Mini Lecture Series: Flow-Augmentation Advancements by Dr. Roohani Sharma

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Palakkad organized a mini-lecture series titled 'Flow-Augmentation: recent advances in parameterized (weighted) cut problems' by Dr. Roohani Sharma on Monday, 7 August , 2023. The lectures included a survey on the parameterized complexity landscape of cut problems and introduced the audience to various tools used in this realm. The lectures kick started with a comprehensive overview of classical tools such as important separators and shadow removal. Subsequently, the sessions explored the recent and most potent tool in this field – flow augmentation. Furthermore, the lectures delved into illustrating the intriguing link between cut problems and the realm of Boolean MinCSPs. The series concluded with a tutorial on the applications of flow augmentation to cut problems in the bi-objective optimization (weighted) setting.

Roohani Sharma is a Lise Meitner Post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Saarbrücken, Germany. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai under the guidance of Saket Saurabh, for which she received 'Honorable mention at ACM India Doctoral Dissertation Award 2021'. Prior to that, she did her Masters in Computer Science at the Chennai Mathematical Institute for which she received the Gold Medal for Excellence in Computer Science. Her B.Tech was in Computer Science and Engineering from Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Jammu and Kashmir.