WORKSHOP
on
Geometric Graphs Representations

Geometric Graphs and Representations

Geometric graphs and representations are intensively studied both for their practical motivation and interesting theoretical properties. In the recent years, several monographs have been published in this area, and several of the main open problems have been solved. The workshop will present an overview of these, as well as point out those that remain open and require more effort to be solved. Several leading experts accepted the invitation to join the workshop.

Petr Hlineny (Masaryk University, Brno):  On difficulty and complexity of graph crossing number

Classical crossing number of a graph G is the smallest possible number
of pairwise edge-crossings over all drawings of G in the plane.
This parameter has important practical applications, for instance,
in VLSI design or graph visualization. Still, it is a very very difficult parameter to handle. We briefly review the problem and some of its weird properties. We focus on the computational complexity issues  associated with the crossing number problems, outline basic known results  and open problems.

Michael Kaufmann (University Tuebingen): Max-tolerance as geometric intersection graphs

Max-tolerance graphs provide a generalization of interval graphs. Vertices of the graph are represented by intervals, and with each interval is associated a number (called its tolerance). Two vertices are adjacent if the overlap of their intervals is greater or equal than both their tolerances. We will show how max-tolerance graphs arise naturally in a DNA sequencing problem. We will further show that max-tolerance graphs are exactly intersection graphs of congruent triangles in the plane, and exploit this equivalent formulation to gain new insight into this class of graphs. In particular, we will show that max-tolerance graphs are NP-hard to recognize. On the positive side, the maximum clique problem can be solved in polynomial time in this class of graphs.
(This is joint work with Jan Kratochvil, Katharina Lehmann and Amarendran Subramarian.)

Jan Kratochvil (Charles University, Prague): Polygon-circle graphs

Polygon-circle graphs are intersection graphs of polygons inscribed to a circle. They generalize well known and studied classes of graphs - circle graphs, circular-arc graphs and chordal graphs. Though their recognition has been announced polynomial time solvable in 1990, the announced paper has never been published and the problem is regarded as open by the community. We show that recongition becomes NP-hard if the polygons are restricted to bounded number of corners. We also give asymptotically tight bound for the maximum number of corners required for representing a polygon-circle graph on $n$ vertices.
(This is a joint work with Martin Pergel.)

Gelasio Salazar (University Sant Louis Potosi): Improving the bounds on crossing number

The crossing number problem is one of the key problems in geometric optimization. But its specific hardness lies in the fact that even for small graphs and some simple graph classes  the exact crossing number is not known. Recently we managed to improve the lower bounds for meshes, complete graphs and complete bipartite graphs.

Marcus Schaefer (DePaul University, Chicago): Crossing Number versus Odd Crossing Number

Abstract: The crossing number of a graph is the minimum number of edge
intersections in a plane drawing of a graph, where each intersection is counted separately. If instead we count the number of pairs of edges that intersect an odd number of times, we obtain the odd crossing number. We show that there is a graph for which these two concepts differ, answering
a well-known open question on crossing numbers. To derive the result
we study drawings of maps (graphs with rotation systems). It was conjectured that odd crossing number equals crossing number, since this is true for the base case; that is, if the odd crossing number of a graph is 0, so is the crossing number. We also give a very simple new proof of this old result of Hanani and Tutte, and show how to apply our proof technique to obtain several  other results, including a simplified proof of the result by Pach and Toth that the crossing number is bounded by the square of the odd crossing number.
(This is joint work with Michael Pelsmajer, and Daniel Stefankovic.)

Pavel Valtr (Charles University, Prague): Extremal problems for geometric graphs

Geometric graphs are graphs given with explicit straight-line drawing in the plane. We will discuss extremal problems on the maximum number of edges of geometric graphs with forbidden configurations, such as $k$ pairwise crossing edges, $k$ pairwise noncrossing edges etc. We improve several previously known bounds and survey open questions in the area.
(The talk is partly based on joint works with Geza Toth and Jan Kyncl.)