Some Applications of the Weighted Combinatorial Laplacian

The weighted combinatorial Laplacian of a graph is a symmetric matrix which is the discrete analogue of the Laplacian operator. In this thesis, we will study a new application of this matrix to matching theory yielding a new characterization of factor-criticality in graphs and matroids. Other applications are from the area of the physical design of very large scale integrated circuits. The placement of the gates includes the minimization of a quadratic form given by a weighted Laplacian. A method based on the dual constrained subgradient method is proposed to solve the simultaneous placement and gate-sizing problem. A crucial step of this method is the projection to the flow space of an associated graph, which can be performed by minimizing a quadratic form given by the unweighted combinatorial Laplacian.Andwendungen der gewichteten kombinatorischen Laplace-Matrix Die gewichtete kombinatorische Laplace-Matrix ist das diskrete Analogon des Laplace-Operators. In dieser Arbeit stellen wir eine neuartige Charakterisierung von Faktor-Kritikalität von Graphen und Matroiden mit Hilfe dieser Matrix vor. Wir untersuchen andere Anwendungen im Bereich des Entwurfs von höchstintegrierten Schaltkreisen. Die Platzierung basiert auf der Minimierung einer quadratischen Form, die durch eine gewichtete kombinatorische Laplace-Matrix gegeben ist. Wir präsentieren einen Algorithmus für das allgemeine simultane Platzierungs- und Gattergrößen-Optimierungsproblem, der auf der dualen Subgradientenmethode basiert. Ein wichtiger Bestandteil dieses Verfahrens ist eine Projektion auf den Flussraum eines assoziierten Graphen, die als die Minimierung einer durch die Laplace-Matrix gegebenen quadratischen Form aufgefasst werden kann

MAP inference via Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe Algorithm

We present a new proximal bundle method for Maximum-A-Posteriori (MAP) inference in structured energy minimization problems. The method optimizes a Lagrangean relaxation of the original energy minimization problem using a multi plane block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe method that takes advantage of the specific structure of the Lagrangean decomposition. We show empirically that our method outperforms state-of-the-art Lagrangean decomposition based algorithms on some challenging Markov Random Field, multi-label discrete tomography and graph matching problems

Jointly Optimal Routing and Caching for Arbitrary Network Topologies

We study a problem of fundamental importance to ICNs, namely, minimizing routing costs by jointly optimizing caching and routing decisions over an arbitrary network topology. We consider both source routing and hop-by-hop routing settings. The respective offline problems are NP-hard. Nevertheless, we show that there exist polynomial time approximation algorithms producing solutions within a constant approximation from the optimal. We also produce distributed, adaptive algorithms with the same approximation guarantees. We simulate our adaptive algorithms over a broad array of different topologies. Our algorithms reduce routing costs by several orders of magnitude compared to prior art, including algorithms optimizing caching under fixed routing.Comment: This is the extended version of the paper "Jointly Optimal Routing and Caching for Arbitrary Network Topologies", appearing in the 4th ACM Conference on Information-Centric Networking (ICN 2017), Berlin, Sep. 26-28, 201

Approximation algorithms for geometric dispersion

The most basic form of the max-sum dispersion problem (MSD) is as follows: given n points in R^q and an integer k, select a set of k points such that the sum of the pairwise distances within the set is maximal. This is a prominent diversity problem, with wide applications in web search and information retrieval, where one needs to find a small and diverse representative subset of a large dataset. The problem has recently received a great deal of attention in the computational geometry and operations research communities; and since it is NP-hard, research has focused on efficient heuristics and approximation algorithms. Several classes of distance functions have been considered in the literature. Many of the most common distances used in applications are induced by a norm in a real vector space. The focus of this thesis is on MSD over these geometric instances. We provide for it simple and fast polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTASs), as well as improved constant-factor approximation algorithms. We pay special attention to the class of negative-type distances, a class that includes Euclidean and Manhattan distances, among many others. In order to exploit the properties of this class, we apply several techniques and results from the theory of isometric embeddings. We explore the following variations of the MSD problem: matroid and matroid-intersection constraints, knapsack constraints, and the mixed-objective problem that maximizes a combination of the sum of pairwise distances with a submodular monotone function. In addition to approximation algorithms, we present a core-set for geometric instances of low dimension, and we discuss the efficient implementation of some of our algorithms for massive datasets, using the streaming and distributed models of computation

Large-scale optimization for data placement problem

Large-scale optimization of combinatorial problems is one of the most challenging areas. These problems are characterized by large sets of data (variables and constraints). In this thesis, we study large-scale optimization of the data placement problem with zero storage cost. The goal in the data placement problem is to find the placement of data objects in a set of fixed capacity caches in a network to optimize the latency of access. Data placement problem arises naturally in the design of content distribution networks. We report on an empirical study of the upper bound and the lower bound of this problem for large sized instances. We also study a semi-Lagrangean relaxation of a closely related k-median problem. In this thesis, we study the theory and practice of approximation algorithm for the data placement problem and the k-median problem