Publication
Mathematics
Video
The Bullet Problem With Discrete Speeds
Bullets are fired along the real line each second with independent uniformly random speeds from [0,1]. When two bullets collide they mutually annihilate. The still open bullet problem asks if the first bullet is never…
Publication
A smooth transition from Wishart to GOE
Video
Matrix Completion has No Spurious Local Minimum
Matrix completion is a basic machine learning problem that has wide applications, especially in collaborative filtering and recommender systems. Simple non-convex optimization algorithms are popular and effective in practice. Despite recent progress in proving various…
Video
Northwest Probability Seminar – Session 3
The local max-cut problem asks to find a partition of the vertices in a weighted graph such that the cut weight cannot be improved by moving a single vertex (that is the partition is locally…
Video
Northwest Probability Seminar – Session 1
The local max-cut problem asks to find a partition of the vertices in a weighted graph such that the cut weight cannot be improved by moving a single vertex (that is the partition is locally…
Video
Northwest Probability Seminar – Session 2
The local max-cut problem asks to find a partition of the vertices in a weighted graph such that the cut weight cannot be improved by moving a single vertex (that is the partition is locally…
Event
Northwest Probability Seminar 2016
The 18th Northwest Probability Seminar, a one-day mini-conference organized by the University of Washington, the Oregon State University, the University of British Columbia, the University of Oregon, and the Theory Group at Microsoft Research, will be…
Video
The Invisible Hand of Laplace: The Role of Market Structure in Price Convergence and Oscillation
In a free market, the rise or fall of a price signals excess demand or supply. If the dynamics of price adjustment work well, signaling can enable goods to clear and prices to equilibrate. This…
