Related papers: Voting Rights, Markov Chains, and Optimization by …
Finding a target in a complex environment is a fundamental challenge in nature, from chemical reactions to sperm reaching an egg. An effective strategy to reduce the time needed to reach a target is to deploy many searchers, increasing the…
In this paper, we deal with a size-variable group of pedestrians moving in a unknown confined environment and searching for an exit. Pedestrian dynamics are simulated by means of a recently introduced microscopic (agent-based) model,…
We investigate a branching random walk where the displacements are independent from the branching mechanism and have a stretched exponential distribution. We describe the positions of the particles in the vicinity of the rightmost particle…
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the Borda rule…
The problem of minimizing convex functionals of probability distributions is solved under the assumption that the density of every distribution is bounded from above and below. A system of sufficient and necessary first-order optimality…
Many planning formalisms allow for mixing numeric with Boolean effects. However, most of these formalisms are undecidable. In this paper, we will analyze possible causes for this undecidability by studying the number of different…
We investigate hide-and-seek games on complex networks using a random walk framework. Specifically, we investigate the efficiency of various degree-biased random walk search strategies to locate items that are randomly hidden on a subset of…
In this study we consider the shortest path problem, where the arc costs are subject to distributional uncertainty. Basically, the decision-maker attempts to minimize her worst-case expected loss over an ambiguity set (or a family) of…
Model checking has been proposed as a formal verification approach for analyzing computer-based and cyber-physical systems. The state space explosion problem is the main obstacle for applying this approach for sophisticated systems.…
Markov chains based on spanning trees have been hugely influential in algorithms for assessing fairness in political redistricting. The input graph represents the geographic building blocks of a jurisdiction. The goal is to output a large…
We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively…
We significantly improve known time bounds for solving the minimum cut problem on undirected graphs. We use a ``semi-duality'' between minimum cuts and maximum spanning tree packings combined with our previously developed random sampling…
Deregulated energy markets, demand forecasting, and the continuously increasing share of renewable energy sources call---among others---for a structured consideration of uncertainties in optimal power flow problems. The main challenge is to…
Motivated by wide-ranging applications such as video delivery over networks using Multiple Description Codes, congestion control, and inventory management, we study the state-tracking of a Markovian random process with a known transition…
The metric distortion framework posits that n voters and m candidates are jointly embedded in a metric space such that voters rank candidates that are closer to them higher. A voting rule's purpose is to pick a candidate with minimum total…
Citizens' assemblies - small panels of citizens that convene to deliberate on policy issues - often face the issue of panelists dropping out at the last-minute. Without intervention, these dropouts compromise the size and representativeness…
Particle swarm optimization comes under lot of changes after James Kennedy and Russell Eberhart first proposes the idea in 1995. The changes has been done mainly on Inertia parameters in velocity updating equation so that the convergence…
The execution time of programs is a key element in many areas of computer science, mainly those where achieving good performance (e.g., scheduling in cloud computing) or a predictable one (e.g., meeting deadlines in embedded systems) is the…
When confronted with a host of issues, groups often save time and energy by compiling many issues into a single bundle when making decisions. This reduces the time and cost of group decision-making, but it also leads to suboptimal outcomes…
We study a finite time horizon Markov decision process (MDP) consisting of several groups of multi-action finite-state restless bandit processes, which are identical within each group. The bandit processes into different groups can be…