The rapid development of derandomization theory, which is a fundamental area
in theoretical computer science, has recently led to many surprising
applications outside its initial intention. We will review some recent such
developments related to combinatorial group testing. In its most basic setting,
the aim of group testing is to identify a set of "positive" individuals in a
population of items by taking groups of items and asking whether there is a
positive in each group.
In particular, we will discuss explicit constructions of optimal or
nearly-optimal group testing schemes using "randomness-conducting" functions.
Among such developments are constructions of error-correcting group testing
schemes using randomness extractors and condensers, as well as threshold group
testing schemes from lossless condensers.Comment: Invited Paper in Proceedings of 48th Annual Allerton Conference on
Communication, Control, and Computing, 201