Compact Oblivious Routing

Oblivious routing is an attractive paradigm for large distributed systems in which centralized control and frequent reconfigurations are infeasible or undesired (e.g., costly). Over the last almost 20 years, much progress has been made in devising oblivious routing schemes that guarantee close to optimal load and also algorithms for constructing such schemes efficiently have been designed. However, a common drawback of existing oblivious routing schemes is that they are not compact: they require large routing tables (of polynomial size), which does not scale. This paper presents the first oblivious routing scheme which guarantees close to optimal load and is compact at the same time - requiring routing tables of polylogarithmic size. Our algorithm maintains the polylogarithmic competitive ratio of existing algorithms, and is hence particularly well-suited for emerging large-scale networks

The random interchange process on the hypercube

We prove the occurrence of a phase transition accompanied by the emergence of cycles of diverging lengths in the random interchange process on the hypercube.Comment: 8 page

GOGMA: Globally-Optimal Gaussian Mixture Alignment

Gaussian mixture alignment is a family of approaches that are frequently used for robustly solving the point-set registration problem. However, since they use local optimisation, they are susceptible to local minima and can only guarantee local optimality. Consequently, their accuracy is strongly dependent on the quality of the initialisation. This paper presents the first globally-optimal solution to the 3D rigid Gaussian mixture alignment problem under the L2 distance between mixtures. The algorithm, named GOGMA, employs a branch-and-bound approach to search the space of 3D rigid motions SE(3), guaranteeing global optimality regardless of the initialisation. The geometry of SE(3) was used to find novel upper and lower bounds for the objective function and local optimisation was integrated into the scheme to accelerate convergence without voiding the optimality guarantee. The evaluation empirically supported the optimality proof and showed that the method performed much more robustly on two challenging datasets than an existing globally-optimal registration solution.Comment: Manuscript in press 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognitio

Remarks on Category-Based Routing in Social Networks

It is well known that individuals can route messages on short paths through social networks, given only simple information about the target and using only local knowledge about the topology. Sociologists conjecture that people find routes greedily by passing the message to an acquaintance that has more in common with the target than themselves, e.g. if a dentist in Saarbr\"ucken wants to send a message to a specific lawyer in Munich, he may forward it to someone who is a lawyer and/or lives in Munich. Modelling this setting, Eppstein et al. introduced the notion of category-based routing. The goal is to assign a set of categories to each node of a graph such that greedy routing is possible. By proving bounds on the number of categories a node has to be in we can argue about the plausibility of the underlying sociological model. In this paper we substantially improve the upper bounds introduced by Eppstein et al. and prove new lower bounds.Comment: 21 page

A Turaev surface approach to Khovanov homology

We introduce Khovanov homology for ribbon graphs and show that the Khovanov homology of a certain ribbon graph embedded on the Turaev surface of a link is isomorphic to the Khovanov homology of the link (after a grading shift). We also present a spanning quasi-tree model for the Khovanov homology of a ribbon graph.Comment: 30 pages, 18 figures, added sections on virtual links and Reidemeister move