Approximating Minimum-Weight Triangulations in Three Dimensions

Let S be a set of noncrossing triangular obstacles in R ³ with convex hull H . A triangulation T of H is compatible with S if every triangle of S is the union of a subset of the faces of T. The weight of T is the sum of the areas of the triangles of T. We give a polynomial-time algorithm that computes a triangulation compatible with S whose weight is at most a constant times the weight of any compatible triangulation. One motivation for studying minimum-weight triangulations is a connection with ray shooting. A particularly simple way to answer a ray-shooting query (``Report the first obstacle hit by a query ray') is to walk through a triangulation along the ray, stopping at the first obstacle. Under a reasonably natural distribution of query rays, the average cost of a ray-shooting query is proportional to triangulation weight. A similar connection exists for line-stabbing queries (``Report all obstacles hit by a query line'). Received February 3, 1997, and in revised form August 21, 1998.     

Broadband multimode baffled piezoelectric cylindrical shell transducers

Hollow piezoelectric cylindrical shell transducers may be made directional for underwater acoustic applications by the use of suitable acoustical baffles and the operational bandwidth may be extended by using multiple resonant modes. A theoretical and experimental investigation was performed for circumferentially baffled piezoelectric cylindrical shell transducers operating in the zero and one modes of extensional vibration. The frequency responses and directivity patterns were analyzed under various conditions of energizing separate halves of electrodes. It was found that the broadest frequency response with nearly constant beamwidth can be obtained when the two halves of the piezoelectric ring are electromechanically excited 90 deg out-of-phase. The experimental results obtained with a proof-of-concept transducer were in good agreement with the theoretical predictions.     

Lines Pinning Lines

A line ℓ is a transversal to a family F of convex polytopes in ℝ³ if it intersects every member of F. If, in addition, ℓ is an isolated point of the space of line transversals to F, we say that F is a pinning of ℓ. We show that any minimal pinning of a line by polytopes in ℝ³ such that no face of a polytope is coplanar with the line has size at most eight. If in addition the polytopes are pairwise disjoint, then it has size at most six.     

Witness (Delaunay) graphs

Proximity graphs are used in several areas in which a neighborliness relationship for input data sets is a useful tool in their analysis, and have also received substantial attention from the graph drawing community, as they are a natural way of implicitly representing graphs. However, as a tool for graph representation, proximity graphs have some limitations that may be overcome with suitable generalizations.We introduce a generalization, witness graphs, that encompasses both the goal of more power and flexibility for graph drawing issues and a wider spectrum for neighborhood analysis. We study in detail two concrete examples, both related to Delaunay graphs, and consider as well some problems on stabbing geometric objects and point set discrimination, that can be naturally described in terms of witness graphs.     

Modal analysis of the electromechanical conversion in piezoelectric ceramic spherical shells

The current study considers piezoelectric ceramic electromechanical transducers utilizing axisymmetric vibrations of complete and incomplete spherical shells. Analysis is focused on generating the modes of vibration that can be employed in the design of multimode unidirectional electroacoustic transducers for underwater applications and on determining the electrode configurations that achieve optimal electromechanical coupling for the different modes of vibration considered. Analytical expressions are presented for the modal and intermodal equivalent parameters characterizing the energy state of the shell vibration. Results of calculation and experimental verification of the resonance frequencies and effective coupling coefficients for different modes of vibration of the complete and incomplete spherical shells are in good agreement.     

Minimizing the error of linear separators on linearly inseparable data

Given linearly inseparable sets $R$ of red points and $B$ of blue points, we consider several measures of how far they are from being separable. Intuitively, given a potential separator (“classifier”), we measure its quality (“error”) according to how much work it would take to move the misclassified points across the classifier to yield separated sets. We consider several measures of work and provide algorithms to find linear classifiers that minimize the error under these different measures.     

Unions of Fat Convex Polytopes Have Short Skeletons

The skeleton of a polyhedral set is the union of its edges and vertices. Let \(\mathcal {P}\) be a set of fat, convex polytopes in three dimensions with n vertices in total, and let f _max be the maximum complexity of any face of a polytope in \(\mathcal {P}\). We prove that the total length of the skeleton of the union of the polytopes in \(\mathcal {P}\) is at most O(α(n)?log^? n?logf _max) times the sum of the skeleton lengths of the individual polytopes.