[Colloq] REMINDER: Hiring Talk: MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, TODAY, April 6 - 10am

Rachel Kalweit rachelb at ccs.neu.edu
Fri Apr 6 08:40:23 EDT 2007


College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium

Presents a Hiring Talk By:
MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi,
MIT & CMU

Who will speak on:
“Graph Algorithms for Wireless Network Design: Fault-Tolerance and Coverage”

Friday, April 6, 2007
10:00am
366 West Village H
Northeastern University

Abstract:
In this talk, we present real-world applications with deep theoretical
underpinnings and consequences and show how wireless multi-hop networks,
algorithmic graph theory, computational geometry, computational
economics and finally computational complexity have a nice intersection
in this area. We mainly focus on the following two practical problems in
wireless networks (near the end of the talk, time permitting, we
highlight some of our related recent results on non-uniform buy-at-bulk,
oblivious routing, online auctions and finally Bidimensionality theory).

First, we consider the concept of power optimization in fault-tolerant
topology control algorithms for wireless multi-hop sensor networks. More
formally, here our goal is to find a k-connected spanning subgraph of a
given graph which minimizes the power. The power of a spanning subgraph
is the sum of the powers of the nodes, and the power of each node is the
weight of the maximum edge attached to that node in the subgraph. From
the theoretical point of view, in this pioneering work, we show an
O(k)-approximation algorithm and an O(log4 n)-approximation algorithm
for this problem and some inapproximability results. From the practical
point of view, we present efficient local heuristic algorithms and
global and practical distributed approximation algorithms. We also
compare different approximation algorithms and heuristics via simulation.

Second, we prove logarithmic approximability and almost-logarithmic
inapproximability for a maximization problem called ``unique coverage'':
given a collection of sets, find a subcollection that maximizes the
number of elements covered exactly once. The unique coverage problem
defined above is a natural maximization version of set cover which was
brought to our attention from its applications in wireless networks. In
one (simplified) application, we have a certain budget to build/place
some transmitters at a subset of a specified set of possible locations.
   Our goal is to maximize the clients that are ``covered'' by (i.e., are
within the range of) exactly one transmitter; these are the clients that
receive signal without interference. Specifically, we prove
O(1/log^{sigma(epsilon)} n) inapproximability assuming that NP is not
subseteq BPTIME(2^{n^epsilon}) for some epsilon > 0. We also prove
O(1/log^{1/3-\epsilon} n) inapproximability, for any epsilon > 0,
assuming that refuting random instances of 3SAT is hard on average. We
establish matching upper bounds up to exponents, even for a more general
(budgeted) setting, giving an Omega(1/log n)-approximation algorithm as
well as an Omega(1/log B)-approximation algorithm when every set has at
most B elements. We also show that our inapproximability results extend
to envy-free pricing, an important problem in computational economics.
We believe that unique coverage has the potential to be a central
inapproximable maximization problem in the same way that set cover is
for minimization problems.

Biography of Speaker:
MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi received the Bachelor's degree in Computer
Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 2000. He received
the Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo
in 2001. Since September 2001, he is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. During his Ph.D. studies, he also worked at the
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (Department of Mathematical Sciences)
and at the Microsoft Research Center (Theory group). Currently, Dr.
Hajiaghayi is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Computer Science at
Carnegie Mellon University with ALADDIN project. Before this from June
2005 to December 2005, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in MIT Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research
interests are combinatorial optimizations and approximation algorithms,
wireless and mobile computing, game theory and combinatorial auctions,
computational geometry and embeddings and algorithmic graph theory.

Host: Rajmohan Rajaraman







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