Title: Low Rank Approximation and Regression in Input Sparsity Time 
Speaker: David Woodruff (IBM Research Almaden)
Co-authors: Ken Clarkson

We improve the running times of algorithms for least squares regression and low-rank approximation to account 
for the sparsity of the input matrix.  Namely, if nnz(A) denotes the number of non-zero entries of an input matrix A: 
- we show how to solve approximate least squares regression given an n x d matrix A in nnz(A) + poly(d log n) time 
- we show how to find an approximate best rank-k approximation of an n x n matrix in nnz(A) + n*poly(k log n) time 

All approximations are relative error. Previous algorithms based on fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss transforms took 
at least ndlog d or nnz(A)*k time. We have implemented our algorithms, and preliminary results suggest the algorithms 
are competitive in practice.