arXiv subjects

Ruonan Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Ruonan Zhang.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2016

The Quadratic Minimum Spanning Tree Problem and its Variations

The quadratic minimum spanning tree problem and its variations such as the quadratic bottleneck spanning tree problem, the minimum spanning tree problem with conflict pair constraints, and the bottleneck spanning tree problem with conflict pair constraints are useful in modeling various real life applications. All these problems are known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we investigate these problems to obtain additional insights into the structure of the problems and to identify possible demarcation between easy and hard special cases. New polynomially solvable cases have been identified, as well as NP-hard instances on very simple graphs. As a byproduct, we have a recursive formula for counting the number of spanning trees on a $(k,n)$-accordion and a characterization of matroids in the context of a quadratic objective function.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2015

Video Manipulation Techniques for the Protection of Privacy in Remote Presence Systems

Systems that give control of a mobile robot to a remote user raise privacy concerns about what the remote user can see and do through the robot. We aim to preserve some of that privacy by manipulating the video data that the remote user sees. Through two user studies, we explore the effectiveness of different video manipulation techniques at providing different types of privacy. We simultaneously examine task performance in the presence of privacy protection. In the first study, participants were asked to watch a video captured by a robot exploring an office environment and to complete a series of observational tasks under differing video manipulation conditions. Our results show that using manipulations of the video stream can lead to fewer privacy violations for different privacy types. Through a second user study, it was demonstrated that these privacy-protecting techniques were effective without diminishing the task performance of the remote user.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2007

Bottleneck flows in networks

The bottleneck network flow problem (BNFP) is a generalization of several well-studied bottleneck problems such as the bottleneck transportation problem (BTP), bottleneck assignment problem (BAP), bottleneck path problem (BPP), and so on. In this paper we provide a review of important results on this topic and its various special cases. We observe that the BNFP can be solved as a sequence of $O(\log n)$ maximum flow problems. However, special augmenting path based algorithms for the maximum flow problem can be modified to obtain algorithms for the BNFP with the property that these variations and the corresponding maximum flow algorithms have identical worst case time complexity. On unit capacity network we show that BNFP can be solved in $O(\min \{{m(n\log n)}^{2/3}, m^{3/2}\sqrt{\log n}\})$. This improves the best available algorithm by a factor of $\sqrt{\log n}$. On unit capacity simple graphs, we show that BNFP can be solved in $O(m \sqrt {n \log n})$ time. As a consequence we have an $O(m \sqrt {n \log n})$ algorithm for the BTP with unit arc capacities.

cs.DS↗