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June 15: Meeting 4


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University of Maryland:

We'll be meeting Wednesday, June 15 at 6pm. Next meeting is NOT held at the Systems Lab. Location will be posted soon :) If you are interested in paticipating, please feel free to email Kotaro. (kotaro at cs dot umd dot edu) We'll post discussion points, links and worked solutions to this page.

Update (June 13): We will hold the meeting 4 at AVW 3228 (Jay's office)!

University of Texas At Arlington :

Maryland Meeting summary:

  • went through contents of the Chap 4.1 - 4.3 of the Alice book

  • discussed about the meaning of a moment generating function, and why it leads to better bound compared to Markov and Chebychef bounds. (More moments, better bounds!)

  • it is interesting that although we use a moment generating function to derive a Chenoff bound, we only use the mean (the first moment) of a random variable in applications!

  • how authors of the Alice book come up with sqrt(6n ln(n)) part of the first equation on the section 4.2.2.

    • It is often the case to set a pretty result (bound) and calculate backward to set a value on left hand side of an equation.

  • Found a misprint on a question 4.6 b) of the pdf version of the Alice book. The interseciton Pr((X > k) and (X < l )) should be Pr((X > k) or (Y < l)).

Task Discussion


  • Kotaro Hara   June 18, 2011, 2:29 p.m.

    Posted answers for problems that we worked on last Wednesday. We worked on 4.1, 4.2, and 4.6 a). We worked on 4.6 b) , but did not complete.