Title:  Approximation Algorithms - LP Rounding Methods

                   Chaitanya Swamny
   Center for the Mathematics of Information
       California Institute of Technology

Abstract: In this second lecture, I will talk about another widely-used
technique for designing approximation algorithms that exploits the powerful
tool of linear programming (LP). The approach here will be to solve an
LP-relaxation of the original (integer) problem and then "round" the
fractional solution to an integer one (hence the name LP rounding); the
challenge is to do this rounding without degrading the solution quality by
much. The talk will focus on some general methods to do this which yield
good performance guarantees for numerous NP-hard problems. 

The talk will be self-contained.