Submodular functions are a key concept in combinatorial optimization. Algorithms that involve submodular functions usually assume that they are given by a (value) oracle. Many interesting problems involving submodular functions can be solved using only polynomially many queries to the oracle, e.g., exact minimization or approximate maximization.

In this paper, we consider the problem of approximating a monotone submodular function f on a ground set of size n everywhere, after only poly(n) oracle queries. Our main result is a deterministic algorithm that makes poly(n) oracle queries and derives a function g such that, for every set S, g(S) approximates f(S) within a factor α(n), where α(n)=sqrt(n+1) for rank functions of matroids and α(n)=O(sqrt(n) log n) for general monotone submodular functions. Our result is based on approximately finding a maximum volume inscribed ellipsoid in a symmetrized polymatroid, and the analysis involves various properties of submodular functions and polymatroids.

Our algorithm is tight up to logarithmic factors. Indeed, we show that no algorithm can achieve a factor better than Ω(sqrt(n) / log n), even for rank functions of a matroid.

Reconfiguration problems arise when we wish to find a step-by-step transformation between two feasible solutions of a problem such that all intermediate results are also feasible. We demonstrate that a host of reconfiguration problems derived from NP-complete problems are PSPACE-complete, while some are also NP-hard to approximate. In contrast, several reconfiguration versions of problems in P are solvable in polynomial time.

We conclude a sequence of work by giving near-optimal sketching and streaming algorithms for estimating Shannon entropy in the most general streaming model, with arbitrary insertions and deletions. This improves on prior results that obtain suboptimal space bounds in the general model, and near-optimal bounds in the insertion-only model without sketching. Our high-level approach is simple: we give algorithms to estimate Rényi and Tsallis entropy, and use them to extrapolate an estimate of Shannon entropy. The accuracy of our estimates is proven using approximation theory arguments and extremal properties of Chebyshev polynomials, a technique which may be useful for other problems. Our work also yields the best-known and near-optimal additive approximations for entropy, and hence also for conditional entropy and mutual information.

We consider the number of queries needed to solve the matroid intersection problem, a question raised by Welsh (1976). Given two matroids of rank r on n elements, it is known that O(nr^1.5) independence queries suffice. However, no non-trivial lower bounds are known for this problem.

We make the first progress on this question. We describe a family of instances of rank r=n/2 based on a pointer chasing problem, and prove that (log₂ 3) n - o(n) queries are necessary to solve these instances. This gives a constant factor improvement over the trivial lower bound of n for matroids of this rank.

Our proof uses methods from communication complexity and group representation theory. We analyze the communication matrix by viewing it as an operator in the group algebra of the symmetric group and explicitly computing its spectrum.

We consider the multi-source network coding problem in cyclic networks. This problem involves several difficulties not found in acyclic networks, due to additional causality requirements. This paper highlights the difficulty of these causality conditions by analyzing two example cyclic networks. The networks appear quite similar at first glance, and indeed both have invalid rate-1 network codes that violate causality. However, the two networks are actually quite different: one also has a valid rate-1 network code obeying causality, whereas the other does not. This unachievability result is proven by a new information inequality for causal coding schemes in a simple cyclic network.

We consider the problem of solving a symmetric, positive definite system of linear equations. The most well-known and widely-used method for solving such systems is the preconditioned Conjugate Gradient method. The performance of this method depends crucially on knowing a good preconditioner matrix. We show that the Conjugate Gradient method itself can produce good preconditioners as a by-product. These preconditioners allow us to derive new asymptotic bounds on the time to solve multiple related linear systems.

We consider the problem of detecting network faults. Our focus is on detection schemes that send probes both proactively and non-adaptively. Such schemes are particularly relevant to all-optical networks, due to these networks' operational characteristics and strict performance requirements. This fault diagnosis problem motivates a new technical framework that we introduce: group testing with graph-based constraints. Using this framework, we develop several new probing schemes to detect network faults. The efficiency of our schemes often depends on the network topology; in many cases we can show that our schemes are optimal or near-optimal by providing tight lower bounds.

We present a new algebraic algorithm for the classical problem of weighted matroid intersection. This problem generalizes numerous well-known problems, such as bipartite matching, network flow, etc. Our algorithm has running time O(nr^{w-1} W^{1+eps}) for linear matroids with n elements and rank r, where w is the matrix multiplication exponent, and W denotes the maximum weight of any element. This algorithm is the fastest known when W is small. Our approach builds on the recent work of Sankowski (2006) for Weighted Bipartite Matching and Harvey (2006) for Unweighted Linear Matroid Intersection.

We present new algebraic approaches for several well-known combinatorial problems, including non-bipartite matching, matroid intersection, and some of their generalizations. Our work yields new randomized algorithms that are the most efficient known. For non-bipartite matching, we obtain a simple, purely algebraic algorithm with running time O(n^ω) where n is the number of vertices and ω is the matrix multiplication exponent. This resolves the central open problem of Mucha and Sankowski (FOCS 2004). For matroid intersection, our algorithm has running time O(nr^ω-1) for matroids with n elements and rank r that satisfy some natural conditions.

Motivated by practical networking scenarios, we introduce a notion of restricted communication called "conservative networking". Consider a network of lossless links and a number of independent sources. Each node needs to recover a certain subset of the sources. However, each node is "conservative" in that all information it receives can only be a function of the sources it will ultimately recover. For acyclic networks, we show that conservative networking admits a clean characterization: (i) The rates achievable by integer routing, factional routing, and network coding are equal, and (ii) this rate is determined by a simple cut bound. However, this clean characterization does not extend to cyclic networks. We present cyclic examples showing that (i) fractional routing can be strictly better than integer routing, (ii) network coding can be strictly better than fractional routing, and (iii) the cut bound cannot be achieved in general. This work underscores the difficulties generally encountered in cyclic networks.

Random linear network coding is a capacity-achieving communication scheme for single sessions over lossy wireline or wireless packet networks. From the point of view of efficiently utilizing transmissions, random linear network coding is an attractive strategy. However, it is not presently attractive from the point of view of efficiently utilizing computational resources. A natural code design question arises: can we design a network code that preserves the communication efficiency of a random linear code and achieves better computational efficiency? In this paper, we give an affirmative answer to this question.

The code that we present as our answer achieves significantly better computational efficiency that existing schemes, despite being based primarily on standard techniques in the literature on erasure codes. We define and use the language of "adversarial schedules" to compare the performance of our coding scheme against other schemes with respect to a broad class of network environments in a concise manner.

We consider the capacity of information networks in the absence of interference and noise. An outer bound on the rate region of these networks is presented, answering a question of Song, Yeung and Cai. This outer bound combines properties of entropy with a strong information inequality derived from the structure of the network. This blend of information theoretic and graph theoretic arguments generates many interesting results. For example, we exactly characterize the capacity of directed cycles, solving a question of Kramer and Savari. We also give the first known proof of a gap between the sparsity of an undirected graph and its capacity. Extending this result, we show that multicommodity flow solutions achieve the capacity in an infinite class of undirected graphs, thereby making important progress on a conjecture of Li and Li. This result is in sharp contrast to the situation with directed graphs, where we present a family of graphs in which the gap between the capacity and the rate achievable using multicommodity flows is linear in the size of the graph.

We prove nearly tight lower bounds on the number of rounds of communication required by efficient protocols over asymmetric channels between a server (with high sending capacity) and one or more clients (with low sending capacity). This scenario captures the common asymmetric communication bandwidth between broadband Internet providers and home users, as well as sensor networks where sensors (clients) have limited capacity because of the high power requirements for long-range transmissions. An efficient protocol in this setting communicates n bits from each of the k clients to the server, where the clients' bits are sampled from a joint distribution D that is known to the server but not the clients, with the clients sending only O(H(D)+k) bits total, where H(D) is the entropy of distribution D. In the single-client case, there are efficient protocols using O(1) rounds in expectation and O(lg n) rounds in the worst case. We prove that this is essentially best possible: with probability 1/2^O(t lg t), any efficient protocol can be forced to use t rounds. In the multi-client case, there are efficient protocols using O(lg k) rounds in expectation. We prove that this is essentially best possible: with probability Omega(1), any efficient protocol can be forced to use Omega(lg k / lg lg k) rounds. Along the way, we develop new techniques of independent interest for proving lower bounds in communication complexity.

Given a matrix whose entries are a mixture of numeric values and symbolic variables, the matrix completion problem is to assign values to the variables so as to maximize the resulting matrix rank. This problem has deep connections to computational complexity and numerous important algorithmic applications. Determining the complexity of this problem is a fundamental open question in computational complexity. Under different settings of parameters, the problem is variously in P, in RP, or NP-hard. We shed new light on this landscape by demonstrating a new region of NP-hard scenarios. As a special case, we obtain the first known hardness result for matrices in which each variable appears only twice.

Another particular scenario that we consider is the simultaneous matrix completion problem, where one must simultaneously maximize the rank for several matrices that share variables. This problem has important applications in the field of network coding. Recent work has given a simple, greedy, deterministic algorithm for this problem, assuming that the algorithm works over a sufficiently large field. We show an exact threshold for the field size required to find a simultaneous completion efficiently. This result implies that, surprisingly, the simple greedy algorithm is optimal: finding a simultaneous completion over any smaller field is NP-hard.

We study the extent to which combinatorial cut conditions determine the maximum network coding rate of k-pairs communication problems. We seek a combinatorial parameter of directed networks which constitutes a valid upper bound on the network coding rate but exceeds this rate by only a small factor in the worst case. (This worst-case ratio is called the gap of the parameter.) We begin by considering vertex-sparsity and meagerness, showing that both of these parameters have a gap which is linear in the network size. Due to the weakness of these bounds, we propose a new bound called informational meagerness. This bound generalizes both vertex-sparsity and meagerness and is potentially the first known combinatorial cut condition with a sublinear gap. However, we prove that informational meagerness does not tightly characterize the network coding rate: its gap can be super-constant.

We present a new deterministic algorithm to construct network codes for multicast problems, a particular class of network information flow problems. Our algorithm easily generalizes to several variants of multicast problems. Our approach is based on a new algorithm for maximum-rank completion of mixed matrices---taking a matrix whose entries are a mixture of numeric values and symbolic variables, and assigning values to the variables so as to maximize the resulting matrix rank. Our algorithm is faster than existing deterministic algorithms and can operate over a smaller field.

My master's thesis is an extended version of this work, containing a much more detailed explanation than the conference version.

FUSE is a lightweight failure notification service for building distributed systems. Distributed systems built with FUSE are guaranteed that failure notifications never fail. Whenever a failure notification is triggered, all live members of the FUSE group will hear a notification within a bounded period of time, irrespective of node or communication failures. In contrast to previous work on failure detection, the responsibility for deciding that a failure has occurred is shared between the FUSE service and the distributed application. This allows applications to implement their own definitions of failure. Our experience building a scalable distributed event delivery system on an overlay network has convinced us of the usefulness of this service. Our results demonstrate that the network costs of each FUSE group can be small; in particular, our overlay network implementation requires no additional liveness-verifying ping traffic beyond that already needed to maintain the overlay, making the steady state network load independent of the number of active FUSE groups.

Given a graph G = (V,E) and k source-sink pairs of vertices, this paper investigates the maximum rate r at which all pairs can simultaneously communicate. We view this problem from two perspectives and compare their advantages. In the multicommodity flow formulation, a solution provides dedicated bandwidth r between each source-sink pair. In the information flow formulation, a vertex can transmit a function of the information it received thereby allowing multiple source-sink pairs to share bandwidth. For directed acyclic graphs with n vertices, we show that the rate achievable in the information flow formulation can be a multiplicative factor n larger than the rate achievable in the multicommodity flow formulation. It is well known that for undirected graphs with n vertices, in the multicommodity flow formulation, the maximum rate achievable can be an O(1/log |V|) multiplicative factor smaller than the value of the sparsest cut. We extend this result to show that the maximum rate achievable in the information flow setting can be an O(1/log |V|) multiplicative factor smaller than the sparsest cut value. For directed acyclic graphs G, we define a parameter called the value of the most meager cut which is an upper bound for the maximum rate achievable in the information flow setting. We also present an example illustrating that this upper bound is not always tight.

We propose the post-order heap, a new data structure for implementing priority queues. Our structure is a simple variant of the binary heap that requires only O(1) amortized time for Insert operations and O(log n) time in the worst case for Delete-Min operations. Like the binary heap, the post-order heap is an implicit data structure, meaning that a structure containing n elements can be stored using only the first n locations of an array and O(1) additional words of storage.

We consider the problem of storing an ordered dictionary data structure over a distributed set of nodes. In contrast to traditional sequential data structures, distributed data structures should ideally have low congestion. We present a novel randomized data structure, called a family tree, to solve this problem. A family tree has optimal expected congestion, uses only a constant amount of state per node, and supports searches and node insertion/deletion in expected O(log n) time on a system with n nodes. Furthermore, a family tree supports keys from any ordered domain. Because the keys are not hashed, searches have good locality in the sense that intermediate nodes on the search path have keys that are not far outside of the range between the source and destination.

We present a deterministic scalable overlay network. In contrast, most previous overlays use randomness or hashing (pseudo-randomness) to achieve a uniform distribution of data and routing traffic.

We consider the problem of fairly matching the left-hand vertices of a bipartite graph to the right-hand vertices. We refer to this problem as the semi-matching problem; it is a relaxation of the known bipartite matching problem. We present a way to evaluate the quality of a given semi-matching and show that, under this measure, an optimal semi-matching balances the load on the right hand vertices with respect to any Lp-norm. In particular, when modeling a job assignment system, an optimal semi-matching achieves the minimal makespan and the minimal flow time for the system.

The problem of finding optimal semi-matchings is a special case of certain scheduling problems for which known solutions exist. However, these known solutions are based on general network optimization algorithms, and are not the most efficient way to solve the optimal semi-matching problem. To compute optimal semi-matchings efficiently, we present and analyze two new algorithms. The first algorithm generalizes the Hungarian method for computing maximum bipartite matchings, while the second, more efficient algorithm is based on a new notion of cost-reducing paths. Our experimental results demonstrate that the second algorithm is vastly superior to using known network optimization algorithms to solve the optimal semi-matching problem. Furthermore, this same algorithm can also be used to find maximum bipartite matchings and is shown to be roughly as efficient as the best known algorithms for this goal.

Scalable overlay networks such as Chord, CAN, Pastry, and Tapestry have recently emerged as flexible infrastructure for building large peer-to-peer systems. In practice, such systems have two disadvantages: They provide no control over where data is stored and no guarantee that routing paths remain within an administrative domain whenever possible. SkipNet is a scalable overlay network that provides controlled data placement and guaranteed routing locality by organizing data primarily by string names. SkipNet allows for both fine-grained and coarse-grained control over data placement: Content can be placed either on a pre-determined node or distributed uniformly across the nodes of a hierarchical naming subtree. An additional useful consequence of SkipNet's locality properties is that partition failures, in which an entire organization disconnects from the rest of the system, can result in two disjoint, but well-connected overlay networks.

SkipNet is a scalable overlay network that provides controlled data placement and routing locality guarantees by organizing data primarily by lexicographic ordering of string names. A key side-effect of the SkipNet design is that all nodes from an organization form one or a few contiguous overlay segments. When an entire organization disconnects from the rest of the system, repair of only a few pointers quickly enables efficient routing throughout the disconnected organization; full repair is done as a subsequent background task. These same operations can be later used to efficiently reconnect an organization's SkipNet back into the global one.