Probabilistic Metric Embedding via Metric Labeling

We consider probabilistic embedding of metric spaces into ultra-metrics (or equivalently to a constant factor, into hierarchically separated trees) to minimize the expected distortion of any pairwise distance. Such embeddings have been widely used in network design and online algorithms. Our main result is a polynomial time algorithm that approximates the optimal distortion on any instance to within a constant factor. We achieve this via a novel LP formulation that reduces this problem to a probabilistic version of uniform metric labeling

Multi-Party Protocols, Information Complexity and Privacy

We introduce the new measure of Public Information Complexity (PIC), as a tool for the study of multi-party computation protocols, and of quantities such as their communication complexity, or the amount of randomness they require in the context of information-theoretic private computations. We are able to use this measure directly in the natural asynchronous message-passing peer-to-peer model and show a number of interesting properties and applications of our new notion: the Public Information Complexity is a lower bound on the Communication Complexity and an upper bound on the Information Complexity; the difference between the Public Information Complexity and the Information Complexity provides a lower bound on the amount of randomness used in a protocol; any communication protocol can be compressed to its Public Information Cost; an explicit calculation of the zero-error Public Information Complexity of the k-party, n-bit Parity function, where a player outputs the bit-wise parity of the inputs. The latter result establishes that the amount of randomness needed for a private protocol that computes this function is Omega(n)