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Abstract. An (α, β)-spanner of an unweighted graph G is a subgraph H that distorts distances in G up to a multiplicative factor of α and an additive term β. It is well known that any graph contains a (multiplicative) (2k − 1, 0)-spanner of size O(n 1+1/k ) and an (additive) (1, 2)-spanner of size O(n 3/2 ). However no other additive spanners are known to exist.In this article we develop a couple of new techniques for constructing (α, β)-spanners. Our first result is an additive (1, 6)-spanner of size O(n 4/3 ). The construction algorithm can be understood as an economical agent that assigns costs and values to paths in the graph, purchasing affordable paths and ignoring expensive ones, which are intuitively well approximated by paths already purchased. We show that this path buying algorithm can be parameterized in different ways to yield other sparseness-distortion tradeoffs. Our second result addresses the problem of which (α, β)-spanners can be computed efficiently, ideally in linear time. We show that, for any k, a (k, k − 1)-spanner with size O(kn 1+1/k ) can be found in linear time, and, further, that in a distributed network the algorithm terminates in a constant number of rounds. Previous spanner constructions with similar performance had roughly twice the multiplicative distortion.

Cycles in graphs play an important role in many applications, e.g., analysis of electrical networks, analysis of chemical and biological pathways, periodic scheduling, and graph drawing. From a mathematical point of view, cycles in graphs have a rich structure. Cycle bases are a compact description of the set of all cycles of a graph. In this paper, we survey results on cycle bases and prove new ones. We introduce different kinds of cycle bases, characterize them in terms of their cycle matrix, and prove structural results about them, in particular, a-priori length bounds. We give polynomial algorithms for the minimum cycle basis problem for some of the classes and prove APX -hardness for others. We also discuss three applications and show that they require different kinds of cycle bases.

Suppose that each member of a set A of applicants ranks a subset of a set P of posts in an order of preference, possibly involving ties. A matching is a set of (applicant, post) pairs such that each applicant and each post appears in at most one pair. A rank-maximal matching is one in which the maximum possible number of applicants are matched to their first choice post, and subject to that condition, the maximum possible number are matched to their second choice post, and so on. This is a relevant concept in any practical matching situation and it was first studied by Irving [2003].We give an algorithm to compute a rank-maximal matching with running time O (min( n + C , C √ n ) m ), where C is the maximal rank of an edge used in a rank-maximal matching, n is the number of applicants and posts and m is the total size of the preference lists.

Refereed conferences require every submission to be reviewed by members of a program committee (PC) in charge of selecting the conference program. There are many software packages available to manage the review process. Typically, in a bidding phase PC members express their personal preferences by ranking the submissions. This information is used by the system to compute an assignment of the papers to referees (PC members).We study the problem of assigning papers to referees. We propose to optimize a number of criteria that aim at achieving fairness among referees/papers. Some of these variants can be solved optimally in polynomial time, while others are NP-hard, in which case we design approximation algorithms. Experimental results strongly suggest that the assignments computed by our algorithms are considerably better than those computed by popular conference management software.