Related papers: Mutual detectability: a targeted SETI strategy tha…
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as machine learning algorithms, have allowed scientists, marketers and governments to shed light on correlations that remained invisible until now. Beforehand, the dots that we had to connect in…
Harmful repercussions from sharing sensitive or personal data can hamper institutions' willingness to engage in data exchange. Thus, institutions consider Authenticity Enhancing Technologies (AETs) and Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs)…
The {\it Kepler} mission has detected thousands of planetary systems with 1-7 transiting planets packed within 0.7~au from their host stars. There is an apparent excess of single-transit planet systems that cannot be explained by transit…
It is known that the shape of a planet (oblateness, rings, etc.) slightly modifies the shape of the transit light curve. The forthcoming space missions (Corot, Kepler), able to detect the transit of Earth-like planets, could a fortiori also…
Context: TESS has been successfully launched and has begin data acquisition. To expedite the science that may be performed with the resulting data it is necessary to gain a good understanding of planetary yields. Given the observing…
Autonomous exploration and multi-object tracking by a team of agents have traditionally been considered as two separate, yet related, problems which are usually solved in two phases: an exploration phase then a tracking phase. The…
Secure Message Transmission (SMT) is a two-party cryptographic protocol by which the sender can securely and reliably transmit messages to the receiver using multiple channels. An adversary can corrupt a subset of the channels and commit…
The law of maturity is the belief that less-observed events are becoming mature and, therefore, more likely to occur in the future. Previous studies have shown that the assumption of infinite exchangeability contradicts the law of maturity.…
The problem of coordination without a priori information about the environment is important in robotics. Applications vary from formation control to search and rescue. This paper considers the problem of search by a group of solitary…
We introduce a pursuit game played between a team of a sensor and an attacker and a mobile target in the unbounded Euclidean plane. The target is faster than the sensor, but slower than the attacker. The sensor's objective is to keep the…
Classical arguments for skepticism regarding the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are critically examined. It is suggested that the emerging class of "phase transition" astrobiological models can simultaneously account for…
Microlensing is proving to be one of the best techniques to detect distant, low-mass planets around the most common stars in the Galaxy. In principle, Earth's microlensing signal could offer the chance for other technological civilisations…
We study a pursuit-evasion game between two players with car-like dynamics and sensing limitations by formalizing it as a partially observable stochastic zero-sum game. The partial observability caused by the sensing constraints is…
Interstellar signals might be intermittent for many reasons, such as targeted sequential transmissions, or isotropic broadcasts that are not on continuously, or many other reasons. The time interval between such signals would be important,…
Mutual exclusion is a classical problem in distributed computing that provides isolation among concurrent action executions that may require access to the same shared resources. Inspired by algorithmic research on distributed systems of…
Message propagation is fundamental in constructing distributed systems upon sparsely connected communication networks. For providing easy message propagation primitives, the mutual-exclusive propagation (MEP) of one-bit messages is…
Popular culture (movies, SF literature) and witness accounts of close encounters with extraterrestrials provide a rather bizarre image of Aliens behavior on Earth. It is far from stereotypes of human space exploration. The reported Aliens…
Consider a cooperation game on a spatial network of habitat patches, where players can relocate between patches if they judge the local conditions to be unfavorable. In time, the relocation events may lead to a homogeneous state where all…
Distributed Opportunistic Scheduling (DOS) is inherently harder than conventional opportunistic scheduling due to the absence of a central entity that has knowledge of all the channel states. With DOS, stations contend for the channel using…
This paper proposes a long term scheme for robotic exploration of the galaxy,and then considers the implications in terms of the `Fermi paradox' and our search for ETI. We discuss the parameter space of the `galactic ecology' of…