Seminar : PageRank- some methods, models and regularizations

* Time:     11am- 12noon, Thursday, April 14, 2011

* Location: Instructional Center, IC 211

* Speaker:  Prof. Boris Polyak


* Title:    PageRank: some methods, models and regularizations

* Abstract:
PageRank problem is one of challenging problems in information
technologies and numerical analysis due to its huge dimension and wide
range of applications. It also attracts great attention of experts in
control theory; it is closely related to consensus in multiagent
systems. The traditional approach to PR goes back to the pioneering
paper by Brin and Page. The original problem is replaced with finding
the eigenvector of the modified matrix which can be effectively solved
by the power method. In this paper we demonstrate that the solution of
the modified problem can be far enough from the original one and propose
an iterative regularization method which allows to find the desired
solution. We also propose an l1-regularization; its solution of the PR
problem ignores low-ranking pages. All methods are illustrated on two
examples of PR problems which have many attractive features as
simulation tests.

* Bio:
Boris Polyak currently serves as the head of Adaptive and Robust Control
Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Control Sciences, Russian
Academy of Sciences and as a professor at the Department of Engineering
and Cybernetics of Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. He earned
his PhD in Mathematics (1963) from Moscow State University and Doctor of
Science degree in Engineering (1978) from the Institute of Control
Sciences. After working as a researcher at the Moscow State University
for several years, Boris joined the Institute of Control Sciences at
1971. He is an author of 4 monographs and more than 180 journal papers
in different fields including mathematical programming, control,
numerical analysis, stochastic optimization, and statistics. Boris is an
IFAC fellow. His numerous awards include Meyerhoff Fellowship in 1991
and Andronov's Award of Russian Academy of Science in 1994. Last but not
the least, he is a nice and cheerful fellow.