  Given an $m\times n$ binary matrix $M$ with $|M|=p\cdot mn$ (where $|M|$
denotes the number of 1 entries), define the discrepancy of $M$ as
$\mbox{disc}(M)=\displaystyle\max_{X\subset [m], Y\subset [n]}\big||M[X\times
Y]|-p|X|\cdot |Y|\big|$. Using semidefinite programming and spectral
techniques, we prove that if $\mbox{rank}(M)\leq r$ and $p\leq 1/2$, then
  $$\mbox{disc}(M)\geq \Omega(mn)\cdot
\min\left\{p,\frac{p^{1/2}}{\sqrt{r}}\right\}.$$
  We use this result to obtain a modest improvement of Lovett's best known
upper bound on the log-rank conjecture. We prove that any $m\times n$ binary
matrix $M$ of rank at most $r$ contains an $(m\cdot 2^{-O(\sqrt{r})})\times
(n\cdot 2^{-O(\sqrt{r})})$ sized all-1 or all-0 submatrix, which implies that
the deterministic communication complexity of any Boolean function of rank $r$
is at most $O(\sqrt{r})$.
