# Department Seminars & Colloquia

2022-08
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A temporal graph is a graph whose edges are available only at specific times. In this scenario, the only valid walks are the ones traversing adjacent edges respecting their availability, i.e. sequence of adjacent edges whose appearing times are non-decreasing. Given a graph G and vertices s and t of G, Menger’s Theorem states that the maximum number of (internally) vertex disjoint s,t-paths is equal to the minimum size of a subset X for which G-X contains no s,t-path. This is a classical result in Graph Theory, taught in most basic Graph Theory courses, and it holds also when G is directed and when edge disjoint paths and edge cuts are considered instead. A direct translation of Menger’s Theorem to the temporal context has been known not to hold since an example was shown in the seminal paper by Kempe, Kleinberg and Kumar (STOC’00). In this talk, an overview of possible temporal versions of Menger’s Theorem will be discussed, as well as the complexity of the related problems.
Host: Sang-il Oum     English     2022-08-05 11:22:11
We prove that for $n>k\geq 3$, if $G$ is an $n$-vertex graph with chromatic number $k$ but any its proper subgraph has smaller chromatic number, then $G$ contains at most $n-k+3$ copies of cliques of size $k-1$. This answers a problem of Abbott and Zhou and provides a tight bound on a conjecture of Gallai. This is joint work with Jie Ma.
Host: Sang-il Oum     English     2022-08-07 22:29:47
The Structural Theorem of the Graph Minors series of Robertson and Seymour asserts that, for every $t\in\mathbb{N},$ there exists some constant $c_{t}$ such that every $K_{t}$-minor-free graph admits a tree decomposition whose torsos can be transformed, by the removal of at most $c_{t}$ vertices, to graphs that can be seen as the union of some graph that is embeddable to some surface of Euler genus at most $c_{t}$ and "at most $c_{t}$ vortices of depth $c_{t}$". Our main combinatorial result is a "vortex-free" refinement of the above structural theorem as follows: we identify a (parameterized) graph $H_{t}$, called shallow vortex grid, and we prove that if in the above structural theorem we replace $K_{t}$ by $H_{t},$ then the resulting decomposition becomes "vortex-free". Up to now, the most general classes of graphs admitting such a result were either bounded Euler genus graphs or the so called single-crossing minor-free graphs. Our result is tight in the sense that, whenever we minor-exclude a graph that is not a minor of some $H_{t},$ the appearance of vortices is unavoidable. Using the above decomposition theorem, we design an algorithm that, given an $H_{t}$-minor-free graph $G$, computes the generating function of all perfect matchings of $G$ in polynomial time. This algorithm yields, on $H_{t}$-minor-free graphs, polynomial algorithms for computational problems such as the {dimer problem, the exact matching problem}, and the computation of the permanent. Our results, combined with known complexity results, imply a complete characterization of minor-closed graphs classes where the number of perfect matchings is polynomially computable: They are exactly those graph classes that do not contain every $H_{t}$ as a minor. This provides a sharp complexity dichotomy for the problem of counting perfect matchings in minor-closed classes. This is joint work with Dimitrios M. Thilikos.
Host: Sang-il Oum     English     2022-07-20 19:55:23
Property testers are probabilistic algorithms aiming to solve a decision problem efficiently in the context of big-data. A property tester for a property P has to decide (with high probability correctly) whether a given input graph has property P or is far from having property P while having local access to the graph. We study property testing of properties that are definable in first-order logic (FO) in the bounded-degree model. We show that any FO property that is defined by a formula with quantifier prefix ∃*∀* is testable, while there exists an FO property that is expressible by a formula with quantifier prefix ∀*∃* that is not testable. In the dense graph model, a similar picture is long known (Alon, Fischer, Krivelevich, Szegedy, Combinatorica 2000), despite the very different nature of the two models. In particular, we obtain our lower bound by a first-order formula that defines a class of bounded-degree expanders, based on zig-zag products of graphs. This is joint work with Isolde Adler and Pan Peng.
Host: Sang-il Oum     English     2022-07-20 19:56:58
We show a flow-augmentation algorithm in directed graphs: There exists a polynomial-time algorithm that, given a directed graph G, two integers $s,t\in V(G)$, and an integer $k$, adds (randomly) to $G$ a number of arcs such that for every minimal st-cut $Z$ in $G$ of size at most $k$, with probability $2^{−\operatorname{poly}(k)}$ the set $Z$ becomes a minimum $st$-cut in the resulting graph. The directed flow-augmentation tool allows us to prove fixed-parameter tractability of a number of problems parameterized by the cardinality of the deletion set, whose parameterized complexity status was repeatedly posed as open problems: (1) Chain SAT, defined by Chitnis, Egri, and Marx [ESA'13, Algorithmica'17], (2) a number of weighted variants of classic directed cut problems, such as Weighted st-Cut, Weighted Directed Feedback Vertex Set, or Weighted Almost 2-SAT. By proving that Chain SAT is FPT, we confirm a conjecture of Chitnis, Egri, and Marx that, for any graph H, if the List H-Coloring problem is polynomial-time solvable, then the corresponding vertex-deletion problem is fixed-parameter tractable. Joint work with Stefan Kratsch, Marcin Pilipczuk, Magnus Wahlström.
Host: Sang-il Oum     English     2022-06-20 14:22:21
We call an order type inscribable if it is realized by a point configuration where all extreme points are all on a circle. In this talk, we investigate inscribability of order types. We first show that every simple order type with at most 2 interior points is inscribable, and that the number of such order types is $\Theta(\frac{4^n}{n^{3/2}})$. We further construct an infinite family of minimally uninscribable order types. The proof of uninscribability mainly uses Möbius transformations. We also suggest open problems around inscribability. This is a joint work with Michael Gene Dobbins.
Host: Sang-il Oum     English     2022-06-22 06:16:23