Events

Title: On the Security of the NIST lightweight Finalist Ascon

Abstract: 

The ongoing NIST lightweight cryptographic standardization project for the selection of ciphers which are suitable for constrained environments is in the final stage. The authenticated encryption algorithm Ascon, designed by Dobrauing et al., is one out of the 10 finalists. Ascon is also one of the winners of the CAESAR competition in the lightweight applications category.

Title: A Brief Introduction to World of Erd\H{o}s-Ko-Rado Theorems

Abstract:   The Erd\H{o}s-Ko-Rado (EKR) theorem is a famous result that is one of the cornerstones of extremal set theory. This theorem answers the question "What is the largest family of intersecting sets, of a fixed size, from a base set?"

Title: Determinantal formulas with major indices

Abstract: Krattenthaler and Thibon discovered a beautiful formula for the determinant of the matrix indexed by permutations whose entries are q^maj( u*v^{-1} ), where “maj” is the major index. Previous proofs of this identity have applied the theory of nonsymmetric functions or the representation theory of the Tits algebra to determine the eigenvalues of the matrix.

Title: Spectral Turan Problems on trees and even cycles

Abstract:  In this talk, we discuss some recent progress with the spectral analogue of a few Turán problems: Instead of maximizing the number of edges, our objective is to maximize the spectral radius of the adjacency matrices of graphs not containing some subgraphs.

Title: Bounded treewidth in hereditary graph classes

Abstract: A highlight of the superb graph minors project of Robertson and Seymour is their so-called Grid Theorem: a minor-closed class of graphs has bounded treewidth if and only it does not contain all planar graphs. Which induced-subgraph-closed graph classes have bounded treewidth?

Title: Box-ball systems, RSK, and Motzkin paths 

Abstract:  A box-ball system (BBS) is a discrete dynamical system whose dynamics come from the balls jumping according to certain rules. A permutation on n objects gives a BBS state by assigning its one-line notation to n consecutive boxes. After a finite number of steps, a box-ball system will reach a steady state. From any steady state, we can construct a tableau called the soliton decomposition of the box-ball system.

Title: Stochastic Optimization

Abstract: While deterministic optimization problems are very useful in practice, often times the assumption that all data is known in advance does not hold true. One possible way to relax this assumption is to assume that the data depends on random variables. This assumption leads to stochastic optimization problems.

Title: 3-colouring via flows

Abstract: I'll show a technique to colour graphs on surfaces using max-flow min-cut.

Title: Strong Cospectrality in Trees

Title: The k-independence number of graph products

Abstract: The k-independence number of a graph is the maximum size of a set of vertices at pairwise distance greater than k, generalizing the standard independence number. In this talk, I will discuss well-known sharp bounds on the independence number of graph products, and extend some of these bounds to the k-independence number. Specifically, we will cover the Cartesian, tensor, strong, and lexicographic products.

Joint work with Aida Abiad.