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Introduction to the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) 2019 Special Issue

Published: 23 January 2022 Publication History
We are delighted to present a Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Algorithms, containing full versions of six articles that were presented at the 30th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) 2019 in San Diego, California, on January 6–9, 2019. These articles, selected on the basis of their high ratings by the conference program committee, have been thoroughly reviewed according to the journal’s highest standards.
In “Polynomial-time algorithm for Maximum Weight Independent Set on P6-free graphs”, Andrzej Grzesik, Tereza Klimošová, Marcin Pilipczuk, and Michał Pilipczuk study the classic problem of max-weight independent set. They provide the first polynomial-time algorithm to solve the problem for the class of \(P_6\)-free graphs, i.e., all graphs that contain no path on six vertices as an induced subgraph. The approach is based on a careful enumeration of vertex subsets that inherently characterize all maximal independent sets.
The article “I/O-Efficient Algorithms for Topological Sort and Related Problems” by Nairen Cao, Jeremy Fineman, Katina Russell, and Eugene Yang, introduces the first randomized algorithms for topological sorting and for identifying the strongly connected components of a directed graph in the I/O model. These algorithms have a runtime of \(O(sort(E)\cdot \text{poly}(\log V))\), where \(sort(E)\) is the time needed for sorting E elements in the I/O-model. The algorithms are based on a recursive approach, which iteratively updates a random labeling until vertices in the same strongly connected component have the same label and the labeling represents a topological sorting of the strongly connected components. These new algorithms also imply efficient I/O-algorithms for various reachability and shortest paths problems in directed acyclic graphs.
In the article “SETH-Based Lower Bounds for Subset Sum and Bicriteria Path”, by Amir Abboud, Karl Bringmann, Danny Hermelin, and Dvir Shabtay, the authors introduce a reduction from k-SAT to SUBSET SUM on dense instances. The new reduction proves that Bellman’s SUBSET SUM algorithm from 1969, which runs in \(O(Tn)\) time on n numbers and target T, cannot be improved to \(T^{1-\epsilon }2^{o(n)}\) time for any constant \(\epsilon \gt 0\), unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) is false. The reduction is based on the results of Behrends (1946) about the existence of certain sequences of numbers, combined with clever partitioning and encoding. The authors also extend their techniques to prove SETH-based lower bounds for the BICRITERIA \(s,t\)-PATH problem.
The article “Optimal Las Vegas Approximate Near Neighbors in p by Alexander Wei presents Las Vegas data structures for solving approximate near neighbors in \(\mathbb {R}^d\) under the \(\ell _p\)-norm. For \(1 \le p \le 2\), the author provides a data structure that matches the performance of optimal locality-sensitive hashing. Moreover, using a locality-sensitive filter construction, the article gives the first data-dependent Las Vegas data structure. The results show that for approximate near neighbor problems, Las Vegas data structures can match the performance of state-of-the-art Monte Carlo ones, both for data-dependent and data-independent settings. The article won the Best Student Paper Award at the SODA’19 conference.
In “Tight Bounds for 1 Oblivious Subspace Embeddings”, Ruosong Wang and David Woodruff prove lower bounds on the distortion of all \(\ell _p\) oblivious subspace embeddings for \(1 \le p \lt 2\). These bounds show that in prominent special cases, existing subspace embeddings have essentially optimal distortion. Moreover, they provide new embeddings with bounded sparsity and distortion, leading to improved results for related problems, e.g., single-pass streaming algorithms for \(\ell _1\)-regression.
Finally, Yipu Wang designs three algorithms for the maximum flow problem in “Maximum Integer Flows in Directed Planar Graphs with Vertex Capacities and Multiple Sources and Sinks”. The algorithms run in time polynomial in the numbers n of nodes, k of terminals, the maximum degree \(\Delta\) of the graph, and polylogarithmic in the maximum capacity U. The running times substantially improve the state-of-the-art in several cases, especially when k and \(\Delta\) are fixed and U is bounded polynomially in n.
The editors would like to thank the authors and the reviewers for their contributions in bringing this special issue out on time.
Martin Hoefer
Goethe University Frankfurt
Tsvi Kopelowitz
Bar-Ilan University
Guest Editors

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Algorithms
ACM Transactions on Algorithms  Volume 18, Issue 1
January 2022
281 pages
ISSN:1549-6325
EISSN:1549-6333
DOI:10.1145/3492455
  • Editor:
  • Edith Cohen
Issue’s Table of Contents

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 January 2022
Published in TALG Volume 18, Issue 1

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