Related papers: Leader Election Requires Logarithmic Time in Popul…
We consider the problem of stabilization of a linear system, under state and control constraints, and subject to bounded disturbances and unknown parameters in the state matrix. First, using a simple least square solution and available…
Population protocols are a well established model of distributed computation by mobile finite-state agents with very limited storage. A classical result establishes that population protocols compute exactly predicates definable in…
We investigate the practical aspects of computing the necessary and possible winners in elections over incomplete voter preferences. In the case of the necessary winners, we show how to implement and accelerate the polynomial-time algorithm…
We study strategic candidate nomination by parties in elections decided by Plurality voting. Each party selects a nominee before the election, and the winner is chosen from the nominated candidates based on the voters' preferences. We…
Proper scoring rules elicit truth-telling when making predictions, or otherwise revealing information. However, when multiple predictions are made of the same event, telling the truth is in general no longer optimal, as agents are motivated…
We consider the leader selection problem in a network with consensus dynamics where both leader and follower agents are subject to stochastic external disturbances. The performance of the system is quantified by the total steady-state…
In this paper, we study the quantity of computational resources (state machine states and/or probabilistic transition precision) needed to solve specific problems in a single hop network where nodes communicate using only beeps. We begin by…
We consider the energy complexity of the leader election problem in the single-hop radio network model, where each device has a unique identifier in $\{1, 2, \ldots, N\}$. Energy is a scarce resource for small battery-powered devices. For…
When allocating indivisible items to agents, it is known that the only strategyproof mechanisms that satisfy a set of rather mild conditions are constrained serial dictatorships: given a fixed order over agents, at each step the designated…
In many applications of multi-agent systems (MAS), a set of leader agents acts as a control input to the remaining follower agents. In this paper, we introduce an analytical approach to selecting leader agents in order to minimize the total…
We present a protocol that allows voters to phone in their votes. Our protocol makes it expensive for a candidate and a voter to cooperate to prove to the candidate who the voter voted for. When the electoral pool is large enough, the cost…
The Herman Protocol Conjecture states that the expected time $\mathbb{E}(\mathbf{T})$ of Herman's self-stabilizing algorithm in a system consisting of $N$ identical processes organized in a ring holding several tokens is at most…
We study probabilistic protocols for concurrent threshold-based load balancing in networks. There are n resources or machines represented by nodes in an undirected graph and m >> n users that try to find an acceptable resource by moving…
Population protocols are a model of computation in which indistinguishable mobile agents interact in pairs to decide a property of their initial configuration. Originally introduced by Angluin et. al. in 2004 with a constant number of…
The study of the number of collisions in a Poisson-Dirichlet coalescent leads to the analysis of the following version of a stochastic leader-elec\-tion algorithm. Consider an infinite family of persons, labeled by $1,2,3,\ldots$, who…
Stochastic processes offer a flexible mathematical formalism to model and reason about systems. Most analysis tools, however, start from the premises that models are fully specified, so that any parameters controlling the system's dynamics…
In a recently introduced model of successive committee elections (Bredereck et al., AAAI-20) for a given set of ordinal or approval preferences one aims to find a sequence of a given length of "best" same-size committees such that each…
We investigate a model of sequential decision-making where a single alternative is chosen at each round. We focus on two objectives -- utilitarian welfare (Util) and egalitarian welfare (Egal) -- and consider the computational complexity of…
We consider congestion control in peer-to-peer distributed systems. The problem can be reduced to the following scenario: Consider a set $V$ of $n$ peers (called clients in this paper) that want to send messages to a fixed common peer…
Conditions are established under which the optimal control of processes having both absolutely continuous and singular (with respect to time) controls are equivalent to linear programs over a space of measures on the state and control…