Graduate Seminar: Branch Decompositions and Matroids

GAINESVILLE, FL:  Dr. Illya V. Hicks, Associate Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University, will deliver a seminar entitled, “Branch Decompositions and Matroids.”  The seminar will be in FLG 0245 at 4 p.m. on Thursday, October 4.

Branch Decompositions and Matroids

This talk gives a general overview of practical computational methods for computing branch decompositions for matroids and their usage for solving integer programs.  The concept of branch decompositions and its related invariant branch width were first introduced by Robertson and Seymour in their proof of the Graph Minors Theorem and can be easily generalized for any symmetric submodular set function.  This talk is based on joint work with Edray Goins, Jing Ma, Susan Margulies, Nolan McMurray, and Elif Ulusal.

Bio:

Illya Hicks serves as Associate Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University.  He received his M.A. (2000) and Ph.D. (2000) in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University after receiving his B.S. (1995) in Mathematics from Texas State University-San Marcos.  Previously, he served on the faculty in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department at Texas A&M University.  His research is focused on combinatorial optimization, graph theory, and integer programming.  His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation.