There are many interesting problems surrounding the unit group U(RG) of the ring RG, where R is a commutative ring and G is a finite group. Of particular interest are the finite subgroups of U(RG). In the seventies, Zassenhaus conjectured that any u in U(ZG) is conjugate, in the group U(QG), to an element of the form +/-g, where g is an element of the group G. This came to be known as the "(first) Zassenhaus conjecture". I will talk about the recent construction of a counterexample to this conjecture (this is joint work with L. Margolis), and recent work on related questions in the modular representation theory of finite groups.

Structure from Motion (SfM) is a problem which asks: given photos of an object from different angles, can we reconstruct the object in 3D? This problem is important in computer vision, with applications including urban planning and autonomous navigation. A key part of SfM is bundle adjustment, where initial estimates of 3D points and camera locations are refined to match the images. This results in a high-dimensional nonlinear least-squares problem. In this talk, I will discuss how dimensionality reduction methods such as block coordinates and sketching can be used to improve solver scalability for bundle adjustment problems.

Abstract: In 2016 Ayyer, Prasad and Spallone proved that the restriction to 
S_{n-1} of any odd degree irreducible character of S_n has a unique irreducible 
constituent of odd degree.
This result was later generalized by Isaacs, Navarro Olsson and Tiep.
In this talk I will survey some recent developments on this topic.

Signed permutation modules of symmetric groups and Iwahori-hecke algebras