Related papers: Public Communication can Facilitate Low-Risk Coord…
Large data sets often require performing distributed statistical estimation, with a full data set split across multiple machines and limited communication between machines. To study such scenarios, we define and study some refinements of…
Widely-deployed encryption-based security prevents unauthorized decoding, but does not ensure undetectability of communication. However, covert, or low probability of detection/intercept (LPD/LPI) communication is crucial in many scenarios…
Understanding how information can efficiently spread in distributed systems under noisy communications is a fundamental question in both biological research and artificial system design. When agents are able to control whom they interact…
We consider the problem of making distributed computations robust to noise, in particular to worst-case (adversarial) corruptions of messages. We give a general distributed interactive coding scheme which simulates any asynchronous…
In this paper, a new randomized response technique aimed at protecting respondents' privacy is proposed. It is designed for estimating the population total, or the population mean, of a quantitative characteristic. It provides a~high degree…
The communication complexity of many fundamental problems reduces greatly when the communicating parties share randomness that is independent of the inputs to the communication task. Natural communication processes (say between humans)…
This work considers the problem of mitigating information leakage between communication and sensing in systems jointly performing both operations. Specifically, a discrete memoryless state-dependent broadcast channel model is studied in…
Networked system often relies on distributed algorithms to achieve a global computation goal with iterative local information exchanges between neighbor nodes. To preserve data privacy, a node may add a random noise to its original data for…
Distributed averaging is among the most relevant cooperative control problems, with applications in sensor and robotic networks, distributed signal processing, data fusion, and load balancing. Consensus and gossip algorithms have been…
The model of population protocols provides a universal platform to study distributed processes driven by pairwise interactions of anonymous agents. While population protocols present an elegant and robust model for randomized distributed…
We study a regime change game in which the state and an opposition leader both observe the regime's true strength and may engage in costly communication by manipulating the mean of citizens' private signals. Each citizen then decides…
A protocol for distributed estimation of discrete distributions is proposed. Each agent begins with a single sample from the distribution, and the goal is to learn the empirical distribution of the samples. The protocol is based on a simple…
In distributed predictive control structures, communication among agents is required to achieve a consensus and approach an optimal global behavior. Such negotiation mechanisms are sensitive to attacks on these exchanges. This paper…
Techniques based on randomized response enable the collection of potentially sensitive data from clients in a privacy-preserving manner with strong local differential privacy guarantees. One of the latest such technologies, RAPPOR, allows…
Covert communication allows us to transmit messages in such a way that it is not possible to detect that the communication is occurring. This provides protection in situations where knowledge that people are talking to each other may be…
We consider distributed average consensus in a wireless network with partial communication to reduce the number of transmissions in every iteration/round. Considering the broadcast nature of wireless channels, we propose a probabilistic…
During an epidemic, the information available to individuals in the society deeply influences their belief of the epidemic spread, and consequently the preventive measures they take to stay safe from the infection. In this paper, we develop…
Secrecy in communication systems is measured herein by the distortion that an adversary incurs. The transmitter and receiver share secret key, which they use to encrypt communication and ensure distortion at an adversary. A model is…
In a recent work (Ghazi et al., SODA 2016), the authors with Komargodski and Kothari initiated the study of communication with contextual uncertainty, a setup aiming to understand how efficient communication is possible when the…
Reproduction numbers are widely used for the estimation and prediction of epidemic spreading processes over networks. However, conventional reproduction numbers of an overall network do not indicate where an epidemic is spreading.…