Thursday, April 4   Rob Adams and Kurt Dresner          Fibonacci Heaps
Tuesday, April  9   Daniel Lowd and Ed Miller           Self-Adjusting Dictionaries
Thursday, April 11  Chris Lundberg Andrew Schoonmaker   Distributed Consensus Algorithms
Tuesday, April 16   Drew Levin and Wes Turner           Greedoids and Antimatroids
Thursday, April 18  Peter Henry                         Matroid Intersection Problems
Tuesday, April 23   Joe Malone                          Inverse Ackermann Analysis of Union-Find
Thursday, April 25  Don Wang                            Competitive Analysis of Trading
Tuesday, April 30   Michael "Boustrophedonic" Szal      Efficient Merge Sorting on a PRAM
Thursday, May 2     Nathaniel Dirksen                   Parallel Sorting on Distributed Memory Machines

Guidelines for Preparing Your Presentation

In preparing your presentation, I anticipate that you will spend a considerable amount of time reading through articles and books to fully understand the material. Don't be surprised if it takes you 5-10 hours just to digest the material that you will be presenting.

After you have done the background reading, make an outline of the major ideas to help you organize your talk. Then, use transparencies as the basis of your talk. You may very well wish to use the blackboard to supplement the transparencies. Planning a clear talk, even after you understand the material well, can easily take 5-10 hours. You are encouraged to talk to me at anytime while preparing your presentation.

You should meet with me at least 3 days before your scheduled presentation (and preferably 5-7 days beforehand) to give a practice talk. For that meeting, your slides should be ready and you should have practiced what you want to say. You should also come prepared with 2 or 3 candidate homework problems (LaTeXed) and their solutions worked out. It is your responsibility to make the appointment and to come prepared with these materials. A full 30% of your presentation grade will be based on how well you have prepared your talk and the quality of the problems that you have selected. Come to this meeting well-prepared!

In almost all certainty, you will be asked to make some changes to your presentation at this meeting. One or two days before the final presentation, we will meet again to go over your final presentation.

After your presentation, your classmates will be asked to give you written feedback on your talk, you will be asked to self-assess your talk, and I will give you feedback and your grade for the presentation as well.