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We investigate the complexity of counting trees, forests and bases of matroids from a parameterized point of view. It turns out that the problems of computing the number of trees and forests with $k$ edges are $\# W[1]$-hard when…
We study fundamental clustering problems for incomplete data. Specifically, given a set of incomplete d-dimensional vectors (representing rows of a matrix), the goal is to complete the missing vector entries in a way that admits a…
Detecting and counting copies of permutation patterns are fundamental algorithmic problems, with applications in the analysis of rankings, nonparametric statistics, and property testing tasks such as independence and quasirandomness…
Writing concurrent programs is notoriously hard due to scheduling non-determinism. The most common concurrency bugs are data races, which are accesses to a shared resource that can be executed concurrently. Dynamic data-race prediction is…
The stable roommates problem can admit multiple different stable matchings. We have different criteria for deciding which one is optimal, but computing those is often NP-hard. We show that the problem of finding generous or rank-maximal…
Finding the longest common subsequence in $k$-length substrings (LCS$k$) is a recently proposed problem motivated by computational biology. This is a generalization of the well-known LCS problem in which matching symbols from two sequences…
In the Colored Clustering problem, one is asked to cluster edge-colored (hyper-)graphs whose colors represent interaction types. More specifically, the goal is to select as many edges as possible without choosing two edges that share an…
We study the optimization version of constraint satisfaction problems (Max-CSPs) in the framework of parameterized complexity; the goal is to compute the maximum fraction of constraints that can be satisfied simultaneously. In standard…
The problem of approximate string matching is important in many different areas such as computational biology, text processing and pattern recognition. A great effort has been made to design efficient algorithms addressing several variants…
We study the problem of finding a mapping $f$ from a set of points into the real line, under ordinal triple constraints. An ordinal constraint for a triple of points $(u,v,w)$ asserts that $|f(u)-f(v)|<|f(u)-f(w)|$. We present an…
We present a series of almost settled inapproximability results for three fundamental problems. The first in our series is the subexponential-time inapproximability of the maximum independent set problem, a question studied in the area of…
We consider the problem of computing a shortest solid cover of an indeterminate string. An indeterminate string may contain non-solid symbols, each of which specifies a subset of the alphabet that could be present at the corresponding…
The first-order (FO) model checking problem asks, given an FO sentence $\phi$ and a graph $G$, whether $G$ is a model of $\phi$. This problem is known to be $\mathsf{AW[*]}$-hard when parameterized by the quantifier rank of the formula. A…
We generalise a multiple string pattern matching algorithm, recently proposed by Fredriksson and Grabowski [J. Discr. Alg. 7, 2009], to deal with arbitrary dictionaries on an alphabet of size $s$. If $r_m$ is the number of words of length…
We study algorithms for solving three problems on strings. The first one is the Most Frequently String Search Problem. The problem is the following. Assume that we have a sequence of $n$ strings of length $k$. The problem is finding the…
It is well-known that checking whether a given string $w$ matches a given regular expression $r$ can be done in quadratic time $O(|w|\cdot |r|)$ and that this cannot be improved to a truly subquadratic running time of $O((|w|\cdot…
Let $S$ be a string of length $n$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ and let $Q$ be a subset of $\Sigma$ of size $q \geq 2$. The 'co-occurrence problem' is to construct a compact data structure that supports the following query: given an integer $w$…
In Path Set Packing, the input is an undirected graph $G$, a collection $\calp$ of simple paths in $G$, and a positive integer $k$. The problem is to decide whether there exist $k$ edge-disjoint paths in $\calp$. We study the parameterized…
We consider the hardness of approximation of optimization problems from the point of view of definability. For many NP-hard optimization problems it is known that, unless P = NP, no polynomial-time algorithm can give an approximate solution…
String matching is the problem of finding all the substrings of a text which match a given pattern. It is one of the most investigated problems in computer science, mainly due to its very diverse applications in several fields. Recently,…