On the ideals of secant varieties of Segre varieties (Q1764398)

The authors develop here several basic techniques for determining the homogeneous ideal of the secant varieties of Segre varieties. They apply their techniques in several examples. In particular they give an affirmative answer to a conjecture of \textit{L. D. Garcia}, \textit{M. Stillman} and \textit{B. Sturmfels} [Algebraic geometry of Bayesian networks, preprint, \texttt{http://arXiv.org/abs/math.AG/0301255}] on the generators of the homogeneous ideal in the case of three factors and set-theoretically for an arbitrary number of factors.