(Colloquium) Shakhar Smorodinsky, Conflict-Free colorings

Given a hypergraph H = (V,E), a coloring of its vertices is said to be conflict-free if for every hyperedge S ∈ E there is at least one vertex whose color is distinct from the colors of all other vertices in S. When all hyperedges in H have cardinality two (i.e., when H is a simple graph), this coloring coincides with the classical graph coloring. The study of this coloring is motivated by frequency assignment problems in wireless networks and several other applications. We will survey this notion and introduce some fascinating open problems.