Related papers: On the Approximability of External-Influence-Drive…
A primary challenge in metagenomics is reconstructing individual microbial genomes from the mixture of short fragments created by sequencing. Recent work leverages the sparsity of the assembly graph to find $r$-dominating sets which enable…
We study the algorithmic decidability of the domination number in the Erdos-Renyi random graph model $G(n,p)$. We show that for a carefully chosen edge probability $p=p(n)$, the domination problem exhibits a strong irreducible property.…
In this paper, we consider an unconstrained distributed optimization problem over a network of agents, in which some agents are adversarial. We solve the problem via gradient-based distributed optimization algorithm and characterize the…
In this paper, we study a number of well-known combinatorial optimization problems that fit in the following paradigm: the input is a collection of (potentially inconsistent) local relationships between the elements of a ground set (e.g.,…
We address the problem of influence maximization when the social network is accompanied by diffusion cascades. In prior works, such information is used to compute influence probabilities, which is utilized by stochastic diffusion models in…
Online allocation problems with resource constraints are central problems in revenue management and online advertising. In these problems, requests arrive sequentially during a finite horizon and, for each request, a decision maker needs to…
We develop a new framework for generalizing approximation algorithms from the structural graph algorithm literature so that they apply to graphs somewhat close to that class (a scenario we expect is common when working with real-world…
Interdiction problems are leader-follower games in which the leader is allowed to delete a certain number of edges from the graph in order to maximally impede the follower, who is trying to solve an optimization problem on the impeded…
Interdiction problems ask about the worst-case impact of a limited change to an underlying optimization problem. They are a natural way to measure the robustness of a system, or to identify its weakest spots. Interdiction problems have been…
In a graph $G = (V,E)$, a k-ruling set $S$ is one in which all vertices $V$ \ $S$ are at most $k$ distance from $S$. Finding a minimum k-ruling set is intrinsically linked to the minimum dominating set problem and maximal independent set…
Influence Maximization (IM) is a classical combinatorial optimization problem, which can be widely used in mobile networks, social computing, and recommendation systems. It aims at selecting a small number of users such that maximizing the…
Online allocation problems with resource constraints have a rich history in operations research. In this paper, we introduce the \emph{regularized online allocation problem}, a variant that includes a non-linear regularizer acting on the…
We present a series of almost settled inapproximability results for three fundamental problems. The first in our series is the subexponential-time inapproximability of the maximum independent set problem, a question studied in the area of…
Finding a maximum independent set is a fundamental NP-hard problem that is used in many real-world applications. Given an unweighted graph, this problem asks for a maximum cardinality set of pairwise non-adjacent vertices. Some of the most…
We model information dissemination as a susceptible-infected epidemic process and formulate a problem to jointly optimize seeds for the epidemic and time varying resource allocation over the period of a fixed duration campaign running on a…
The influence maximization paradigm has been used by researchers in various fields in order to study how information spreads in social networks. While previously the attention was mostly on efficiency, more recently fairness issues have…
We study the influence minimization problem: given a graph $G$ and a seed set $S$, blocking at most $b$ nodes or $b$ edges such that the influence spread of the seed set is minimized. This is a pivotal yet underexplored aspect of network…
In this paper we analyze influence maximization in the voter model with an active strategic and a passive influencing party in non-stationary settings. We thus explore the dependence of optimal influence allocation on the time horizons of…
We study the problem of computing maximin share guarantees, a recently introduced fairness notion. Given a set of $n$ agents and a set of goods, the maximin share of a single agent is the best that she can guarantee to herself, if she would…
We propose a new localized inference algorithm for answering marginalization queries in large graphical models with the correlation decay property. Given a query variable and a large graphical model, we define a much smaller model in a…