There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

Planning algorithms are impacting technical disciplines and industries around the world, including robotics, computer-aided design, manufacturing, computer graphics, aerospace applications, drug design, and protein folding. This coherent and comprehensive book unifies material from several sources, including robotics, control theory, artificial intelligence, and algorithms. The treatment is centered on robot motion planning but integrates material on planning in discrete spaces. A major part of the book is devoted to planning under uncertainty, including decision theory, Markov decision processes, and information spaces, which are the “configuration spaces” of all sensor-based planning problems. The last part of the book delves into planning under differential constraints that arise when automating the motions of virtually any mechanical system. Developed from courses taught by the author, the book is intended for students, engineers, and researchers in robotics, artificial intelligence, and control theory as well as computer graphics, algorithms, and computational biology.

Planning Algorithms: Introductory Material

This paper provides an overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) with emphasis on enabling technologies, protocols, and application issues. The IoT is enabled by the latest developments in RFID, smart sensors, communication technologies, and Internet protocols. The basic premise is to have smart sensors collaborate directly without human involvement to deliver a new class of applications. The current revolution in Internet, mobile, and machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies can be seen as the first phase of the IoT. In the coming years, the IoT is expected to bridge diverse technologies to enable new applications by connecting physical objects together in support of intelligent decision making. This paper starts by providing a horizontal overview of the IoT. Then, we give an overview of some technical details that pertain to the IoT enabling technologies, protocols, and applications. Compared to other survey papers in the field, our objective is to provide a more thorough summary of the most relevant protocols and application issues to enable researchers and application developers to get up to speed quickly on how the different protocols fit together to deliver desired functionalities without having to go through RFCs and the standards specifications. We also provide an overview of some of the key IoT challenges presented in the recent literature and provide a summary of related research work. Moreover, we explore the relation between the IoT and other emerging technologies including big data analytics and cloud and fog computing. We also present the need for better horizontal integration among IoT services. Finally, we present detailed service use-cases to illustrate how the different protocols presented in the paper fit together to deliver desired IoT services.

Internet of Things: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Protocols, and Applications

In k-means clustering, we are given a set of n data points in d-dimensional space R/sup d/ and an integer k and the problem is to determine a set of k points in Rd, called centers, so as to minimize the mean squared distance from each data point to its nearest center. A popular heuristic for k-means clustering is Lloyd's (1982) algorithm. We present a simple and efficient implementation of Lloyd's k-means clustering algorithm, which we call the filtering algorithm. This algorithm is easy to implement, requiring a kd-tree as the only major data structure. We establish the practical efficiency of the filtering algorithm in two ways. First, we present a data-sensitive analysis of the algorithm's running time, which shows that the algorithm runs faster as the separation between clusters increases. Second, we present a number of empirical studies both on synthetically generated data and on real data sets from applications in color quantization, data compression, and image segmentation.

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An efficient k-means clustering algorithm: analysis and implementation

We consider the problem of placing a small number of angle guards inside a simple polygon P so asto provide efficient proofs that any given point is inside P. Each angle guard views an infinite wedge of the plane, and a point can prove membership in P if it is inside the wedges for a set of guards whose common intersection contains no points outside the polygon. This model leads to a broad class of new art gallery type problems, which we call "sculpture garden" problems and for which we provide upper and lower bounds. In particular, we show there is a polygon P such that a "natural" angle-guard vertex placement cannot fully distinguish between pointson the inside and outside of P (even if we place a guard at every vertex of P), which implies that Steiner-point guards are sometimes necessary. More generally, we show that, for any polygon P, there is a set of n+2(h-1) angle guards that solve the sculpture garden problem for P, where h is the number of holes in P (so a simple polygon can be defined with n-2 guards). In addition, we show that, for any orthogonal polygon P, the sculpture garden problem can besolved using n/2 angle guards. We also give an example of a class of simple (non-general-position) polygons that have sculpture garden solutions using O(√n) guards, and we show this bound is optimal to within a constant factor. Finally, while optimizing the number of guards solving a sculpture garden problem for a particular P is of unknown complexity, we show how to find in polynomial time a guard placement whose size is within a factor of 2 of the optimal number for any particular polygon.

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Guard placement for efficient point-in-polygon proofs

In this paper we give efficient parallel algorithms for solving a number of visibility and shortest path problems for simple polygons. Our algorithms all run in O(log n) time and are based on the use of a new data structure for implicitly representing all shortest paths in a simple polygon P, which we call the stratified decomposition tree. We use this approach to derive efficient parallel methods for computing the visibility of P from an edge, constructing the visibility graph of the vertices of P (using an output-sensitive number of processors), constructing the shortest path tree from a vertex of P, and determining all-farthest neighbors for the vertices in P. The computational model we use is the CREW PRAM.

Parallel methods for visibility and shortest path problems in simple polygons (preliminary version)

This paper studies the straight skeleton of polyhedra in three dimensions. We first address voxel-based polyhedra (polycubes), formed as the union of a collection of cubical (axis-aligned) voxels. We analyze the ways in which the skeleton may intersect each voxel of the polyhedron, and show that the skeleton may be constructed by a simple voxel-sweeping algorithm taking constant time per voxel. In addition, we describe a more complex algorithm for straight skeletons of voxel-based polyhedra, which takes time proportional to the area of the surfaces of the straight skeleton rather than the volume of the polyhedron. We also consider more general polyhedra with axis-parallel edges and faces, and show that any n-vertex polyhedron of this type has a straight skeleton with O(n^2) features. We provide algorithms for constructing the straight skeleton, with running time O(min(n^2 log n, k log^{O(1)} n)) where k is the output complexity. Next, we discuss the straight skeleton of a general nonconvex polyhedron. We show that it has an ambiguity issue, and suggest a consistent method to resolve it. We prove that the straight skeleton of a general polyhedron has a superquadratic complexity in the worst case. Finally, we report on an implementation of a simple algorithm for the general case.

Straight Skeletons of Three-Dimensional Polyhedra

In this paper we present a package for the creation of Specialized Assignments In LATEX, SAIL. We describe several features which allow an instructor to create sufficiently different instances of the “same” problem so as to encourage student cooperation without fear of plagiarism. The SAIL package also provides support for grading aids and grading automation. In addition, we describe an on-line system for archiving homework problems in a database that can be easily searched and to which new parametrized problems can be easily added. Together, the SAIL package and the searchable database of problems offer a powerful tool for generating, archiving, and retrieving homework assignments (as well as tests and quizzes).

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SAIL: a system for generating, archiving, and retrieving specialized assignments using LATEX

/pdf/linear-time-triangulation-of-a-simple-polygon-made-easier-c5mrkzn6zx.pdf

Michael T. Goodrich

Papers

Guard placement for efficient point-in-polygon proofs

Parallel methods for visibility and shortest path problems in simple polygons (preliminary version)

Straight Skeletons of Three-Dimensional Polyhedra

SAIL: a system for generating, archiving, and retrieving specialized assignments using LATEX

Linear-time triangulation of a simple polygon made easier via randomization