Speaker: Shay Solomon, Weizmann

Title: A Non-Geometric Approach to Geometric Spanners

Abstract:
---------
Managing the valuable data of large-scale networks is among the most
fundamental challenges in computer science.
Whenever the data involves network distances, one may use a {spanner},
which provides a good approximation for all the pairwise distances using a
small (ideally, a linear) number of network links.
{Geometric spanners} are spanners for networks induced by points in the
plane, or more generally, by arbitrary Euclidean spaces.
Such spanners have been intensively studied since the mid-80s, with
applications ranging from compact routing and distance oracles to robotics
and machine learning.

In this talk I will discuss novel non-geometric techniques to geometric
spanners, and demonstrate their effectiveness in solving several
long-standing open questions.

The main message of my talk is somewhat surprising -- the right approach to
geometric spanners is often non-geometric