Related papers: Homonym Population Protocols, or Providing a Small…

We revisit the problem of designing scalable protocols for private statistics and private federated learning when each device holds its private data. Locally differentially private algorithms require little trust but are (provably) limited…

We consider a population of $n$ agents which communicate with each other in a decentralized manner, through random pairwise interactions. One or more agents in the population may act as authoritative sources of information, and the…

Many of society's most pressing challenges, from pandemic response to supply chain disruptions to climate adaptation, emerge from the collective behavior of millions of autonomous agents making decisions over time. Large Population Models…

The mainstream crowd counting methods regress density map and integrate it to obtain counting results. Since the density representation to one head accords to its adjacent distribution, it embeds the same category objects with variant…

Most population models assume that individuals within a given population are identical, that is, the fundamental role of variation is ignored. Inhomogeneous models of populations and communities allow for birth and death rates to vary among…

We give efficient protocols and matching accuracy lower bounds for frequency estimation in the local model for differential privacy. In this model, individual users randomize their data themselves, sending differentially private reports to…

In this paper, we consider the problem of formation of a series of geometric patterns [4] by a network of oblivious mobile robots that communicate only through vision. So far, the problem has been studied in models where robots are either…

We introduce a new type of generalized Turing machines (GTMs), which are intended as a tool for the mathematician who studies computability in Analysis. In a single tape cell a GTM can store a symbol, a real number, a continuous real…

In this work, we study the fundamental naming and counting problems (and some variations) in networks that are anonymous, unknown, and possibly dynamic. In counting, nodes must determine the size of the network n and in naming they must end…

In this work, we study protocols so that populations of distributed processes can construct networks. In order to highlight the basic principles of distributed network construction we keep the model minimal in all respects. In particular,…

Infinite population models are important tools for studying population dynamics of evolutionary algorithms. They describe how the distributions of populations change between consecutive generations. In general, infinite population models…

We study here the dynamics (and stability) of Probabilistic Population Protocols, via the differential equations approach. We provide a quite general model and we show that it includes the model of Angluin et. al. in the case of very large…

Background: Many different simulation frameworks, in different topics, need to treat realistic datasets to initialize and calibrate the system. A precise reproduction of initial states is extremely important to obtain reliable forecast from…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled human-like social simulations at unprecedented scale and fidelity, offering new opportunities for computational social science. A key challenge, however, is the construction of…

We extend classical methods of computational complexity to the realm of distributed computing, where they sometimes prove more effective than in their original context. Our focus is on decision problems in the LOCAL model, a setting in…

Motivated by tensions between data privacy for individual citizens, and societal priorities such as counterterrorism and the containment of infectious disease, we introduce a computational model that distinguishes between parties for whom…

Starting with Michail, Chatzigiannakis, and Spirakis work, the problem of Counting the number of nodes in Anonymous Dynamic Networks has attracted a lot of attention. The problem is challenging because nodes are indistinguishable (they lack…

This paper describes Census, a protocol for data aggregation and statistical counting in MANETs. Census operates by circulating a set of tokens in the network using biased random walks such that each node is visited by at least one token.…

Motivated by the desire to bridge the utility gap between local and trusted curator models of differential privacy for practical applications, we initiate the theoretical study of a hybrid model introduced by "Blender" [Avent et al.,\…

Communicating anonymously comes at a cost - and large communities have been in a constant tug-of-war between the development of faster protocols, and the improvement of security analyses. Thereby more intricate privacy goals emerged and…