This document collects the lecture notes from my course ``Communication Complexity (for Algorithm Designers),'' taught at
Stanford in the winter quarter of 2015. The two primary goals of the course are:

1. Learn several canonical problems that have proved the most useful for proving lower bounds (Disjointness, Index, Gap-Hamming, etc.). ... more >>>

The {\em Unique Coverage} problem, given a universe $V$ of elements and a collection $E$ of subsets of $V$, asks to find $S \subseteq V$ to maximize the number of $e \in E$ that intersects $S$ in {\em exactly one} element. When each $e \in E$ has cardinality at most ... more >>>

We show an exponential separation between two well-studied models of algebraic computation, namely read-once oblivious algebraic branching programs (ROABPs) and multilinear depth three circuits. In particular we show the following:

1. There exists an explicit $n$-variate polynomial computable by linear sized multilinear depth three circuits (with only two product gates) ... more >>>