A linkage is a collection of line segments, called bars, possibly joined at their ends, called joints. A planar reconfiguration of a linkage is a continuous motion of their bars, preserving the length of each bar and disallowing bars to cross. In this paper, we introduce a class of linkages, called "monotone trees," and give a method for reconfiguring a monotone tree to a straight line. If the tree has n joints, then the method takes at most n-1 moves, each of which uses two joints. We also obtain an algorithm to find such a method in time O(n log n), using space O(n). These time and space complexities are optimal.

The HITS algorithm proposed by Kleinberg is one of the representative methods of scoring Web pages by using hyperlinks. In the days when the algorithm was proposed, most of the pages given high score by the algorithm were really related to a given topic, and hence the algorithm could be used to find related pages. However, the algorithm and the variants including Bharat's improved HITS, abbreviated to BHITS, proposed by Bharat and Henzinger cannot be used to find related pages any more on today's Web, due to an increase of spam links. In this paper, we first propose three methods to find "linkfarms," that is, sets of spam links forming a densely connected subgraph of a Web graph. We then present an algorithm, called a trust-score algorithm, to give high scores to pages which are not spam pages with a high probability. Combining the three methods and the trust-score algorithm with BHITS, we obtain several variants of the HITS algorithm. We ascertain by experiments that one of them, named TaN+BHITS using the trust-score algorithm and the method of finding linkfarms by employing name servers, is most suitable for finding related pages on today's Web. Our algorithms take time and memory no more than those required by the original HITS algorithm, and can be executed on a PC with a small amount of main memory.

Digital watermarking used for fingerprinting may receive a collusion attack; two or more users collude, compare their data, find a part of embedded watermarks, and make an unauthorized copy by masking their identities. In this paper, assuming that at most c users collude, we give a characterization of the fingerprinting codes that have the best security index in a sense of "(c,p/q)-secureness" proposed by Orihara et al. The characterization is expressed in terms of intersecting families of sets. Using a block design, we also show that a distributor of data can only find asymptotically a set of c users including at least one culprit, no matter how good fingerprinting code is used.

Designing a protocol to exchange a secret key is one of the most fundamental subjects in cryptography. Using a random deal of cards, pairs of card players (agents) can share secret keys that are information-theoretically secure against an eavesdropper. A key set protocol, which uses a random deal of cards, can perform an Eulerian secret key exchange, in which the pairs of players sharing secret keys form an Eulerian circuit passing through all players. Along the Eulerian circuit any designated player can send a message to the rest of players and the message can be finally sent back to the sender. Checking the returned message with the original one, the sender can know whether the message circulation has not been influenced by a possible single transmission error or false alteration. It has been known that any Eulerian circuit formed by the protocol has length at most 3/2k, where k is the number of players. Note that the length corresponds to the time required to send the message to all players and acknowledge the secure receipt. In this paper, we show that the average length of Eulerian circuits is approximately k+ln k.

Let C be a set of colors, and let ω(c) be an integer cost assigned to a color c in C. An edge-coloring of a graph G is to color all the edges of G so that any two adjacent edges are colored with different colors in C. The cost ω(f) of an edge-coloring f of G is the sum of costs ω(f(e)) of colors f(e) assigned to all edges e in G. An edge-coloring f of G is optimal if ω(f) is minimum among all edge-colorings of G. In this paper, we show that the problem of finding an optimal edge-coloring of a tree T can be simply reduced in polynomial time to the minimum weight perfect matching problem for a new bipartite graph constructed from T. The reduction immediately yields an efficient simple algorithm to find an optimal edge-coloring of T in time O(n1.5Δlog(nNω)), where n is the number of vertices in T, Δ is the maximum degree of T, and Nω is the maximum absolute cost |ω(c)| of colors c in C. We then show that our result can be extended for multitrees.

Assume that each vertex of a graph G is assigned a constant number q of nonnegative integer weights, and that q pairs of nonnegative integers li and ui, 1 ≤ i ≤ q, are given. One wishes to partition G into connected components by deleting edges from G so that the total i-th weights of all vertices in each component is at least li and at most ui for each index i, 1 ≤ i ≤ q. The problem of finding such a "uniform" partition is NP-hard for series-parallel graphs, and is strongly NP-hard for general graphs even for q = 1. In this paper we show that the problem and many variants can be solved in pseudo-polynomial time for series-parallel graphs and partial k-trees, that is, graphs with bounded tree-width.

Fingerprinting is one of the digital watermarking techniques, and is becoming more important as a copyright protection technique. Fingerprinting must resist collusion attacks. As a security index, "c-secureness" has been proposed, but it has been known that there is indeed no c-secure code. In this paper, we introduce a new index to measure the resilience of fingerprinting for collusion attacks and obtain some upper bounds and a lower bound on the index.

Let l be a positive integer, and let G be a graph with nonnegative integer weights on edges. Then a generalized vertex-coloring, called an l-coloring of G, is an assignment of colors to the vertices of G in such a way that any two vertices u and v get different colors if the distance between u and v in G is at most l. In this paper we give an algorithm to find an l-coloring of a given graph G with the minimum number of colors. The algorithm takes polynomial time if G is a partial k-tree and both l and k are bounded integers.

Many combinatorial problems can be efficiently solved for partial k-trees (graphs of treewidth bounded by k). The edge-coloring problem is one of the well-known combinatorial problems for which no NC algorithms have been obtained for partial k-trees. This paper gives an optimal and first NC parallel algorithm to find an edge-coloring of any given partial k-tree with bounded degrees using a minimum number of colors. In the paper k is assumed to be bounded.

Several methods have been proposed for compressing the linkage data of a Web graph. Among them, the method proposed by Boldi and Vigna is known as the most efficient one. In the paper, we propose a new method to compress a Web graph. Our method is more efficient than theirs with respect to the size of the compressed data. For example, our method needs only 1.99 bits per link to compress a Web graph containing 3,216,152 links connecting 325,557 pages, while the method of Boldi and Vigna needs 2.84 bits per link to compress the same Web graph.

Assume that each edge e of a graph G is assigned a list (set) L(e) of colors. Then an edge-coloring of G is called an L-edge-coloring if each edge e of G is colored with a color contained in L(e). It is known that any series-parallel simple graph G has an L-edge-coloring if either (i) |L(e)| max{4,d(v),d(w)} for each edge e=vw or (ii) the maximum degree of G is at most three and |L(e)| 3 for each edge e, where d(v) and d(w) are the degrees of the ends v and w of e, respectively. In this paper we give a linear-time algorithm for finding such an L-edge-coloring of a series-parallel graph G.

Let each vertex v of a graph G have a positive integer weight ω(v). Then a multicoloring of G is to assign each vertex v a set of ω(v) colors so that any pair of adjacent vertices receive disjoint sets of colors. A partial k-tree is a graph with tree-width bounded by a fixed constant k. This paper presents an algorithm which finds a multicoloring of any given partial k-tree G with the minimum number of colors. The computation time of the algorithm is bounded by a polynomial in the number of vertices and the maximum weight of vertices in G.

Assume that each edge e of a graph G is assigned a list (set) L(e) of colors. Then an edge-coloring of G is called an L-edge-coloring if each edge e of G is colored with a color contained in L(e). In this paper, we prove that any series-parallel simple graph G has an L-edge-coloring if |L(e)| max{3,d(v),d(w)} for each edge e = vw, where d(v) and d(w) are the degrees of the ends v and w of e, respectively. Our proof yields a linear algorithm for finding an L-edge-coloring of series-parallel graphs.

Let T be a given tree. Each vertex of T is either a supply vertex or a demand vertex, and is assigned a positive number, called the supply or demand. Each demand vertex v must be supplied an amount of “power,” equal to the demand of v, from exactly one supply vertex through edges in T. Each edge is assigned a positive number called the capacity. One wishes to partition T into subtrees by deleting edges from T so that each subtree contains exactly one supply vertex whose supply is no less than the sum of all demands in the subtree and the power flow through each edge is no more than capacity of the edge. The “partition problem” is a decision problem to ask whether T has such a partition. The “maximum partition problem” is an optimization version of the partition problem. In this paper, we give three algorithms for the problems. First is a linear-time algorithm for the partition problem. Second is a pseudo-polynomial-time algorithm for the maximum partition problem. Third is a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the maximum partition problem.

Graph drawing addresses the problem of constructing geometric representation of information and finds applications in almost every branch of science and technology. Efficient algorithms are essential for automatic drawings of graphs, and hence a lot of research has been carried out in the last decade by many researchers over the world to develop efficient algorithms for drawing graphs. In this paper we survey the recent algorithmic results on various drawings of plane graphs: straight line drawing, convex drawing, orthogonal drawing, rectangular drawing and box-rectangular drawing.

There are several methods for mining communities on the Web using hyperlinks. One of the well-known ones is a max-flow based method proposed by Flake et al. The method adopts a page-oriented framework, that is, it uses a page on the Web as a unit of information, like other methods including HITS and trawling. Recently, Asano et al. built a site-oriented framework which uses a site as a unit of information, and they experimentally showed that trawling on the site-oriented framework often outputs significantly better communities than trawling on the page-oriented framework. However, it has not been known whether the site-oriented framework is effective in mining communities through the max-flow based method. In this paper, we first point out several problems of the max-flow based method, mainly owing to the page-oriented framework, and then propose solutions to the problems by utilizing several advantages of the site-oriented framework. Computational experiments reveal that our max-flow based method on the site-oriented framework is very effective in mining communities, related to the topics of given pages, in comparison with the original max-flow based method on the page-oriented framework.

A total coloring of a graph G is a coloring of all elements of G, i.e. vertices and edges, such that no two adjacent or incident elements receive the same color. Let L(x) be a set of colors assigned to each element x of G. Then a list total coloring of G is a total coloring such that each element x receives a color contained in L(x). The list total coloring problem asks whether G has a list total coloring for given L. In this paper, we give a sufficient condition for a series-parallel graph to have a list total coloring, and we present a linear-time algorithm to find a list total coloring of a given series-parallel graph G if G and L satisfy the sufficient condition.

In this paper we discuss the relation between a one-way group homomorphism and a one-way ring homomorphism. Let U,V be finite abelian groups with #U=n. We show that if there exists a one-way group homomorphism f:UV, then there exists a one-way ring homomorphism F:ZnUZnImf. We also give examples of such ring homomorphisms which are one-way under a standard cryptographic assumption. This implies that there is an affirmative solution to an extended version of the open question raised by Feigenbaum and Merrit: Is there an encryption function f such that both f(x+y) and f(xy) can be efficiently computed from f(x) and f(y)? A multiple signature scheme is also given as an application of one-way ring homomorphisms.

Suppose that there are players in two hierarchical groups and a computationally unlimited eavesdropper. Using a random deal of cards, a player in the higher group wishes to send a one-bit message information-theoretically securely either to all the players in her group or to all the players in the two groups. This can be done by the so-called 2-level key set protocol. In this paper we give a necessary and sufficient condition for the 2-level key set protocol to succeed.

Let G be a graph with a single source w, assigned a positive integer called the supply. Every vertex other than w is a sink, assigned a nonnegative integer called the demand. Every edge is assigned a positive integer called the capacity. Then a spanning tree T of G is called a spanning distribution tree if the capacity constraint holds when, for every sink v, an amount of flow, equal to the demand of v, is sent from w to v along the path in T between them. The spanning distribution tree problem asks whether a given graph has a spanning distribution tree or not. In the paper, we first observe that the problem is NP-complete even for series-parallel graphs, and then give a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to solve the problem for a given series-parallel graph G. The computation time is bounded by a polynomial in n and D, where n is the number of vertices in G and D is the sum of all demands in G.