Reversing Color Coding

Abstract: In computational complexity it is often easier to prove hardness results for a colored version of a combinatorial or graph theoretic problem than its uncolored counterpart. Moreover, one can typically reduce from the uncolored version of a problem to its colored counterpart by a straightforward application of the celebrated color coding technique. Is the reduction in the reverse direction also possible?

In some interesting cases, such as the parameterized set intersection problem, such a reduction is highly non-trivial and this shall be the focus of the talk.

Joint work with Boris Bukh and Bhargav Narayanan.

Bio: Karthik C. S. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in 2019 from Weizmann Institute of Science where he was advised by Irit Dinur. He has held postdoctoral appointments at Tel Aviv University (hosted by Amir Shpilka) and New York University (hosted by Subahsh Khot). He is broadly interested in complexity theory and geometry with emphasis on hardness of approximation, fine-grained complexity, and parameterized complexity.