Related papers: Empirical Optimization on Post-Disaster Communicat…
Across infrastructure domains, physical damage caused by storms and other weather events often requires costly and time-sensitive repairs to restore services as quickly as possible. While recent studies have used agent-based models to…
In this article the most fundamental decomposition-based optimization method - block coordinate search, based on the sequential decomposition of problems in subproblems - and building performance simulation programs are used to reason about…
This paper considers distributed nonconvex optimization with the cost functions being distributed over agents. Noting that information compression is a key tool to reduce the heavy communication load for distributed algorithms as agents…
This paper complements the large body of social sensing literature by developing means for augmenting sensing data with inference results that "fill-in" missing pieces. It specifically explores the synergy between (i) inference techniques…
Microstructure reconstruction is a key enabler of process-structure-property linkages, a central topic in materials engineering. Revisiting classical optimization-based reconstruction techniques,they are recognized as a powerful framework…
One of the continuing challenges of Human Computer Interaction research is the full inclusion of people with special needs into the digital world. In particular, this crucial category includes people that experiences some kind of limitation…
Major disasters such as extreme weather events can magnify and exacerbate pre-existing social disparities, with disadvantaged populations bearing disproportionate costs. Despite the implications for equity and emergency planning, we lack a…
Social connections are conduits through which individuals communicate, information propagates, and diseases spread. Identifying individuals who are more likely to adopt ideas and spread them is essential in order to develop effective…
We identify and explore differential access to population-level signaling (also known as information design) as a source of unequal access to opportunity. A population-level signaler has potentially noisy observations of a binary type for…
Modern applied optimization problems become more and more complex every day. Due to this fact, distributed algorithms that can speed up the process of solving an optimization problem through parallelization are of great importance. The main…
Across various domains--such as health, education, and housing--improving societal welfare involves allocating resources, setting policies, targeting interventions, and regulating activities. These solutions have an immense impact on the…
Robust optimization is a popular paradigm for modeling and solving two- and multi-stage decision-making problems affected by uncertainty. In many real-world applications, the time of information discovery is decision-dependent and the…
Modeling and shaping how information spreads through a network is a major research topic in network analysis. While initially the focus has been mostly on efficiency, recently fairness criteria have been taken into account in this setting.…
Allocation of scarce resources is a recurring challenge for the public sector: something that emerges in areas as diverse as healthcare, disaster recovery, and social welfare. The complexity of these policy domains and the need for meeting…
We examine fundamental tradeoffs in iterative distributed zeroth and first order stochastic optimization in multi-agent networks in terms of \emph{communication cost} (number of per-node transmissions) and \emph{computational cost},…
Delay/Disruption-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) have been around for more than a decade and have especially been proposed to be used in scenarios where communication infrastructure is unavailable. In such scenarios, DTNs can offer a best-effort…
AI algorithms used in the public sector, e.g., for allocating social benefits or predicting fraud, often involve multiple public and private stakeholders at various phases of the algorithm's life-cycle. Communication issues between these…
Humanitarian and disaster management actors have increasingly adopted cash transfer to reduce the sufferings and vulnerability of the survivors. Case transfers have also been used as a critical instrument in the current COVID-19 pandemic.…
Due to the increase in natural disasters in the past years, Disaster Response Organizations (DROs) are faced with the challenge of coping with more and larger operations. Currently appointed Information and Communications Technology (ICT)…
The dynamics of flooding are primarily influenced by the shape, height, and roughness (friction) of the underlying topography. For this reason, mechanisms to mitigate floods frequently employ structural measures that either modify…