Theoretical Foundations


Research in theoretical foundations formally defines both the types of problems that can be solved using a computer and the quality of their solutions. Computers are limited by space and time. The optimal solution to a computational problem often lies outside these limits, thus an approximate solution must be computed. Methods developed in this area define the plausibility of an optimal solution, the quality of the approximate solution, and the resources necessary to find each, thus leading the way to better utilization of a computer's resources or those of multiple computers in parallel. Specific research in this area encompasses a broad range of foundational topics in computer science including computational learning theory, complexity theory, algorithm and data structure design, parallel algorithms, geometric computing, cryptography, computational logic, programming languages theory, and matrix computations. Several group members are also engaged actively in leveraging their research into various application areas.
Faculty










Labs and selected projects
- Graph Partitioning George Karypis
- ITSOL: Iterative Solvers Package Yousef Saad
- Numerical Algorithms for Very Large, Sparse Dynamical Systems Daniel Boley and Yousef Saad
- pARMS: parallel Algebraic Recursive Multilevel Solvers Yousef Saad
- Research on Layered Manufacturing Ravi Janardan
- UMN Machine Learning Seminar Series
Related centers and programs
Latest research projects, publications, and talks

EMP: Edge-assisted Multi-vehicle Perception [conference paper]
Posted January 31, 2022
27th Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking (MobiCom 2021)

MC-DGCNN: A Novel DNN Architecture for Multi-Category Point Set Classification [preprint]
Posted December 22, 2021
Majid Farhadloo (Ph.D. student), Carl Molnar (M.S. student), Gaoxiang Luo (undergraduate research assistant), Yan Li (Ph.D. student), Shashi Shekhar (professor), Rachel L Maus, Svetomir N Markovic, Raymond Moore, Alexey Leontovich

Identification and characterization of a fungal-selective glutaminyl tRNA synthetase inhibitor with potent activity against Candida albicans [journal]
Posted December 17, 2021
Alice Xue, Amanda Veri, Xiang Zhang, Ci Fu, Emma Lash, Kali Iyer, Nicole Revie, Nicole Robbins, Charles Boone, Chad Myers (professor), Leah Cowen
Access Microbiology

About a Proof Pearl: A Purported Solution to a POPLMARK Challenge Problem that is Not One [preprint]
Posted December 17, 2021
Gopalan Nadathur (professor)

Perceptions of Visual and Multimodal Symbolic Mediated Social Touch: Role of Technology Modality, Relationship, and Task Emotional Salience [journal]
Posted December 17, 2021
Svetlana Yarosh (associate professor), Xizi Wang, Yuan Yao
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies

A Label Correction Algorithm Using Prior Information for Automatic and Accurate Geospatial Object Recognition [conference paper]
Posted December 15, 2021
Weiwei Duan, Yao-Yi Chiang (associate professor), Stefan Leyk, Johannes H. Uhl, Craig A. Knoblock
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData)

Guided Generative Models using Weak Supervision for Detecting Object Spatial Arrangement in Overhead Images [conference paper]
Posted December 15, 2021
Weiwei Duan, Yao-Yi Chiang (associate professor), Stefan Leyk, Johannes H. Uhl, Craig A. Knoblock
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData)

AggNet: Cost-Aware Aggregation Networks for Geo-distributed Streaming Analytics [conference paper]
Posted December 14, 2021
Dhruv Kumar (Ph.D. student), Sohaib Ahmad, Abhishek Chandra (professor), Ramesh Sitaraman
6th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing

Early Stopping for Deep Image Prior [preprint]
Posted December 11, 2021
Hengkang Wang (Ph.D. student), Taihui Li (Ph.D. student), Zhong Zhuang (Ph.D. student), Tiancong Chen (Ph.D. student), Hengyue Liang, Ju Sun (assistant professor)

TempoQR: Temporal Question Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs [preprint]
Posted December 10, 2021
Costas Mavromatis (Ph.D. student), Prasanna Lakkur Subramanyam, Vassilis N Ioannidis, Soji Adeshina, Phillip R Howard, Tetiana Grinberg, Nagib Hakim, George Karypis (professor)
More About Research areas
- Architectures, Compiler Optimization, and Embedded Systems
- Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
- Computing Education
- Computing Foundations
- Computing Systems
- Data Mining, Databases, and Geographical Information Systems
- Data Science and Machine Learning
- Graphics and Immersive Computing
- High Performance Computing
- Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
- Human-Centered Computing
- Networks, Distributed Systems, and Security
- Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
- Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
- Software Engineering and Programming Languages