Abstract: Consider the following problem: we monitor a sequence of edgeinsertions and deletions in a graph on n vertices, so there are N = (n choose 2) possible edges (e.g. monitoring a stream of friend accepts/removals on Facebook). At any point someone may say "query()", at which point must output a random edge that exists in the graph at that time from a distribution that is statistically close to uniform.  More specifically, with probability p our edge should come from a distribution close to uniform,…

Abstract: When is simple random walk on growing in time d-dimensional domains recurrent? For domain growth which is independent of the walk, we review recent progress and related universality conjectures about a sharp recurrence versus transience criterion in terms of the growth rate. We compare this with the question of recurrence/transience for time varying conductance models, where Gaussian heat kernel estimates and evolving sets play an important role. We also briefly contrast such expected universality with examples of the rich…

Abstract: In this talk we will first consider a general question of estimating linear functional of the distribution based on the noisy samples from it. We discover that the (two-point) LeCam lower bound is in fact achievable by optimizing bias-variance tradeoff of an empirical-mean type of estimator. Next, we apply this general framework to the specific problem of population recovery. Namely, consider a random poll of sample size n conducted on a population of individuals, where each pollee is asked to…