Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/Las Positas College Science and Engineering Seminar to Reveal How the Internet Knows What You Want

A new seminar in the second season of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)/Las Positas College Science and Engineering Seminar Series will take place on Monday March 5, 6-7:15 p.m. in the Multi-Disciplinary Building 2400, Room 2420. The seminar will reveal math and computer science techniques that collect, sort, categorize and process online information. Seminar presenters are two LLNL experts: Van Emden Henson, Ph.D., Applied Mathematician; and Andy Yoo, Ph.D., Computer Scientist.

“The series is designed to enhance the partnership shared by the two Livermore institutions and provides a forum for laboratory scientists and engineers to share their broad range of basic and applied research with the college’s scientific community of students, staff and faculty,” said Dean of Math, Science, Engineering and Public Safety Neal Ely, Ph.D.

“The series offers a way to look at how science is done,” added Biology Instructor Nan Ho. “A unique feature of the series, especially for a community college, is the focus on the ‘big science’ that LLNL does that requires cross-disciplinary expertise.”

The March 5 seminar is entitled “A Child’s Garden of Graphs: How a pinch of linear algebra, a smattering of graph theory, and a spoonful of computer science is dominating your life.” Following is the abstract.

“How does Netflix (or Amazon) recommend the movies (or products) you may like? How do Google, AltaVista, or Bing assemble their lists of results?  How does Expedia find an airline itinerary? How do Facebook or LinkedIn find people you may know? How do dating sites propose possible matches? How do banks catch potentially fraudulent activities? These, and many, many more, are examples of graphs in action.

“While some of the graph algorithms are subtle and complex, a surprising number are remarkably simple. Many can best be understood and implemented with the tools of linear algebra.  But the modern world is also the world of exponential growth of information, and many of the graphs behind these applications are rapidly growing to extraordinary size. How do we deal with graphs having tens or hundreds of billions of vertices? How can we deal with information at enormous scales?

“Where the mathematician and the applications scientist devise the algorithms to organize, mine, or employ the information, it falls to the computer scientists to create the architectures, hardware, software environments, and implementations making the computations possible.  In this talk, Van Emden Henson will describe some of the graph-based problems that have become ubiquitous in today’s world, and the mathematical tools used to address them, and Andy Yoo will describe the challenges and approaches to realizing these methods on the most modern computational engines.”

For more information about the seminar, please visit the website at http://www.laspositascollege.edu/news/scienceSeries.php.