You are warmly invited to the second School Seminar:

Speaker: Peter Macgregor

Title: Fast Dynamic Algorithms for Modern Clustering

Abstract: Spectral clustering and DBSCAN both have long histories as theoretically grounded, general-purpose clustering algorithms. However, they face practical challenges when scaling to large datasets which have limited their adoption in practice.

In recent work, we have developed several improvements to these algorithms which improve their running time and space complexity while preserving their performance guarantees and generalising them to dynamically changing datasets. We make use of several algorithmic techniques including sparsification, dimensionality reduction, and random sampling. In this talk, I will present the recent progress and make the case that it’s time to challenge k-means’ dominance as the ‘default’ clustering algorithm.

Date & Time: Thursday 16/10/2025 11am-12pm

Location: JC 1.33A

Please do come along and join us! 🙂