KAIST Discrete Math Seminar

The stable marriage problem is a classical matching problem. An input consists of the set of men, the set of women, and each person’s preference list that orders the members of the opposite sex according to the preference. The problem asks to find a stable matching, that is, a matching that contains no (man, woman) pair, each of which prefers the other to his/her current partner in the matching.

One of the practical extensions is to allow participants to use ties in preference lists and to exclude unacceptable persons from lists. In this variant, finding a stable matching of maximum size is NP-hard. In this talk, we give some of the approximability results on this problem.

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. The study of this notion is motivated by frequency assignment problems in wireless networks. We introduce and study the list-coloring (or choice) version of this notion. Joint work with Panagiotis Cheilaris.

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.

Quasi-random graphs can be informally described as graphs whose edge distribution closely resembles that of a random graph. They have been a subject of intensive study during the last two decades and have seen numerous applications both in Combinatorics and Computer Science.

Starting with the work of Thomason and Chung, Graham, and Wilson, there have been many works which established the equivalence of various properties of graphs to quasi-randomness. In this talk, I will give a survey on this topic, and provide a new condition which guarantees quasi-randomness. This result answers an open question raised independently by Janson, and Shapira and Yuster.

Joint work with Hao Huang (UCLA).

Self-dual codes have become one of the most active research areas in coding theory due to their rich mathematical theories. In this talk, we start with an introduction to coding theory. Then we describe some recent results on the constructions of self-dual codes over rings, and applications to lattices and network coding theory. We conclude the talk with some open problems.