This reading group is intended to provide a meeting place for FSU faculty, postdocs, and students interested in the design, analysis and implementation of algorithms. We plan to meet once a week, with one or more of the four different missions:

• Paper presentations -- This is fairly informal, with one person (i.e. student) responsible each time for leading the discussions. Nobody will have to lead for more than one paper per semester.
• Open Problem Sessions -- where we would pose and attack accessible research problems. A good time is had by all.
• Road Trips -- to conferences/talks nearby which we might be interested in.
• Algorithms Lunch -- once in the semester we'll have free food for everyone in the course.

The fraction of sessions dedicated to unsolved problems vs. papers will depend upon general interest. You can get one credit for participating by simply registering for CIS6935. You will be required to present one paper, and attend on a somewhat regular basis. Everyone is welcome to attend. This is a excellent opportunity for students looking for potential thesis or projects topics and is also a good forum for practicing your conference/thesis talks and get valuable feedback.

Since the group will be somewhat informal, the choice of topics or papers will depend upon the current interest of its members. I propose that we focus more on problem sessions than papers this semester. I also hope to see continuity between problem sessions, so we continue to work between sessions to make progress. I want a mix of both "useful theory papers" and "clever application papers" to get us back to the core technologies we have evolved from.

My intention is to alternate between a variety of topics in algorithms this semester. We lean towards a grab bag of topics, particularly areas like computational geometry, computer graphics/games, computational biology, machine learning, external memory/cache oblivious/parallel algorithms, randomized algorithms, discrete/continuous optimization, clustering, algorithms for networks, etc.