Smoothed analysis of belief propagation and minimum-cost flow algorithms

Acknowledgments At the start of a Ph.D. project, you never know where it will take you. Though the research plan for my project contained several paragraphs on the planned research for the first two years, the plan for the last two years consisted of only a couple of lines. Even this concise plan turned out to be too detailed, since some research directions turned out to be less promising than expected, while other interesting research opportunities appeared. This thesis is the result of all the research that I did during the last four years. I look back at my time as a Ph.D. student as a very enjoyable time, during which I learned many new things. Many people contributed to this, and I would like to thank them here. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisors. Marc, thank you for giving me the opportunity to do research as a Ph.D. student in the DMMP group. Also, thank you for writing praising recommendation letters for me, which allowed me to participate in several interesting summer schools. Bodo, thank you for being my daily supervisor. It was a pleasure to be the first Ph.D. student under your supervision. Thank you for always having your door open for me and for coming to look for me when I would not visit you often enough. In addition, I am grateful for all the writing advice that you gave me to improve the quality of my papers. While at the University of Twente, I had the pleasure to get to know many colleagues from the DMMP, SOR, and 'floor 3' groups of applied mathematics. Thank you all for always being willing to discuss research with me. Also, thank you for the fun times we had both at work and outside of work. Among others, I really enjoyed our pub quizzes, escape rooms, movie nights, kart racing afternoons, department outings, and games and beer nights at the Lunteren conferences. Thank you in particular to Ruben and Jasper, who were my office mates for most of my stay in the DMMP group. I always enjoyed our conversations, both concerning work topics and other topics (mostly games). During my Ph.D. time I visited the University of Bonn several times. Heiko, Tobias, Clemens, and Michael, thank you for always making me feel welcome in Bonn and for the successful cooperation, from which two joint papers resulted. …