Research Interests

Dominique Roelants van Baronaigien's research is predominantly in two areas, the social implications of computing and in combinatorial generation algorithms.

The impact of computers has been enormous. While computers have given us a number of benefits, they have also caused some significant problems as well. Issues such as job loss due to automation and privacy invasion on an unprecedented scale regularly receive media attention. The ability to track an individual's buying habits and movements has been greatly augmented by computing technology.

Computing technology has also had a significant impact in the area of medicine, where, for instance in B.C. the Provincial Government has set up Pharmanet - a province wide database of individuals prescription histories - that will allow the government to reduce prescription abuse and help prevent patients from taking medications that conflict with each other.

The goal of my research in the area of social implications of computing is to ensure that systems such as Pharmanet both achieve their obvious positive goals but also are designed so that they respect the dignity of the individual and they do not have unexpected side effects.

Some problems are very difficult to solve, such as scheduling problems. The solution of these hard problems, NP-Complete problems, often requires testing all possible solutions to the problem. That is where my second research area, designing combinatorial generation algorithms, is useful. Combinatorial generation is also useful in many diverse areas including psychology, biology and electrical engineering. In mathematics and computing science lists of combinatorial objects may be used for generating and testing hypothesis about the objects, testing circuits and verifying programs. Because the number of combinatorial objects of a particular type often grow exponentially it is important to have very efficient generation algorithms, and because of some of the uses of these objects it is beneficial to list the objects such that there is a minimal amount of change between successive objects in the list.

Dr. Roelants van Baronaigien's research focuses on developing fast algorithms for listing combinatorial objects, creating constant amortized time algorithms, loop free algorithms and Gray code algorithms. The long term goal is to develop a list of criteria for determining what type of combinatorial objects can be listed by a constant amortized time algorithm, a loop free algorithm or a Gray code algorithm. Some work has been done by Wilf on the problem of developing a unified setting for listing combinatorial objects. Dr. Roelants van Baronaigien's goal is to expand this work into other areas. The research focuses on development of constant amortized time, loop free and Gray code algorithms for listing various combinatorial objects.

Selected Publications and Presentation

Generating Hamilton Paths in Planar Graphs, (with Stephen Goglin), presented at the 31th SE Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, 2000, FAU, Boca Raton Florida.

A Loopless Graycode algorithm for Listing k-ary Trees, Journal of Algorithms, v35 (2000) pp. 100-107.

A multi-stack method for the fast generation of Permutations With Minimal Length Increasing Subsequences, Info. Proc. Lett. v69 (1999) pp. 123-126.

Fast Gray Code Generation of the Bit Sequence Representation of k-ary Trees, presented at the 28th SE Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, 1998, FAU, Boca Raton Florida, Congressus Numerantium, v130 (1998) pp. 169-174.

Access to Information: The Key to Accountability or the Downfall of the System, Presented at the 16th Annual Pacific Health Care Forum, 1998, U.B.C., Vancouver Canada

Cohabitation and Domestic Labour (M.A. Thesis), Department of Sociology, University of Victoria (1998).

Loopfree Generation of k-ary Trees presented at the International Conference on Statistical Inference, Combinatorics and Related Areas, Baranas Hindu University, Varansi India, 1997, Technical Report DCS-254-IR, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria 1997.

Student Web Pages: Freedom of Speech or Liability Problem" presented at the 2nd Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education, May 1997.

CAT Generation of Subsets with a Given Parity Subsequence, presented at the 27th SE Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, 1997, FAU, Boca Raton Florida, Congressus Numerantium, v. 124 (1997) pp. 65-71.

Ethics, Social Implications of Technology, and Computer Science Curriculum" presented at the Western Canadian Conference on Computing Education, May 1996.

Privacy and Computerized Medical Records, (with M. Stevens), presented at Computers Freedom and Privacy '96, MIT, Boston.

Generation of Parity Restricted Subsets, presented at the 26th SE Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, 1996, LSU, Baton Rouge Louisiana, Congressus Numerantium, v. 117 (1996) pp. 33-42.

Consumer Tracking, Credit and Debit Cards and Privacy, presented as the guest on CKEG Radio open line, June 8, 1995.

Constant Amortized Time Generation of Permutations With Minimal Length Increasing Subsequence, presented at the 25th SE Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, 1995, FAU, Boca Raton Florida.

Loopless Generation of Subsets with a Given Sum (with E. Neufeld), presented at the 24th SE Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, 1994, FAU, Boca Raton Florida, Congressus Numerantium, v. 100 (1994) pp. 147-152.

On Rotations and the Generation of Binary Trees (with J. Lucas and F. Ruskey), Journal of Algorithms,15, pp. 343-366, 1993.

Generating Permutations With Given Ups and Downs (with F. Ruskey), Discrete Applied Math., 36, pp. 57-64, 1992

A Loopless Algorithm for Generating Binary Tree Sequence, Info. Processing Letters, vol. 39, pp 189-194, 1991.