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Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

Roads

Computation of Road Network Diameter

Based on the algorithms presented in [5] , Laurent Viennot has computed the diameter and radius of the worldwide road network. The diameter of a graph is the distance between two points that are furthest apart one from another. The interesting distance notion in a road network is often travel time. Finding the worldwide road network diameter thus amounts to find two points such that the travel time from one to another is maximal. Once such a pair of points is identified, we can compute the shortest path between them to obtain somehow the longest road trip in the world. Computing the diameter of a general graph usually requires to compute all pairwise distances, which is impractical for such a big graph. However, the team has developed heuristics that appear to work fast on many practical graphs including road networks. Thanks to OpenStreetMap data, the team has thus been able to compute the world road diameter (and the diameter of various restricted parts of the network). The results can be visualized on https://who.rocq.inria.fr/Laurent.Viennot/road/ .

Erc

New ERC Consolidator Grant

Amos Korman has received an ERC Consolidator Grant, entitled “Distributed Biological Algorithms (DBA)”, which started in May 2015. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to demonstrate the usefulness of an algorithmic perspective in studies of complex biological systems. It focuses on the aspect of collective behavior, demonstrating the benefits of applying distributed computing techniques to establish algorithmic insights into the behavior of biological ensembles.

Highpapers

Work on distributed computing

The team has published a number of papers on Distributed Computing theory at high-profile venues. A subjective selection of these results includes: an almost-tight bound on the space complexity of set agreement [29] , a study of the power of randomization in proof-labeling schemes [22] (both published at PODC'15), and a characterization of convergence in an important class of population protocols [28] (published at ICALP'15 track A).