Related papers: Empirical Optimization on Post-Disaster Communicat…
Recent advances on human dynamics have focused on the normal patterns of human activities, with the quantitative understanding of human behavior under extreme events remaining a crucial missing chapter. This has a wide array of potential…
Humans have developed considerable machinery used at scale to create policies and to distribute incentives, yet we are forever seeking ways in which to improve upon these, our institutions. Especially when funding is limited, it is…
The multifaceted nature of disaster impact shows that densely populated areas contribute more to aggregate burden, while sparsely populated but heavily affected regions suffer disproportionately at the individual level. This study…
Efficient allocation and use of limited resources are fundamental to advancing collective welfare and achieving long-term societal sustainability. This challenge involves not only how policymakers distribute scarce resources among…
In the aftermath of an extreme natural hazard, community residents must have access to functioning food retailers to maintain food security. Food security is dependent on supporting critical infrastructure systems, including electricity,…
In addition to their benefits, optimization systems can have negative economic, moral, social, and political effects on populations as well as their environments. Frameworks like fairness have been proposed to aid service providers in…
Emergency Response Management (ERM) is a critical problem faced by communities across the globe. Despite this, it is common for ERM systems to follow myopic decision policies in the real world. Principled approaches to aid ERM…
The idea of a hierarchical spatial organization of society lies at the core of seminal theories in human geography that have strongly influenced our understanding of social organization. In the same line, the recent availability of…
This paper reviews the literature on response strategies for restoring infrastructure networks in the aftermath of a disaster. Our motivation for this review is twofold. First, the frequency and magnitude of natural and man-made disasters…
The problem of identifying models of post-disaster reconstruction is an issue that has been dealt with in depth in a number of works, mostly dedicated to individual cases or to the comparison of models. There are also a number of works that…
Equipping current decision-making tools with notions of fairness, equitability, or other ethically motivated outcomes, is one of the top priorities in recent research efforts in machine learning, AI, and optimization. In this paper, we…
The energy sector in the United States is ever more vulnerable to extreme climatic hazards, leading to multiple hazard-induced and managed power outages. Utility companies reportedly prioritize the restoration of power systems based on the…
In this paper, we study unconstrained distributed optimization strongly convex problems, in which the exchange of information in the network is captured by a directed graph topology over digital channels that have limited capacity (and…
Public sector agencies perform the critical task of implementing the redistributive role of the State by acting as the leading provider of critical public services that many rely on. In recent years, public agencies have been increasingly…
Communications play a vital role in the response to disasters and crises. However, existing communications infrastructure is often impaired, destroyed or overwhelmed during such events. This leads to the use of substitute communications…
Predictive algorithms are now used to help distribute a large share of our society's resources and sanctions, such as healthcare, loans, criminal detentions, and tax audits. Under the right circumstances, these algorithms can improve the…
A significant body of research in the data sciences considers unfair discrimination against social categories such as race or gender that could occur or be amplified as a result of algorithmic decisions. Simultaneously, real-world…
An urban planner might design the spatial layout of transportation amenities so as to improve accessibility for underserved communities -- a fairness objective. However, implementing such a design might trigger processes of neighborhood…
There are many news articles reporting the obstacles confronting poverty-stricken households in access to public transits. These barriers create a great deal of inconveniences for these impoverished families and more importantly, they…
Variational inequalities are a broad and flexible class of problems that includes minimization, saddle point, and fixed point problems as special cases. Therefore, variational inequalities are used in various applications ranging from…