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The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk…
We study the optimal control of storage which is used for arbitrage, i.e. for buying a commodity when it is cheap and selling it when it is expensive. Our particular concern is with the management of energy systems, although the results are…
In this paper we present efficient algorithmic solutions for several constrained resource allocation, management and discovery problems. We consider new types of resource allocation models and constraints, and we present new geometric…
How best to quantify the information of an object, whether natural or artifact, is a problem of wide interest. A related problem is the computability of an object. We present practical examples of a new way to address this problem. By…
Mathematical optimization, although often leading to NP-hard models, is now capable of solving even large-scale instances within reasonable time. However, the primary focus is often placed solely on optimality. This implies that while…
A perfectly rational decision-maker chooses the best action with the highest utility gain from a set of possible actions. The optimality principles that describe such decision processes do not take into account the computational costs of…
We consider a distribution logistics scenario where a shipping operator, managing a limited amount of resources, receives a stream of collection requests, issued by a set of customers along a booking time-horizon, that are referred to a…
In most contemporary approaches to decision making, a decision problem is described by a sets of states and set of outcomes, and a rich set of acts, which are functions from states to outcomes over which the decision maker (DM) has…
As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…
It is well known that options can make planning more efficient, among their many benefits. Thus far, algorithms for autonomously discovering a set of useful options were heuristic. Naturally, a principled way of finding a set of useful…
Searching for objects amongst clutter is a key ability of visual systems. Speed and accuracy are often crucial: how can the visual system trade off these competing quantities for optimal performance in different tasks? How does the…
We investigate whether a robot arm can learn to pick and throw arbitrary objects into selected boxes quickly and accurately. Throwing has the potential to increase the physical reachability and picking speed of a robot arm. However,…
The note studies the problem of selecting a good enough subset out of a finite number of alternatives under a fixed simulation budget. Our work aims to maximize the posterior probability of correctly selecting a good subset. We formulate…
The study of order volumes in financial markets has shown that these display several non-trivial statistical properties. Most studies have been focused on the bulk properties of volume of incoming orders or of realized transactions rather…
Pick-and-place is one of the fundamental tasks in robotics research. However, the attention has been mostly focused on the ``pick'' task, leaving the ``place'' task relatively unexplored. In this paper, we address the problem of placing…
We consider the problem of probabilistic allocation of objects under ordinal preferences. We devise an allocation mechanism, called the vigilant eating rule (VER), that applies to nearly arbitrary feasibility constraints. It is constrained…
We consider an agent who needs to buy (or sell) a relatively small amount of asset over some fixed short time interval. We work at the highest frequency meaning that we wish to find the optimal tactic to execute our quantity using limit…
Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or…
Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or…
We study the optimal control of storage which is used for both arbitrage and buffering against unexpected events, with particular applications to the control of energy systems in a stochastic and typically time-heterogeneous environment.…