CS 261 Notes, Winter 2020-21

1. Lecture 1: Teaser problems (please ignore the section about class requirements since this is a unique quarter) and Introduction to Max Flows
2. Lecture 2: Ford Fulkerson Algorithm and The Max-flow Min-Cut Theorem
3. Lecture 3: Edmonds-Karp and Dinic's Algorithm ; Slides on credit networks
4. Lecture 4: Maximum Bipartite Matching and Hall's theorem (only sections 4 and 5) and Rounding a matrix
5. Lectures 5 and 6: The min-cost-flow problem (sections 1 and 2), Introduction to Linear Programming , Basic Feasible Solutions (10 steps), and also see the min-cost-flow LP and its Basic Feasible Solutions.
6. Lectures 7 and 8: Introduction to Duality, Strong duality and complementary slackness, Additional examples of complementary slackness.
7. Lecture 9: Multiplicative Weights
8. Lecture 11: A nice introduction to boosting (read the first four sections for an overview, and the rest based on your interest); the original AdaBoost paper (read section 4 for notation. Unfortunately, the introduction and the original paper use different notation; we will use the notation from the original paper in class, so reading the first half of section 4 is mandatory, even if you have read the introduction.) A special case of Adaboost
9. Lecture 12: Stable Matchings
10. Lecture 14: The Gittins Index , and an Excel file.
11. Lecture 15: Introduction to Sketching.
12. Lectures 16 and 18: Sketching part 2 and part 3 .
13. Assignments 1, 2, 3, 4.