CS 229r: Algorithms for Big Data

Prof. Jelani Nelson TF: Jarosław Błasiok

[Home] [Lectures] [Assignments] [Project]

Scribing
Use this template when scribing.
Each student may have to scribe 1-2 lectures, depending on class size.
Pick a date below when you are available to scribe and send your choice to cs229r-f15-
staff@seas.harvard.edu. First-come first-served.
Submit scribe notes (pdf + source) to cs229r-f15-staff@seas.harvard.edu.
Please give real bibliographical citations for the papers that we mention in class (DBLP can help
you collect bibliographic info).
Scribe notes are due by 6pm on the day after lecture. They are posted immediately without
proofreading (though we may proofread later and ask for some changes to be made.)
When creating your scribe notes, feel free to use those from Fall 2013 (some topics and proofs
given will change, so be prepared to make edits; also, it is expected that you polish and improve
whatever you started with). You may also find these notes helpful, courtesy of Sam Elder.

Scribe Notes
1. Thursday, Sept. 3 — logistics, course topics, basic tail bounds (Markov, Chebyshev, Chernoff,
Bernstein), Morris' algorithm.
Scribe: Zhengyu Wang. [PDF][TeX][video]

2. Tuesday, Sept. 8 — distinct elements, k-wise independence, geometric subsampling of streams.

Scribe: Jeffrey Ling. [PDF][TeX][video]

3. Thursday, Sept. 10 — necessity of randomized/approximate guarantees, linear sketching, AMS

sketch, p-stable sketch 0<p<2.
Scribe: Vasileios Nakos. [PDF][TeX][video]

4. Tuesday, Sept. 15 — p-stable sketch analysis, Nisan's PRG, high ℓp norms (p>2) via max-stability.
Scribe: Hyunghoon Cho. [PDF][TeX][video]

5. Thursday, Sept. 17 — analysis of ℓp estimation algorithm via max-stability, deterministic point

query via incoherent matrices.
Scribe: Yakir Reshef. [PDF][TeX][video]

6. Tuesday, Sept. 22 — CountMin sketch, point query, heavy hitters, sparse approximation.
Scribe: Mien Wang. [PDF][TeX][video]

7. Thursday, Sept. 24 — CountSketch, ℓ0 sampling, graph sketching.

Scribe: David Mende. [PDF][TeX][video]

8. Tuesday, Sept. 29 — amnesic dynamic programming (approximate distance to monotonicity).

 Scribe: Johnny Ho. [PDF][TeX][video]

9. Thursday, Oct. 1 — communication complexity (indexing, gap hamming) + application to median

and F0 lower bounds.
Scribe: Rachit Singh. [PDF][TeX][video]

10. Tuesday, Oct. 6 — randomized and approximate F0 lower bounds, disjointness, Fp lower bound,
dimensionality reduction (JL lemma).
Scribe: Morris Yau. [PDF][TeX][video]

11. Thursday, Oct. 8 — Khintchine, decoupling, Hanson-Wright, proof of distributional JL lemma.

Scribe: None. [PDF][TeX][video]

12. Tuesday, Oct. 13 — Alon's JL lower bound, beyond worst case analysis: suprema of gaussian
processes, Gordon's theorem.
Scribe: Vasileios Nakos. [PDF][TeX][video]

13. Thursday, Oct. 15 — ORS theorem (distributional JL implies Gordon's theorem), sparse JL.
Scribe: Yakir Reshef. [PDF][TeX][video]

14. Tuesday, Oct. 20 — sparse JL proof wrap-up, Fast JL Transform, approximate nearest neighbor.
Scribe: Rachit Singh. [PDF][TeX][video]

15. Thursday, Oct. 22 — approximate matrix multiplication with Frobenius error via sampling / JL,
matrix median trick, subspace embeddings.
Scribe: Mien Wang. [PDF][TeX][video]

16. Tuesday, Oct. 27 — linear least squares via subspace embeddings, leverage score sampling, non-
commutative Khintchine, oblivious subspace embeddings.
Scribe: Jefferson Lee. [PDF][TeX][video]

17. Thursday, Oct. 29 — oblivious subspace embeddings, faster iterative regression, sketch-and-solve
regression.
Scribe: Morris Yau. [PDF][TeX][video]

18. Tuesday, Nov. 3 — low-rank approximation, column-based matrix reconstruction, k-means,

compressed sensing.
Scribe: Jefferson Lee. [PDF][TeX][video]

19. Thursday, Nov. 5 — RIP and connection to incoherence, basis pursuit, Krahmer-Ward theorem.
Scribe: Abdul Wasay. [PDF][TeX][video]

20. Tuesday, Nov. 10 — Krahmer-Ward proof, Iterative Hard Thresholding.

Scribe: Yakir Reshef. [PDF][TeX][video]

21. Thursday, Nov. 12 — ℓ1/ℓ1 recovery, RIP1, unbalanced expanders, Sequential Sparse Matching
Pursuit.
Scribe: Zezhou Liu. [PDF][TeX][video]

22. Tuesday, Nov. 17 — matrix completion.

Scribe: Abdul Wasay. [PDF][TeX][video]

23. Thursday, Nov. 19 — external memory model: linked list, matrix multiplication, B-tree, buffered
repository tree, sorting.
Scribe: Johnny Ho. [PDF][TeX][video]
24. Tuesday, Nov. 24 — competitive paging, cache-oblivious algorithms: matrix multiplication, self-
organizing linked list, static B-tree, lazy funnelsort.
Scribe: Zhengyu Wang. [PDF][TeX][video]

25. Thursday, Nov. 26. NO CLASS (Happy Thanksgiving!).

26. Tuesday, Dec. 1 — MapReduce: TeraSort, minimum spanning tree, triangle counting.
Scribe: Zezhou Liu. [PDF][TeX][video]

27. Thursday, Dec. 3 — project presentations.