arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Michael T. Goodrich.
Inspired by a classic paper by Knuth, we revisit the problem of drawing flowcharts of loop-free algorithms, that is, degree-three series-parallel digraphs. Our drawing algorithms show that it is possible to produce Knuthian drawings of degree-three series-parallel digraphs with good aspect ratios and small numbers of edge bends.
We study geometric data structures for sets of point-based temporal events, answering time-windowed queries, i.e., given a contiguous time interval we answer common geometric queries about the point events with time stamps in this interval. The geometric queries we consider include queries based on the skyline, convex hull, and proximity relations of the point set. We provide space efficient data structures which answer queries in polylogarithmic time.
The problem of finding an electric vehicle route that optimizes both driving time and energy consumption can be modeled as a bicriterion path problem. Unfortunately, the problem of finding optimal bicriterion paths is NP-complete. This paper studies such problems restricted to two-phase paths, which correspond to a common way people drive electric vehicles, where a driver uses one driving style (say, minimizing driving time) at the beginning of a route and another driving style (say, minimizing energy consumption) at the end. We provide efficient polynomial-time algorithms for finding optimal two-phase paths in bicriterion networks, and we empirically verify the effectiveness of these algorithms for finding good electric vehicle driving routes in the road networks of various U.S. states. In addition, we show how to incorporate charging stations into these algorithms, in spite of the computational challenges introduced by the negative energy consumption of such network vertices.
Motivated by privacy preservation for outsourced data, data-oblivious external memory is a computational framework where a client performs computations on data stored at a semi-trusted server in a way that does not reveal her data to the server. This approach facilitates collaboration and reliability over traditional frameworks, and it provides privacy protection, even though the server has full access to the data and he can monitor how it is accessed by the client. The challenge is that even if data is encrypted, the server can learn information based on the client data access pattern; hence, access patterns must also be obfuscated. We investigate privacy-preserving algorithms for outsourced external memory that are based on the use of data-oblivious algorithms, that is, algorithms where each possible sequence of data accesses is independent of the data values. We give new efficient data-oblivious algorithms in the outsourced external memory model for a number of fundamental graph problems. Our results include new data-oblivious external-memory methods for constructing minimum spanning trees, performing various traversals on rooted trees, answering least common ancestor queries on trees, computing biconnected components, and forming open ear decompositions. None of our algorithms make use of constant-time random oracles.
We study balanced circle packings and circle-contact representations for planar graphs, where the ratio of the largest circle's diameter to the smallest circle's diameter is polynomial in the number of circles. We provide a number of positive and negative results for the existence of such balanced configurations.
Many well-known graph drawing techniques, including force directed drawings, spectral graph layouts, multidimensional scaling, and circle packings, have algebraic formulations. However, practical methods for producing such drawings ubiquitously use iterative numerical approximations rather than constructing and then solving algebraic expressions representing their exact solutions. To explain this phenomenon, we use Galois theory to show that many variants of these problems have solutions that cannot be expressed by nested radicals or nested roots of low-degree polynomials. Hence, such solutions cannot be computed exactly even in extended computational models that include such operations.
We study wear-leveling techniques for cuckoo hashing, showing that it is possible to achieve a memory wear bound of $\log\log n+O(1)$ after the insertion of $n$ items into a table of size $Cn$ for a suitable constant $C$ using cuckoo hashing. Moreover, we study our cuckoo hashing method empirically, showing that it significantly improves on the memory wear performance for classic cuckoo hashing and linear probing in practice.
We describe and analyze Zig-zag Sort--a deterministic data-oblivious sorting algorithm running in O(n log n) time that is arguably simpler than previously known algorithms with similar properties, which are based on the AKS sorting network. Because it is data-oblivious and deterministic, Zig-zag Sort can be implemented as a simple O(n log n)-size sorting network, thereby providing a solution to an open problem posed by Incerpi and Sedgewick in 1985. In addition, Zig-zag Sort is a variant of Shellsort, and is, in fact, the first deterministic Shellsort variant running in O(n log n) time. The existence of such an algorithm was posed as an open problem by Plaxton et al. in 1992 and also by Sedgewick in 1996. More relevant for today, however, is the fact that the existence of a simple data-oblivious deterministic sorting algorithm running in O(n log n) time simplifies the inner-loop computation in several proposed oblivious-RAM simulation methods (which utilize AKS sorting networks), and this, in turn, implies simplified mechanisms for privacy-preserving data outsourcing in several cloud computing applications. We provide both constructive and non-constructive implementations of Zig-zag Sort, based on the existence of a circuit known as an epsilon-halver, such that the constant factors in our constructive implementations are orders of magnitude smaller than those for constructive variants of the AKS sorting network, which are also based on the use of epsilon-halvers.
We present a simple, efficient, and secure data-oblivious randomized shuffle algorithm. This is the first secure data-oblivious shuffle that is not based on sorting. Our method can be used to improve previous oblivious storage solutions for network-based outsourcing of data.
In streamed graph drawing, a planar graph, G, is given incrementally as a data stream and a straight-line drawing of G must be updated after each new edge is released. To preserve the mental map, changes to the drawing should be minimized after each update, and Binucci et al.show that exponential area is necessary and sufficient for a number of streamed graph drawings for trees if edges are not allowed to move at all. We show that a number of streamed graph drawings can, in fact, be done with polynomial area, including planar streamed graph drawings of trees, tree-maps, and outerplanar graphs, if we allow for a small number of coordinate movements after each update. Our algorithms involve an interesting connection to a classic algorithmic problem - the file maintenance problem - and we also give new algorithms for this problem in a framework where bulk memory moves are allowed.
We study a three-dimensional analogue to the well-known graph visualization approach known as arc diagrams. We provide several algorithms that achieve good angular resolution for 3D arc diagrams, even for cases when the arcs must project to a given 2D straight-line drawing of the input graph. Our methods make use of various graph coloring algorithms, including an algorithm for a new coloring problem, which we call localized edge coloring.
We introduce the problem of performing set-difference range queries, where answers to queries are set-theoretic symmetric differences between sets of items in two geometric ranges. We describe a general framework for answering such queries based on a novel use of data-streaming sketches we call signed symmetric-difference sketches. We show that such sketches can be realized using invertible Bloom filters (IBFs), which can be composed, differenced, and searched so as to solve set-difference range queries in a wide range of scenarios.
Parametric search has been widely used in geometric algorithms. Cole's improvement provides a way of saving a logarithmic factor in the running time over what is achievable using the standard method. Unfortunately, this improvement comes at the expense of making an already complicated algorithm even more complex; hence, this technique has been mostly of theoretical interest. In this paper, we provide an algorithm engineering framework that allows for the same asymptotic complexity to be achieved probabilistically in a way that is both simple and practical (i.e., suitable for actual implementation). The main idea of our approach is to show that a variant of quicksort, known as boxsort, can be used to drive comparisons, instead of using a sorting network, like the complicated AKS network, or an EREW parallel sorting algorithm, like the fairly intricate parallel mergesort algorithm. This results in a randomized optimization algorithm with a running time matching that of using Cole's method, with high probability, while also being practical. We show how this results in practical implementations of some geometric algorithms utilizing parametric searching and provide experimental results that prove practicality of the method.
We formalize a problem we call combinatorial pair testing (CPT), which has applications to the identification of uncooperative or unproductive participants in pair programming, massively distributed computing, and crowdsourcing environments. We give efficient adaptive and nonadaptive CPT algorithms and we show that our methods use an optimal number of testing rounds to within constant factors. We also provide an empirical evaluation of some of our methods.
Searching accounts for one of the most frequently performed computations over the Internet as well as one of the most important applications of outsourced computing, producing results that critically affect users' decision-making behaviors. As such, verifying the integrity of Internet-based searches over vast amounts of web contents is essential. We provide the first solution to this general security problem. We introduce the concept of an authenticated web crawler and present the design and prototype implementation of this new concept. An authenticated web crawler is a trusted program that computes a special "signature" $s$ of a collection of web contents it visits. Subject to this signature, web searches can be verified to be correct with respect to the integrity of their produced results. This signature also allows the verification of complicated queries on web pages, such as conjunctive keyword searches. In our solution, along with the web pages that satisfy any given search query, the search engine also returns a cryptographic proof. This proof, together with the signature $s$, enables any user to efficiently verify that no legitimate web pages are omitted from the result computed by the search engine, and that no pages that are non-conforming with the query are included in the result. An important property of our solution is that the proof size and the verification time both depend solely on the sizes of the query description and the query result, but not on the number or sizes of the web pages over which the search is performed. Our authentication protocols are based on standard Merkle trees and the more involved bilinear-map accumulators. As we experimentally demonstrate, the prototype implementation of our system gives a low communication overhead between the search engine and the user, and allows for fast verification of the returned results on the user side.
Force-directed layout algorithms produce graph drawings by resolving a system of emulated physical forces. We present techniques for using social gravity as an additional force in force-directed layouts, together with a scaling technique, to produce drawings of trees and forests, as well as more complex social networks. Social gravity assigns mass to vertices in proportion to their network centrality, which allows vertices that are more graph-theoretically central to be visualized in physically central locations. Scaling varies the gravitational force throughout the simulation, and reduces crossings relative to unscaled gravity. In addition to providing this algorithmic framework, we apply our algorithms to social networks produced by Mark Lombardi, and we show how social gravity can be incorporated into force-directed Lombardi-style drawings.
We study graph drawing in a cloud-computing context where data is stored externally and processed using a small local working storage. We show that a number of classic graph drawing algorithms can be efficiently implemented in such a framework where the client can maintain privacy while constructing a drawing of her graph.
We study the question of how to shuffle $n$ cards when faced with an opponent who knows the initial position of all the cards {\em and} can track every card when permuted, {\em except} when one takes $K< n$ cards at a time and shuffles them in a private buffer "behind your back," which we call {\em buffer shuffling}. The problem arises naturally in the context of parallel mixnet servers as well as other security applications. Our analysis is based on related analyses of load-balancing processes. We include extensions to variations that involve corrupted servers and adversarially injected messages, which correspond to an opponent who can peek at some shuffles in the buffer and who can mark some number of the cards. In addition, our analysis makes novel use of a sum-of-squares metric for anonymity, which leads to improved performance bounds for parallel mixnets and can also be used to bound well-known existing anonymity measures.