CS: Watching Videos on The Longest Night.

Tonight is the longest night in the northern hemisphere. Let watch some videos till the end of this nuit blanche....

First, Dror Baron has given some context to his Compressed Sensing research. The reason for this blog is to put some context in the amount of raw information that is accumulating on the subject. I always appreciate it when researchers go beyond their expected output and try to put their research in perspective. Thanks Dror!

At the Center of Computational Intractability, Adi Akavia made a presentation on the SFT algorithm that can "Deterministically and Locally Finding Significant Fourier Transform Coefficients". The video of the talk is here.

Also of interest are the two talks by Sanjeev Arora and Moses Charikar entitled “Semidefinite programming and approximation algorithms: a survey.” (video_part_1 and video_part_2) and the tutorial by Assaf Naor on “An Introduction to Embedding Theory”(video part 1 video part 2). The abstract of the tutorial is:

This talk is intended as an introductory talk for non-experts in preparation for the upcoming Princeton workshop on metric embeddings. This workshop will focus on new directions in this area, so the purpose of the tutorial is to explain some of the relevant background. We will explain the basic definitions, show some important examples, discuss some of the fundamental theorems (with a few complete proofs), show some lower bound techniques, and describe a few applications of this mathematical discipline to computer science. No prerequisites will be assumed.

Finally, a more hardware focused talk by Ramesh Raskar at ECTV'08. If you haven't had time to read his papers yet, here is a good way to get interested by watching the video.