TCS+ talk: Wednesday, March 18, Chris Gartland, UNC Charlotte
Clement Canonne
Our next talk will take place this coming Wednesday, March 18th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time (10:00 AM Pacific Time, 18:00 Central European Time, 17:00 UTC). Chris Gartland from UNC Charlotte will speak about "$L_1$-Distortion of EMD over Grids" (abstract below).
Please sign up on the online form at https://sites.google.com/view/tcsplus/welcome/next-tcs-talk if you wish to join the talk as an individual or a group. Registration is /not/ required to attend the interactive talk, and the link will be posted on the website the day prior to the talk; however, by registering in the form, you will receive a reminder, along with the link. (The link to the recording will also be posted on our website afterwards.)
Hoping to see you all there,
The organizers
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Speaker: Chris Gartland (UNC Charlotte)
Title: $L_1$-Distortion of EMD over Grids
Abstract: The Earth Mover Distance (EMD) is a popular metric used in the comparison of probability distributions over a metric space, and low-distortion embeddings of this metric into $L_1$ is a commonly used approximation tool. We will discuss a general technique of using Sobolev-type inequalities to prove lower bounds for the $L_1$-distortion of EMD. While the main focus will be on describing the specific Sobolev-type inequality for the planar grid $\{1,\dots n\}^2$, we will also mention results for the higher dimensional grids $\{1,\dots n\}^d$, $d \geq 3$. Based on joint work with Mikhail Ostrovskii, Yuval Rabani, and Robert Young.