publishers: W. H Freeman and Company).
• Algorithm Design, by Kleinberg and Tardos.
• Computational Geometry, by de Berg, van Kreveld, Overmars, Schwazkopf, Springer Verlag, 3rd Edition, 2008.
• Algorithm on Strings, Trees, and Sequences, by Gusfield, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry, by Goodman and O'Rourke, Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2004.
• Combinatorial Optimization, by Papadimitriou and Steiglitz
• Algorithms, by Dasgupta, Papadimitriou, and Vazirani
• The Discrepancy Method, by Chazelle, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

• computational biology & bioinformatics
• computational geometry (overlap with spatial data mining)
• randomized algorithms and analysis (includes Markov chains, random walks and random sampling)
• on-line algorithms (includes paging algorithms and server problem algorithms)
• approximation algorithms (useful for many NP-hard problems)
• advanced graph algorithms
• experimental algorithms and algorithms visualization
• combinatorial optimization
• linear programming and duality
• metric embeddings
• spectral partitioning
• power-aware computing
• algorithmic game theory
• parallel algorithms
• Burrows-Wheeler transforms, compressed full text indexes