Coherent configurations" (CCs) are certain highly regular colorings of the directed complete graph. The concept goes back to Schur (1933) who used it to study permutation groups, and has subsequently been rediscovered in other contexts (block designs,
association schemes, graph canonization).
CCs are the central concept in the "Split-or-Johnson" (SoJ) procedure, one of the main combinatorial components of the speaker's recent algorithm to test graph isomorphism.

Title: Avatars of small cancellation
Abstract:
In general, given a finite presentation of a group, it is very difficult (in fact algorithmically impossible) to understand the group it defines. Small cancellation theory was developped as a combinatorial condition on a presentation that allows one to understand the group it represents. This very flexible construction has many applications to construct examples of groups with specific features.

I will give introduction to sofic groups and discuss a possible strategy towards finding a non-sofic group. I will show that if the Higman group were sofic, there would be a map from Z/pZ to itself, locally like an exponential map, satisfying a rather strong recurrence property. The approach to (non)-soficity is based on the study of sofic representations of amenable subgroups of a sofic group. This is joint work with Harald Helfgott.

Abstract: The original construction uses the theory of pseudo-holomorphic curves. In this lecture, I will describe an explicit combinatorial algorithm for computing knot Floer homology in terms of grid diagrams. In this lecture, I will describe joint work with Ciprian Manolescu, Sucharit Sarkar, Zoltan Szabo, and Dylan Thurston.