[Discrete-math-seminar] IIT Discrete Math Seminar: Wednesday 4pm

[Hemanshu Kaul]

Hello all,

Jeong Ok Choi, from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will be
visiting us this Wednesday and Thursday. She will give a talk on
"Fractional Weak Discrepancy of Posets" at 4pm on Wednesday, 4/30, in
room 245, E1 Bldg. 

The abstract for her talk will be available at
http://www.iit.edu/csl/am/colloquia/#DAMsem . 
In lay terms, especially for students who might not be sure what the
title of the talk means, her talk will be about the following.

" Poset is a set endowed with a partial order. Typical examples are: set
of integers with x < y if x divides y; Family of subsets of a fixed
underlying set with A < B if A is contained in B. Weak Discrepancy of a
poset measures the least amount of difference between incomparable
elements of the poset through an integer-valued mapping of the poset
which is constrained to assign higher value to an higher ordered
element. If we allow this map to be real-valued, it corresponds to the
fractional weak discrepancy. This can be thought of as a Linear
Programming relaxation of the Integer Program corresponding to the weak
discrepancy. 

As an example application think of a manager who partially orders her
employees by their value to the company, and now needs to assign a
salary level to each employee. The more valuable employee gets a higher
salary than a less valuable one, but for the sake of fairness the salary
discrepancies between pairs of incomparable employees have to be
minimized. This is the fractional weak discrepancy of that poset.

We will describe posets which when they are forbidden as subposets
characterize posets with bounded fractional weak discrepancy."


I look forward to seeing you all at the talk.

Hemanshu

Hemanshu Kaul
Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago
http://www.math.iit.edu/~kaul/