Shang-Hua Teng

Interplay between Influence Dynamics and Social Networks, Yale Network Science Institute: Distinguished Lecture

Through the Lens of the Laplacian Paradigm: Big Data and Scalable Algorithms - a Pragmatic Match Made On Earth,CMU Machine Learning/Google Distinguished Lecture

SHORT BIO

Dr. Shang-Hua Teng has twice won the prestigious Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science, first in 2008, for developing the theory of smoothed analysis , and then in 2015, for designing the groundbreaking nearly-linear time

Laplacian solver for network systems. Both are joint work with Dan Spielman of Yale --- his long-time collaborator. Smoothed analysis is fundamental for modeling and analyzing practical algorithms, and the Laplacian paradigm has since led to several breakthroughs in network analysis, matrix computation, and optimization. Citing him as, ``one of the most original theoretical computer scientists in the world'', the Simons Foundation named Teng a 2014 Simons Investigator, for pursuing long-term curiosity-driven fundamental research. He and his collaborators also received the best paper award at

ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) for what's considered to be the ``first improvement in 10 years'' of a fundamental optimization problem --- the computation of maximum flows and minimum cuts in a network. In addition, he is known for his joint work with Xi Chen and Xiaotie Deng that characterized the complexity for computing an approximate Nash equilibrium in game theory, and his joint papers on market equilibria in computational economics. He and his collaborators also pioneered the development of well-shaped Dalaunay meshing algorithms for arbitrary three-dimensional geometric domains, which settled a long-term open problem in numerical simulation, also a fundamental problem in computer graphics. Software based on this development was used at the University of Illinois for the simulation of advanced rockets. Teng is also interested in mathematical board games. With his former Ph.D. student Kyle Burke, he designed and analyzed a game called Atropos , which is played on the Sperner's triangle and based on the beautiful, celebrated Sperner's Lemma. In 2000 at UIUC, Teng was named on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students for his class, ``Network Security and Cryptography''. He has worked and consulted for Microsoft Research, Akamai, IBM Almaden Research Center, Intel Corporation, Xerox PARC, and NASA Ames Research Center, for which he received fifteen patents for his work on compiler optimization, Internet technology, and social network.

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

An Axiomatic Approach to Community Detection , Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS 2016) (with Christian Borgs, Jennifer Chayes, and Adrian Marple)

Electrial flows, Laplacian systems, and faster approximation of maximum flow in undirected graphs,in STOC 2011: 273-282 (with Paul Christiano, Jon Kelner, Aleksander Madry, and Daniel Spielman).

Nearly-Linear Time Algorithms for Preconditioning and Solving Symmetric, Diagonally Dominant Linear Systems,

Journal on Matrix Analysis (2014) 35 (3) (with Dan Spielman)

Spectral Sparsification of Graphs,in SIAM J. Computing, 40(4): 981-1025, 2011 (with Daniel Spielman).

A Local Clustering Algorithm for Massive Graphs and Its Application to Nearly Linear Time Graph Partitioning, SIAM J. Comput. 42(1): 1-26 (2013) (with Dan Spielman)

Settling the complexity of computing two-player Nash equilibria, in J. ACM, 56(3) May 2009 (with Xi Chen and Xiaotie Deng).

Smoothed analysis of algorithms: the simplex algorithm usually takes polynomial number of steps, in J. ACM, 51(3) pages 385-463, May 2004 (with Daniel Spielman).

Separators for sphere-packings and nearest neighborhood graphs,in J. ACM, 44(1), 1-29, January 1997 (with Gary Miller, William Thurston, and Steve Vavasis).

Sliver Exudation,in J. ACM, 47(5): 883-904, 2000 (with S.-W. Cheng, T. Dey, H. Edelsbrunner, and M. Facello).