Related papers: The clairvoyant ma\^{i}tre d'
The problem of cleaning a messy table using Deep Neural Networks is a very interesting problem in both social and industrial robotics. This project focuses on the social application of this technology. A neural network model that is capable…
In the classical secretary problem, $n$ ranked items arrive one by one, and each item's rank relative to its predecessors is noted. The observer must select or reject each item as it arrives, with the object of selecting the item of highest…
Inspired by the theory of desirable gambles that is used to model uncertainty in the field of imprecise probabilities, I present a theory of desirable things. Its aim is to model a subject's beliefs about which things are desirable. What…
The fair allocation of scarce resources is a central problem in mathematics, computer science, operations research, and economics. While much of the fair-division literature assumes that individuals have underlying cardinal preferences,…
A reciprocal recommendation problem is one where the goal of learning is not just to predict a user's preference towards a passive item (e.g., a book), but to recommend the targeted user on one side another user from the other side such…
We describe a randomized algorithm that, given a set $P$ of points in the plane, computes the best location to insert a new point $p$, such that the Delaunay triangulation of $P\cup\{p\}$ has the largest possible minimum angle. The expected…
We address the problem of enumeration of seating arrangements of married couples around a circular table such that no spouses sit next to each other and no k consecutive persons are of the same gender. While the case of k=2 corresponds to…
The Sleeping Beauty problem is a problem of imperfect recall that has received considerable attention. One approach to solving the Sleeping Beauty problem is to allow Sleeping Beauty to make decisions based on her beliefs, and then…
In the prophet inequality problem, a gambler faces a sequence of items arriving online with values drawn independently from known distributions. On seeing an item, the gambler must choose whether to accept its value as her reward and quit…
We study a fair division problem with indivisible items, namely the computation of maximin share allocations. Given a set of $n$ players, the maximin share of a single player is the best she can guarantee to herself, if she would partition…
The Probabilistic Serial (PS) mechanism -- also known as the simultaneous eating algorithm -- is a canonical solution for the random assignment problem under ordinal preferences. It guarantees envy-freeness and ordinal efficiency in the…
We study the minimum backlog problem (MBP). This online problem arises, e.g., in the context of sensor networks. We focus on two main variants of MBP. The discrete MBP is a 2-person game played on a graph $G=(V,E)$. The player is initially…
A number of tricky problems in probability are discussed, having in common one or more infinite sequences of coin tosses, and a representation as a problem in dependent percolation. Three of these problems are of `Winkler' type, that is,…
We consider the revenue maximization problem for an online retailer who plans to display in order a set of products differing in their prices and qualities. Consumers have attention spans, i.e., the maximum number of products they are…
We give a solution of the following combinatorial problem: "Let one from $n$ married couples in the m\'enage problem (see Problem 1) be a couple of a known mathematician $M$ and his wife. After the ladies are seated at every other chair,…
This paper considers using predictions in the context of the online Joint Replenishment Problem with Deadlines (JRP-D). Prior work includes asymptotically optimal competitive ratios of $O(1)$ for the clairvoyant setting and $O(\sqrt{n})$ of…
We study noncooperative games, in which each player's objective is composed of a sequence of ordered- and potentially conflicting-preferences. Problems of this type naturally model a wide variety of scenarios: for example, drivers at a busy…
Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. A gambler is sent values in an online fashion, sampled from an instance of independent distributions, in an adversarial, random or selected order, depending on…
In many covering settings, it is natural to consider the presence both of elements that we seek to include and of elements that we seek to avoid. This paper introduces a novel combinatorial problem formalizing this tradeoff: from a…
The muffin problem asks us to divide $m$ muffins into pieces and assign each of those pieces to one of $s$ students so that the sizes of the pieces assigned to each student total $m/s$, with the objective being to maximize the size of the…