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We consider the problem of building a binary decision tree, to locate an object within a set by way of the least number of membership queries. This problem is equivalent to the “20 questions game” of information theory and is closely related to lossless so ...
An open problem in polarization theory is to determine the binary operations that always lead to polarization when they are used in Arıkan style constructions. This paper solves this problem by providing a necessary and sufficient condition for a binary op ...
In this thesis, we present new approximation algorithms as well as hardness of approximation results for NP-hard vehicle routing problems related to public transportation. We consider two different problem classes that also occur frequently in areas such a ...
We consider the Node-weighted Steiner Forest problem on planar graphs. Demaine et al. showed that a generic primal-dual algorithm gives a 6-approximation. We present two different proofs of an approximation factor of~3. Then, we draw a connection to Goem ...
The problem of finding "small" sets that meet every straight-line which intersects a given convex region was initiated by Mazurkiewicz in 1916. We call such a set an opaque set or a barrier for that region. We consider the problem of computing the shortest ...
We consider the capacitated k-center problem. In this problem we are given a finite set of locations in a metric space and each location has an associated non-negative integer capacity. The goal is to choose (open) k locations (called centers) and assign e ...
It is increasingly common for domain scientists to use computational tools to build and simulate spatial models of the phenomena they are studying. The spatial models they build are more and more detailed as well as dense and are consequently difficult to ...
We present a novel approximation algorithm for k-median that achieves an approximation guarantee of 1 + √3 + ε, improving upon the decade-old ratio of 3+ε. Our approach is based on two components, each of which, we believe, is of independent interest. Firs ...
One of the classic results in scheduling theory is the 2-approximation algorithm by Lenstra, Shmoys, and Tardos for the problem of scheduling jobs to minimize makespan on unrelated machines; i.e., job j requires time p(ij) if processed on machine i. More t ...
We consider the capacitated -center problem. In this problem we are given a finite set of locations in a metric space and each location has an associated non-negative integer capacity. The goal is to choose (open) locations (called centers) and assign each ...
