215 research outputs found
On the Obfuscation Complexity of Planar Graphs
Being motivated by John Tantalo's Planarity Game, we consider straight line
plane drawings of a planar graph with edge crossings and wonder how
obfuscated such drawings can be. We define , the obfuscation complexity
of , to be the maximum number of edge crossings in a drawing of .
Relating to the distribution of vertex degrees in , we show an
efficient way of constructing a drawing of with at least edge
crossings. We prove bounds (\delta(G)^2/24-o(1))n^2 < \obf G <3 n^2 for an
-vertex planar graph with minimum vertex degree .
The shift complexity of , denoted by , is the minimum number of
vertex shifts sufficient to eliminate all edge crossings in an arbitrarily
obfuscated drawing of (after shifting a vertex, all incident edges are
supposed to be redrawn correspondingly). If , then
is linear in the number of vertices due to the known fact that the matching
number of is linear. However, in the case we notice that
can be linear even if the matching number is bounded. As for
computational complexity, we show that, given a drawing of a planar graph,
it is NP-hard to find an optimum sequence of shifts making crossing-free.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure. The proof of Theorem 3 is simplified. An overview
of a related work is adde
On the Anonymization of Differentially Private Location Obfuscation
Obfuscation techniques in location-based services (LBSs) have been shown
useful to hide the concrete locations of service users, whereas they do not
necessarily provide the anonymity. We quantify the anonymity of the location
data obfuscated by the planar Laplacian mechanism and that by the optimal
geo-indistinguishable mechanism of Bordenabe et al. We empirically show that
the latter provides stronger anonymity than the former in the sense that more
users in the database satisfy k-anonymity. To formalize and analyze such
approximate anonymity we introduce the notion of asymptotic anonymity. Then we
show that the location data obfuscated by the optimal geo-indistinguishable
mechanism can be anonymized by removing a smaller number of users from the
database. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the optimal geo-indistinguishable
mechanism has better utility both for users and for data analysts.Comment: ISITA'18 conference pape
On the Maximum Crossing Number
Research about crossings is typically about minimization. In this paper, we
consider \emph{maximizing} the number of crossings over all possible ways to
draw a given graph in the plane. Alpert et al. [Electron. J. Combin., 2009]
conjectured that any graph has a \emph{convex} straight-line drawing, e.g., a
drawing with vertices in convex position, that maximizes the number of edge
crossings. We disprove this conjecture by constructing a planar graph on twelve
vertices that allows a non-convex drawing with more crossings than any convex
one. Bald et al. [Proc. COCOON, 2016] showed that it is NP-hard to compute the
maximum number of crossings of a geometric graph and that the weighted
geometric case is NP-hard to approximate. We strengthen these results by
showing hardness of approximation even for the unweighted geometric case and
prove that the unweighted topological case is NP-hard.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure
Optimal Geo-Indistinguishable Mechanisms for Location Privacy
We consider the geo-indistinguishability approach to location privacy, and
the trade-off with respect to utility. We show that, given a desired degree of
geo-indistinguishability, it is possible to construct a mechanism that
minimizes the service quality loss, using linear programming techniques. In
addition we show that, under certain conditions, such mechanism also provides
optimal privacy in the sense of Shokri et al. Furthermore, we propose a method
to reduce the number of constraints of the linear program from cubic to
quadratic, maintaining the privacy guarantees and without affecting
significantly the utility of the generated mechanism. This reduces considerably
the time required to solve the linear program, thus enlarging significantly the
location sets for which the optimal mechanisms can be computed.Comment: 13 page
Privacy-Preserving Vehicle Assignment for Mobility-on-Demand Systems
Urban transportation is being transformed by mobility-on-demand (MoD)
systems. One of the goals of MoD systems is to provide personalized
transportation services to passengers. This process is facilitated by a
centralized operator that coordinates the assignment of vehicles to individual
passengers, based on location data. However, current approaches assume that
accurate positioning information for passengers and vehicles is readily
available. This assumption raises privacy concerns. In this work, we address
this issue by proposing a method that protects passengers' drop-off locations
(i.e., their travel destinations). Formally, we solve a batch assignment
problem that routes vehicles at obfuscated origin locations to passenger
locations (since origin locations correspond to previous drop-off locations),
such that the mean waiting time is minimized. Our main contributions are
two-fold. First, we formalize the notion of privacy for continuous
vehicle-to-passenger assignment in MoD systems, and integrate a privacy
mechanism that provides formal guarantees. Second, we present a scalable
algorithm that takes advantage of superfluous (idle) vehicles in the system,
combining multiple iterations of the Hungarian algorithm to allocate a
redundant number of vehicles to a single passenger. As a result, we are able to
reduce the performance deterioration induced by the privacy mechanism. We
evaluate our methods on a real, large-scale data set consisting of over 11
million taxi rides (specifying vehicle availability and passenger requests),
recorded over a month's duration, in the area of Manhattan, New York. Our work
demonstrates that privacy can be integrated into MoD systems without incurring
a significant loss of performance, and moreover, that this loss can be further
minimized at the cost of deploying additional (redundant) vehicles into the
fleet.Comment: 8 pages; Submitted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 201
A polynomial bound for untangling geometric planar graphs
To untangle a geometric graph means to move some of the vertices so that the
resulting geometric graph has no crossings. Pach and Tardos [Discrete Comput.
Geom., 2002] asked if every n-vertex geometric planar graph can be untangled
while keeping at least n^\epsilon vertices fixed. We answer this question in
the affirmative with \epsilon=1/4. The previous best known bound was
\Omega((\log n / \log\log n)^{1/2}). We also consider untangling geometric
trees. It is known that every n-vertex geometric tree can be untangled while
keeping at least (n/3)^{1/2} vertices fixed, while the best upper bound was
O(n\log n)^{2/3}. We answer a question of Spillner and Wolff [arXiv:0709.0170
2007] by closing this gap for untangling trees. In particular, we show that for
infinitely many values of n, there is an n-vertex geometric tree that cannot be
untangled while keeping more than 3(n^{1/2}-1) vertices fixed. Moreover, we
improve the lower bound to (n/2)^{1/2}.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure
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