On approximability of the Permanent of PSD matrices

Tuesday, June 18, 2024 - 4:00pm

Event Calendar Category

Other LIDS Events

Speaker Name

Ansh Nagda

Affiliation

UC Berkeley

Building and Room number

LIDS Seminar Room

Building and Room Number

32-D677

The permanent of a positive semidefinite (PSD) matrix is a natural quantity that has connections to quantum physics, probability, and complexity theory. In this talk, we will present recent work on understanding the approximability of PSD permanents. The main theme in our work is to understand the relationship between PSD permanents and a certain matrix norm problem, which leads to both improved algorithms as well as better hardness results for PSD permanents.

Based on arXiv:2404.10959. Joint work with Farzam Ebrahimnejad and Shayan Oveis Gharan.

Ansh Nagda is a PhD student in the Theoretical Computer Science group at UC Berkeley, where he is advised by Prasad Raghavendra. Prior to graduate school, he was an undergraduate student at the University of Washington.
His primary research interests lie in theoretical computer science, with a broad focus on complexity theory and approximation algorithms. Recently, he has been focusing more on problems in quantum computing.

Learn more: anshnagda.github.io