Related papers: Blind Number Sequencing
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
An unknown positive number of items arrive at independent uniformly distributed times in the interval [0,1] to a selector, whose task is to pick online the last one. We show that under the assumption of an adversary determining the number…
Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…
Evolutions of the trading landscape lead to the capability to exchange the same financial instrument on different venues. Because of liquidity issues, the trading firms split large orders across several trading destinations to optimize…
TikTok currently is the fastest growing social media platform with over 1 billion active monthly users of which the majority is from generation Z. Arguably, its most important success driver is its recommendation system. Despite the…
Simple stochastic games are two-player zero-sum stochastic games with turn-based moves, perfect information, and reachability winning conditions. We present two new algorithms computing the values of simple stochastic games. Both of them…
An open problem posed by the first author is the complexity to decide whether a sequence of nonnegative integer numbers can be the final score of a football tournament. In this paper we propose polynomial time approximate and exponential…
We revisit the elegant observation of T. Cover '65 which, perhaps, is not as well-known to the broader community as it should be. The first goal of the tutorial is to explain---through the prism of this elementary result---how to solve…
We study methods for improving fairness to subgroups in settings with overlapping populations and sequential predictions. Classical notions of fairness focus on the balance of some property across different populations. However, in many…
Online bidding is a classic optimization problem, with several applications in online decision-making, the design of interruptible systems, and the analysis of approximation algorithms. In this work, we study online bidding under…
This paper introduces improved methods for sub-event detection in social media streams, by applying neural sequence models not only on the level of individual posts, but also directly on the stream level. Current approaches to identify…
In the tournament game two players, called Maker and Breaker, alternately take turns in claiming an unclaimed edge of the complete graph on n vertices and selecting one of the two possible orientations. Before the game starts, Breaker fixes…
Games often incorporate random elements in the form of dice or shuffled card decks. This randomness is a key contributor to the player experience and the variety of game situations encountered. There is a tension between a level of…
Given a social network $G$ and an integer $k$, the influence maximization (IM) problem asks for a seed set $S$ of $k$ nodes from $G$ to maximize the expected number of nodes influenced via a propagation model. The majority of the existing…
Randomized rounding is a technique that was originally used to approximate hard offline discrete optimization problems from a mathematical programming relaxation. Since then it has also been used to approximately solve sequential stochastic…
Pandora's Box is a fundamental stochastic optimization problem, where the decision-maker must find a good alternative while minimizing the search cost of exploring the value of each alternative. In the original formulation, it is assumed…
Blackjack or "21" is a popular card-based game of chance and skill. The objective of the game is to win by obtaining a hand total higher than the dealer's without exceeding 21. The ideal blackjack strategy will maximize financial return in…
We study a sequential resource allocation problem between a fixed number of arms. On each iteration the algorithm distributes a resource among the arms in order to maximize the expected success rate. Allocating more of the resource to a…
In large-scale recommendation systems, the vast array of items makes it infeasible to obtain accurate user preferences for each product, resulting in a common issue of missing labels. Typically, only items previously recommended to users…
Most convex and nonconvex clustering algorithms come with one crucial parameter: the $k$ in $k$-means. To this day, there is not one generally accepted way to accurately determine this parameter. Popular methods are simple yet theoretically…