Related papers: The "art of trellis decoding" is fixed-parameter t…
Parameterized complexity seeks to use input structure to obtain faster algorithms for NP-hard problems. This has been most successful for graphs of low treewidth: Many problems admit fast algorithms relative to treewidth and many of them…
We give a fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) approximation algorithm computing the path-width of a tournament, and more generally, of a semi-complete digraph. Based on this result, we prove that topological containment and rooted immersion…
We give an analog of the Myhill-Nerode methods from formal language theory for hypergraphs and use it to derive the following results for two NP-hard hypergraph problems: * We provide an algorithm for testing whether a hypergraph has…
We show that the following two problems are fixed-parameter tractable with parameter k: testing whether a connected n-vertex graph with m edges has a square root with at most n-1+k edges and testing whether such a graph has a square root…
We consider integer programs whose constraint matrix has a special block structure: $\min\{f(x):H_{com}x=b, l\le x\le u,x\in\mathbb{Z}^{t_B+nt_A}\}$, where the objective function $f$ is separable convex and the constraint matrix $H_ {com}$…
Locally repairable codes (LRCs) are error correcting codes used in distributed data storage. A traditional approach is to look for codes which simultaneously maximize error tolerance and minimize storage space consumption. However, this…
The bandwidth of a $n$-vertex graph $G$ is the smallest integer $b$ such that there exists a bijective function $f : V(G) \rightarrow \{1,...,n\}$, called a layout of $G$, such that for every edge $uv \in E(G)$, $|f(u) - f(v)| \leq b$. In…
In the Steiner Tree problem we are given an undirected edge-weighted graph as input, along with a set $K$ of vertices called terminals. The task is to output a minimum-weight connected subgraph that spans all the terminals. The famous…
We study the classical problem of computing geometric thickness, i.e., finding a straight-line drawing of an input graph and a partition of its edges into as few parts as possible so that each part is crossing-free. Since the problem is…
This dissertation explores applications of discrete geometry in mathematical neuroscience. We begin with convex neural codes, which model the activity of hippocampal place cells and other neurons with convex receptive fields. In Chapter 4,…
We study computationally-hard fundamental motion planning problems where the goal is to translate $k$ axis-aligned rectangular robots from their initial positions to their final positions without collision, and with the minimum number of…
The Max-Cut problem is known to be NP-hard on general graphs, while it can be solved in polynomial time on planar graphs. In this paper, we present a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for the problem on `almost' planar graphs: Given an…
Over the past decade, we witness an increasing amount of interest in the design of exact exponential-time and parameterized algorithms for problems in Graph Drawing. Unfortunately, we still lack knowledge of general methods to develop such…
In the Disjoint Paths problem, the input consists of an $n$-vertex graph $G$ and a collection of $k$ vertex pairs, $\{(s_i,t_i)\}_{i=1}^k$, and the objective is to determine whether there exists a collection $\{P_i\}_{i=1}^k$ of $k$…
Recently a strong connection has been shown between the tractability of integer programming (IP) with bounded coefficients on the one side and the structure of its constraint matrix on the other side. To that end, integer linear programming…
For a family of graphs $\mathcal{G}$, the $\mathcal{G}$-\textsc{Contraction} problem takes as an input a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, and the goal is to decide if there exists $F \subseteq E(G)$ of size at most $k$ such that $G/F$ belongs…
We define a special case of tree decompositions for planar graphs that respect a given embedding of the graph. We study the analogous width of the resulting decomposition we call the embedded-width of a plane graph. We show both upper…
We consider the feasibility problem of integer linear programming (ILP). We show that solutions of any ILP instance can be naturally represented by an FO-definable class of graphs. For each solution there may be many graphs representing it.…
In this paper, we study the problem of finding a minimum weight spanning tree that contains each vertex in a given subset $V_{\rm NT}$ of vertices as an internal vertex. This problem, called Minimum Weight Non-Terminal Spanning Tree,…
Integer Linear Programming (ILP) can be seen as the archetypical problem for NP-complete optimization problems, and a wide range of problems in artificial intelligence are solved in practice via a translation to ILP. Despite its huge range…