Welcome to the Homepage of Cartogram Computation Group
We study contact representations of planar graphs, where the vertices are represented by simple
interior-disjoint polygons and adjacencies are represented by a non-trivial contact (shared boundary) between
the corresponding polygons. In the weighted version, each vertex is associated with a pre-specified weight.
A contact representation is called a cartogram if the area of each region is equal to the pre-specified weight
of the corresponding vertex. For practical, cognitive and aesthetic consideration, it is desirable to to limit
the polygonal complexity of the representation, measured by the number of sides. Similarly, it is also desirable
to minimize the unused area in the representation, also known as holes in floorplanning and VLSI layouts. We
study different variant of this problem depending on: (i) whether we allow holes in the layout, (ii) whether we
restrict ourselves to use only special types of polygons, i.e. convex polygons or rectilinear polygon,
(iii) the class of planar graph that we address eic.