His publications are here: http://www.mit.edu/~parrilo/pubs/index.html. This one in particular: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.0808v1 looks like it might be related.

I know this post is about Parrilo but I would just like to point out that Jesus De Loera (co-author of linked paper) is awesome.

Favorite paper: minimal tetrahedralization of a convex polyhedron is NP-hard. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/math/pdf/0012/0012177v1.pdf

http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~deloera/RECENT_WORK/recent.html

Can't open file from http://arxiv.org/pdf/0909.0808v1 evince says "Permission Denied". Could someone provide another link? Thanks in advance.

Its just a PDF file, but the name lacks an extension. You might try downloading it, renaming it with a .pdf extension, and trying again to open it.

Does anyone have a link to the actual algorithms?

I suppose the article is referring to the SOSTOOLS (where SOS = Sum of Squares) free MATLAB toolbox:

http://www.cds.caltech.edu/sostools

http://www.mit.edu/~parrilo/sostools

The article could have mentioned that more people have worked on this. The whole thing started while Parrilo and Prajna were Prof. John Doyle's grad students at Caltech / CDS. Yet once again, MIT's shameless self-promotion fails to give credit where credit is due...

I always hate how these articles never have links to the actual papers or references. I suppose most people don't care, but then again, this is MIT news. Nerds will read it. HN's the only place where you get links to stuff. Thanks.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/ is the online alumni magazine whose, like every other alumni magazine on earth's, sole purpose is PR about the great things the school is doing.

It isn't exactly scientific american.

while true, I don't think it hurts for journalists of any sort to quote or link to their sources. And considering the audience of MIT alumni, I'm sure they'd appreciate it as much as I would.