Author Description

Symposium held in San Francisco, California, January 2002. The Symposium was jointly sponsored by the SIAM Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics and by SIGACT, the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory. Contains approximately 130 papers that were selected from a field of over 325 submissions based on their originality, technical contribution, and relevance. Papers cover such topics as discrete mathematics and graph theory, including combinatorics, combinatorial optimization, and networks. Although the papers were not formally refereed, every attempt was made to verify the main claims. Abbreviated versions of these papers may appear later in more elaborate form in various scientific journals. This symposium concerns research on the use, design, and analysis of efficient algorithms and data structures, and on the mathematical problems related to the development and analysis of discrete algorithms. Application areas include, but are not limited to, discrete mathematics and combinatorics; combinatorial structures; communication networks; computational biology; computational physics; computational finance; computational geometry; computational topology; computer graphics and computer vision; computer systems; cryptography and security; databases and information retrieval; discrete optimization; discrete probability; distributed algorithms; experimental algorithmics; graph drawing; graphs and networks; machine learning; mathematical programming; molecular computing; number theory and algebra; on-line problems; pattern matching and data compression; quantum computing; random structures; robotics; statistical inference; and symbolic computation. The proceeding's content reflects the themes of the meeting.