Heating the Solar Atmosphere by the Self-Enhanced Thermal Waves Caused by the Dynamo Processes

We discuss a possible mechanism for heating the solar atmosphere by the ensemble of thermal waves, generated by the photospheric dynamo and propagating upwards with increasing magnitudes. These waves are self-sustained and amplified due to the specific dependence of the efficiency of heat release by Ohmic dissipation on the ratio of the collisional to gyro- frequencies, which in its turn is determined by the temperature profile formed in the wave. In the case of sufficiently strong driving, such a mechanism can increase the plasma temperature by a few times, i.e. it may be responsible for heating the chromosphere and the base of the transition region.Comment: v2: A number of minor corrections and additional explanations. AASTeX, 5 pages, 2 EPS figures, submitted to The Astrophysical Journa

A Spanner for the Day After

We show how to construct $(1+\varepsilon)$-spanner over a set $P$ of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that is resilient to a catastrophic failure of nodes. Specifically, for prescribed parameters $\vartheta,\varepsilon \in (0,1)$, the computed spanner $G$ has $O\bigl(\varepsilon^{-c} \vartheta^{-6} n \log n (\log\log n)^6 \bigr)$ edges, where $c= O(d)$. Furthermore, for any $k$, and any deleted set $B \subseteq P$ of $k$ points, the residual graph $G \setminus B$ is $(1+\varepsilon)$-spanner for all the points of $P$ except for $(1+\vartheta)k$ of them. No previous constructions, beyond the trivial clique with $O(n^2)$ edges, were known such that only a tiny additional fraction (i.e., $\vartheta$) lose their distance preserving connectivity. Our construction works by first solving the exact problem in one dimension, and then showing a surprisingly simple and elegant construction in higher dimensions, that uses the one-dimensional construction in a black box fashion

A structural approach to kernels for ILPs: Treewidth and Total Unimodularity

Kernelization is a theoretical formalization of efficient preprocessing for NP-hard problems. Empirically, preprocessing is highly successful in practice, for example in state-of-the-art ILP-solvers like CPLEX. Motivated by this, previous work studied the existence of kernelizations for ILP related problems, e.g., for testing feasibility of Ax <= b. In contrast to the observed success of CPLEX, however, the results were largely negative. Intuitively, practical instances have far more useful structure than the worst-case instances used to prove these lower bounds. In the present paper, we study the effect that subsystems with (Gaifman graph of) bounded treewidth or totally unimodularity have on the kernelizability of the ILP feasibility problem. We show that, on the positive side, if these subsystems have a small number of variables on which they interact with the remaining instance, then we can efficiently replace them by smaller subsystems of size polynomial in the domain without changing feasibility. Thus, if large parts of an instance consist of such subsystems, then this yields a substantial size reduction. We complement this by proving that relaxations to the considered structures, e.g., larger boundaries of the subsystems, allow worst-case lower bounds against kernelization. Thus, these relaxed structures can be used to build instance families that cannot be efficiently reduced, by any approach.Comment: Extended abstract in the Proceedings of the 23rd European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2015

Improved Distributed Algorithms for Exact Shortest Paths

Computing shortest paths is one of the central problems in the theory of distributed computing. For the last few years, substantial progress has been made on the approximate single source shortest paths problem, culminating in an algorithm of Becker et al. [DISC'17] which deterministically computes $(1+o(1))$-approximate shortest paths in $\tilde O(D+\sqrt n)$ time, where $D$ is the hop-diameter of the graph. Up to logarithmic factors, this time complexity is optimal, matching the lower bound of Elkin [STOC'04]. The question of exact shortest paths however saw no algorithmic progress for decades, until the recent breakthrough of Elkin [STOC'17], which established a sublinear-time algorithm for exact single source shortest paths on undirected graphs. Shortly after, Huang et al. [FOCS'17] provided improved algorithms for exact all pairs shortest paths problem on directed graphs. In this paper, we present a new single-source shortest path algorithm with complexity $\tilde O(n^{3/4}D^{1/4})$. For polylogarithmic $D$, this improves on Elkin's $\tilde{O}(n^{5/6})$ bound and gets closer to the $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/2})$ lower bound of Elkin [STOC'04]. For larger values of $D$, we present an improved variant of our algorithm which achieves complexity $\tilde{O}\left( n^{3/4+o(1)}+ \min\{ n^{3/4}D^{1/6},n^{6/7}\}+D\right)$, and thus compares favorably with Elkin's bound of $\tilde{O}(n^{5/6} + n^{2/3}D^{1/3} + D )$ in essentially the entire range of parameters. This algorithm provides also a qualitative improvement, because it works for the more challenging case of directed graphs (i.e., graphs where the two directions of an edge can have different weights), constituting the first sublinear-time algorithm for directed graphs. Our algorithm also extends to the case of exact $\kappa$-source shortest paths...Comment: 26 page

SgpDec : Cascade (de)compositions of finite transformation semigroups and permutation groups

We describe how the SgpDec computer algebra package can be used for composing and decomposing permutation groups and transformation semigroups hierarchically by directly constructing substructures of wreath products, the so called cascade products.Final Accepted Versio

Model of Multi-branch Trees for Efficient Resource Allocation

Although exploring the principles of resource allocation is still important in many fields, little is known about appropriate methods for optimal resource allocation thus far. This is because we should consider many issues including opposing interests between many types of stakeholders. Here, we develop a new allocation method to resolve budget conflicts. To do so, we consider two points—minimizing assessment costs and satisfying allocational efficiency. In our method, an evaluator's assessment is restricted to one's own projects in one's own department, and both an executive's and mid-level executives' assessments are also restricted to each representative project in each branch or department they manage. At the same time, we develop a calculation method to integrate such assessments by using a multi-branch tree structure, where a set of leaf nodes represents projects and a set of non-leaf nodes represents either directors or executives. Our method is incentive-compatible because no director has any incentive to make fallacious assessments

I/O-optimal algorithms on grid graphs

Given a graph of which the n vertices form a regular two-dimensional grid, and in which each (possibly weighted and/or directed) edge connects a vertex to one of its eight neighbours, the following can be done in O(scan(n)) I/Os, provided M = Omega(B^2): computation of shortest paths with non-negative edge weights from a single source, breadth-first traversal, computation of a minimum spanning tree, topological sorting, time-forward processing (if the input is a plane graph), and an Euler tour (if the input graph is a tree). The minimum-spanning tree algorithm is cache-oblivious. The best previously published algorithms for these problems need Theta(sort(n)) I/Os. Estimates of the actual I/O volume show that the new algorithms may often be very efficient in practice.Comment: 12 pages' extended abstract plus 12 pages' appendix with details, proofs and calculations. Has not been published in and is currently not under review of any conference or journa

Topological Stability of Kinetic kk-Centers

We study the $k$-center problem in a kinetic setting: given a set of continuously moving points $P$ in the plane, determine a set of $k$ (moving) disks that cover $P$ at every time step, such that the disks are as small as possible at any point in time. Whereas the optimal solution over time may exhibit discontinuous changes, many practical applications require the solution to be stable: the disks must move smoothly over time. Existing results on this problem require the disks to move with a bounded speed, but this model is very hard to work with. Hence, the results are limited and offer little theoretical insight. Instead, we study the topological stability of $k$-centers. Topological stability was recently introduced and simply requires the solution to change continuously, but may do so arbitrarily fast. We prove upper and lower bounds on the ratio between the radii of an optimal but unstable solution and the radii of a topologically stable solution---the topological stability ratio---considering various metrics and various optimization criteria. For $k = 2$ we provide tight bounds, and for small $k > 2$ we can obtain nontrivial lower and upper bounds. Finally, we provide an algorithm to compute the topological stability ratio in polynomial time for constant $k$

Area-Universal Rectangular Layouts

A rectangular layout is a partition of a rectangle into a finite set of interior-disjoint rectangles. Rectangular layouts appear in various applications: as rectangular cartograms in cartography, as floorplans in building architecture and VLSI design, and as graph drawings. Often areas are associated with the rectangles of a rectangular layout and it might hence be desirable if one rectangular layout can represent several area assignments. A layout is area-universal if any assignment of areas to rectangles can be realized by a combinatorially equivalent rectangular layout. We identify a simple necessary and sufficient condition for a rectangular layout to be area-universal: a rectangular layout is area-universal if and only if it is one-sided. More generally, given any rectangular layout L and any assignment of areas to its regions, we show that there can be at most one layout (up to horizontal and vertical scaling) which is combinatorially equivalent to L and achieves a given area assignment. We also investigate similar questions for perimeter assignments. The adjacency requirements for the rectangles of a rectangular layout can be specified in various ways, most commonly via the dual graph of the layout. We show how to find an area-universal layout for a given set of adjacency requirements whenever such a layout exists.Comment: 19 pages, 16 figure

Map Matching with Simplicity Constraints

We study a map matching problem, the task of finding in an embedded graph a path that has low distance to a given curve in R^2. The Fr\'echet distance is a common measure for this problem. Efficient methods exist to compute the best path according to this measure. However, these methods cannot guarantee that the result is simple (i.e. it does not intersect itself) even if the given curve is simple. In this paper, we prove that it is in fact NP-complete to determine the existence a simple cycle in a planar straight-line embedding of a graph that has at most a given Fr\'echet distance to a given simple closed curve. We also consider the implications of our proof on some variants of the problem