The mid-term presentations will be talks describing a single research article. The idea is very simple: take any article you like that discusses the use of a heuristic algorithm for a discrete optimization problem, and tell us about it. Describe the problem, the algorithm, and the algorithm's performance.

In case you are lacking in inspiration, here are a few possible papers:

• B. Selman, D. Mitchell, and H. Levesque, "A new method for solving hard satisfiability problems", Proceedings of the 10th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-92), 440-446 (1992). Available at: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/selman92new.html

• O.C. Martin and S.W. Otto, "Combining simulated annealing with local search heuristics", Annals of Operations Research 63, 57-75 (1996). Available at: http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/18917.html

• S. Boettcher and A.G. Percus, "Nature's way of optimizing", Artificial Intelligence 119, 275-286 (2000).

• R. Unger and J. Moult, "Genetic algorithms for protein folding simulations", Journal of Molecular Biology 231, 75-81 (1993).

• F. Alizadeh, R.M. Karp, L.A. Newberg, and D.K. Weisser, "Physical mapping of chromosomes: a combinatorial problem in molecular biology", Proceedings of the Fourth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA '93), 371-381 (1993). Available through the ACM Digital Library.

Plan on a 25-30 minute talk, but expect to have lots of interruptions and/or heckling from the audience (which might well turn it into an hour-and-twenty-minute talk!). The goal is not only for you to explain the work in the paper, but for all of us to understand it.

Giving one of these talks is a requirement for students taking the course for credit, but it would be great if those auditing want to do so as well. I highly encourage it. It is the best way of really understanding the literature, and things will be more interesting for everyone if I am not the only one lecturing.

You may wish to use visual aids (Powerpoint presentation, viewgraphs, etc.) but you are by no means required to.

Here are the scheduled talks.

• Tues., February 4: Paul DiLorenzo, A new method for solving hard satisfiability problems (GSAT)
• Thurs., February 6: Bhrigu Celly, Video textures
• Tues., February 11: Andres Figueroa, Probe selection algorithms with applications in the analysis of microbial communities
• Tues., February 25: Vaishnavi Krishnamurthy, Sampling internet topologies: how small can we go?
• Thurs., February 27: Shanzhong Zhu, Real-time scheduling issues in query scheduling of streaming data
• Tues., March 4: Jing Li, Efficient haplotyping algorithms
• Thurs., March 6: Qiaofeng Yang, Biclustering of gene expression data