Stata Center (Building 32), Room 32D-677 (LIDS Seminar Room, Dreyfus tower)

• Amir Ali Ahmadi (MIT)
• Venkat Chandrasekaran (MIT)
• Shashank Dwivedi (MIT)
• Joao Gouveia (Washington)
• Bill Helton (UC San Diego)
• Jiawang Nie (UC San Diego)
• Pablo Parrilo (MIT)
• Parikshit Shah (MIT)
• Noah Stein (MIT)
• Bernd Sturmfels (UC Berkeley)
• Caroline Uhler (UC Berkeley)
• Cynthia Vinzant (UC Berkeley)

• Jeremy Gunawardena (Harvard)
• Josephine Yu (MIT)
• Greg Blekherman

The schedule below is (more or less) final, but flexible. We can still add and/or reorganize the order of the talks.

• Saturday May 9th, afternoon (1PM-5:30PM)
  • 1:00PM-1:30PM: Welcome, Logistics, and Introduction.
  • 1:30PM-2:30PM: First session
    • Amir Ali Ahmadi: "A convex polynomial that is not sos-convex"
  • 2:30PM-3:00PM: Coffee Break
  • 3:00PM-5:30PM: Second session:
    • Parikshit Shah: "Variable Elimination in semidefinite programming"
    • Caroline Uhler: "Semidefinite matrix completion and Gaussian graphical models"
    • Pablo A. Parrilo: "Numerically stable SDP/SOS schemes"
• Sunday May 10th (9AM-5:30PM)
  • 8:30AM-9:00AM: Breakfast
  • 9:00AM-10:30AM: First morning session
    • Jiawang Nie: "Bi-Quadratic Optimization and Semidefinite Programming Relaxations"
    • Bill Helton: "Convexity when the variables are matrices vs LMI representations"
  • 10:30AM-10:45: Break
  • 10:45AM-12:00PM: Second morning session
    • Joao Gouveia: "A sums of squares approach to the Max-Cut problem"
    • Cynthia Vinzant: "Degree stability of sums of squares modulo an ideal"
  • 12:00PM-1:00PM: Lunch break
  • 1:00PM-2:30PM: First session
    • Venkat Chandrasekaran: "Rank-Sparsity Incoherence for Matrix Decomposition"
    • Greg Blekherman: "Large dimensional gaps between nonnegative polynomials and sums of squares"
  • 2:30PM-3:00PM: Coffee Break
  • 3:00PM-5:30PM: Second afternoon session
    • Open discussion.
  • 7:00PM-9:00PM: Workshop dinner at Legal Sea Foods

• Monday May 11th morning (9AM-1PM)
  • 8:30AM-9:00AM: Breakfast
  • 9AM-11AM: Session on biochemical networks
    • Jeremy Gunawardena: "Biochemical rationality"
    • Bill Helton: "Sign patterns for chemical reaction networks"
    • Bernd Sturmfels: "Siphons in Chemical Reaction Networks"

• On Monday 4PM, Bernd will give the Applied Math Colloquium: http://math.mit.edu/amc/spring09/

• Map of Stata Center (Building 32)
• Cambridge hotels http://web.mit.edu/visit/hotels.html

The two Marriotts and the Kendall are just one block from the Stata Center (the Hyatt is much further away, but still walkable). Both usually offer an “MIT rate” (you can just ask for it over the phone), but sometimes it is cheaper to get them via Expedia or similar.

• Pablo Parrilo parrilo@mit.edu
• Lisa Gaumond lisaga@mit.edu