Falmagne recently introduced the concept of a medium, a combinatorial object encompassing hyperplane arrangements, topological orderings, acyclic orientations, and many other familiar structures. We find efficient solutions for several algorithmic problems on media: finding short reset sequences, shortest paths, testing whether a medium has a closed orientation, and listing the states of a medium given a black-box description.
We describe a data structure consisting of a sequence of compressed quadtrees for successively sparser samples of an input point set, with connections between the same squares in successive members of the sequence. Using this structure, we can insert or delete points and answer approximate range queries and approximate nearest neighbor queries in O(log n) time per operation.
We consider graph drawing algorithms for learning spaces, a type of \(st\)-oriented partial cube derived from antimatroids and used to model states of knowledge of students. We show how to draw any \(st\)-planar learning space so all internal faces are convex quadrilaterals with the bottom side horizontal and the left side vertical, with one minimal and one maximal vertex. Conversely, every such drawing represents an \(st\)-planar learning space. We also describe connections between these graphs and arrangements of translates of a quadrant.
We show how to test whether a graph is a partial cube, and if so embed it isometrically into a hypercube, in time O(n2), improving previous O(nm)-time solutions; here n is the number of vertices and m is the number of edges. The ideas are to use bit-parallelism to speed up previous approaches to the embedding step, and to verify that the resulting embedding is isometric using an all-pairs shortest path algorithm from "algorithms for media".
(slides)
Defines a class of orthogonal graph drawings formed by a point set in three dimensions for which axis-parallel line contains zero or two vertices, with edges connecting pairs of points on each nonempty axis-parallel line. Shows that the existence of such a drawing can be defined topologically, in terms of certain two-dimensional surface embeddings of the same graph. Based on this equivalence, describes algorithms, graph-theoretic properties, and hardness results for graphs of this type.
(Slides from talk at U. Arizona, February 2008 – Slides from GD08) )
How to implement an antimatroid, with applications in computerized education.
We formalize problems of finding large approximately-matching regions of two related but not completely isomorphic quadrilateral meshes, show that these problems are NP-complete, and describe a natural greedy heuristic that is guaranteed to find good matches when the mismatching parts of the meshes are small.
(Preprint)
We use a construction inspired by the motorcycle graphs previously used in straight skeleton construction, to partition quadrilateral meshes into a small number of structured submeshes. Our construction is canonical in that two copies of the same mesh will always be partitioned in the same way, and can be used to speed up graph isomorphism computations for geometric models in feature animation.
A straight skeleton is defined by the locus of points crossed by the edges and vertices of a polyhedron as it undergoes a continuous shrinking process in which the faces move inwards at constant speed. We resolve some ambiguities in the definition of these shapes, define efficient algorithms for polyhedra with axis-parallel faces, show that arbitrary polyhedra have strictly more complicated straight skeletons, and report on results from an implementation of our algorithm for arbitrary polyhedra.
Greedy drawing is an idea for encoding network routing tables into the geometric coordinates of an embedding of the network, but most previous work in this area has ignored the space complexity of these encoded tables. We refine a method of R. Kleinberg for embedding arbitrary graphs into the hyperbolic plane, which uses linearly many bits to represent each vertex, and show that only logarithmic bits per point are needed.
We describe polynomial time algorithms for determining whether an undirected graph may be embedded in a distance-preserving way into the hexagonal tiling of the plane, the diamond structure in three dimensions, or analogous structures in higher dimensions. The graphs that may be embedded in this way form an interesting subclass of the partial cubes.
(Slides)
We examine US road network data and show that, contrary to the assumptions of much past GIS work, these networks are highly nonplanar. We introduce a class of "multiscale dispersed" networks that better fit the data; these networks are defined by a family of disks of varying sizes such that, if a small number of outliers is removed, the remaining disks cover each point of the plane a constant number of times. As we show, these networks have good graph separators, allowing for efficient algorithms for minimum spanning trees, graph Voronoi diagrams, and related problems.
We consider problems of determining when a curve in the plane is the projection of a 3d surface with no vertical tangents. Several problems of this type are NP-complete, but can be solved in polynomial time if a casing of the curve is also given.
If a connected graph corresponds to a set of points and line segments in the plane, in such a way that the number of crossing pairs of line segments is sublinear in the size of the graph by an iterated-log factor, then we can find the arrangement of the segments in linear time. It was previously known how to find the arrangement in linear time when the number of crossings is superlinear by an iterated-log factor, so the only remaining open case is when the number of crossings is close to the size of the graph.
Proves that it's NP-complete to compute the Hadwiger number of a graph.
Investigates Voronoi diagrams for a "smoothed distance" in which the distance between two points p and q is inversely weighted by the perimeter of triangle opq for a fixed point o, its relation to dilation of star networks centered at o, and its generalization to minimization diagrams of certain convex functions. When the function to be minimized is suitably well-behaved, its level sets form pseudocircles, the bisectors of the minimization diagram form pseudoline arrangements, and the diagram itself has linear complexity.
Years – Publications – David Eppstein – Theory Group – Inf. & Comp. Sci. – UC Irvine
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