We present several variants of the sunflower conjecture of Erd\H{o}s and Rado and discuss the relations among them.

We then show that two of these conjectures (if true) imply negative answers to questions of Coppersmith and Winograd and Cohn et al. regarding possible approaches for obtaining fast matrix multiplication algorithms. ... more >>>

A family of permutations in $S_n$ is $k$-wise independent if a uniform permutation chosen from the family maps any distinct $k$ elements to any distinct $k$ elements equally likely. Efficient constructions of $k$-wise independent permutations are known for $k=2$ and $k=3$, but are unknown for $k \ge 4$. In fact, ... more >>>

Color Coding is an algorithmic technique for deciding efficiently
if a given input graph contains a path of a given length (or
another small subgraph of constant tree-width). Applications of the
method in computational biology motivate the study of similar
algorithms for counting the number of copies of a given ... more >>>

The domination number of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is the minimum size of
a dominating set $U \subseteq V$, which satisfies that every
vertex in $V \setminus U$ is adjacent to at least one vertex in
$U$. The notion of a problem kernel refers to a polynomial time
algorithm that achieves ... more >>>

The Nearest Codeword Problem (NCP) is a basic algorithmic question in the theory of error-correcting codes. Given a point v in an n-dimensional space over F_2 and a linear subspace L in F_2^n of dimension k NCP asks to find a point l in L that minimizes the (Hamming) distance ... more >>>

We describe a short and easy to analyze construction of
constant-degree expanders. The construction relies on the
replacement-product, which we analyze using an elementary
combinatorial argument. The construction applies the replacement
product (only twice!) to turn the Cayley expanders of \cite{AR},
whose degree is polylog n, into constant degree
expanders.

Our main result implies the following easily formulated statement. The set of edges E of every finite bipartite graph can be split into poly(log |E|) subsets so the all the resulting bipartite graphcs are almost regular. The latter means that the ratio between the maximal and minimal non-zero degree of ... more >>>

Property-testers are fast randomized algorithms for distinguishing
between graphs (and other combinatorial structures) satisfying a
certain property, from those that are far from satisfying it. In
many cases one can design property-testers whose running time is in
fact {\em independent} of the size of the input. In this paper we
more >>>

We say that a distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$
is almost $k$-wise independent
if its restriction to every $k$ coordinates results in a
distribution that is close to the uniform distribution.
A natural question regarding almost $k$-wise independent
distributions is how close they are to some $k$-wise
independent distribution. We show that ... more >>>

We present a new efficient sampling method for approximating
r-dimensional Maximum Constraint Satisfaction Problems, MAX-rCSP, on
n variables up to an additive error \epsilon n^r.We prove a new
general paradigm in that it suffices, for a given set of constraints,
to pick a small uniformly random ... more >>>

We describe a novel randomized method, the method of
{\em color-coding\/} for finding simple paths and cycles of a specified
length $k$, and other small subgraphs, within a given graph $G=(V,E)$.
The randomized algorithms obtained using this method can be
derandomized using families of {\em perfect hash functions\/}. Using
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The Tutte-Gr\"othendieck polynomial $T(G;x,y)$ of a graph $G$
encodes numerous interesting combinatorial quantities associated
with the graph. Its evaluation in various points in the $(x,y)$
plane give the number of spanning forests of the graph, the number
of its strongly connected orientations, the number of its proper
$k$-colorings, the (all ... more >>>