相关论文: Voting Rights, Markov Chains, and Optimization by …

The outcome of elections is strongly dependent on the districting choices, making thus possible (and frequent) the gerrymandering phenomenon, i.e.\ politicians suitably changing the shape of electoral districts in order to win the…

We consider the following well-studied problem of metric distortion in social choice. Suppose we have an election with $n$ voters and $m$ candidates located in a shared metric space. We would like to design a voting rule that chooses a…

We present a comparative study of several algorithms for an in-plane random walk with a variable step. The goal is to check the efficiency of the algorithm in the case where the random walk terminates at some boundary. We recently found…

Although many successful ensemble clustering approaches have been developed in recent years, there are still two limitations to most of the existing approaches. First, they mostly overlook the issue of uncertain links, which may mislead the…

The run-and-tumble walk, consisting in randomly reoriented ballistic excursions, models phenomena ranging from gas kinetics to bacteria motility. We evaluate the mean time required for this walk to find a fixed target within a 2D or 3D…

We consider real-valued branching random walks and prove a large deviation result for the position of the rightmost particle. The position of the rightmost particle is the maximum of a collection of a random number of dependent random…

This paper considers distribution systems with a high penetration of distributed, renewable generation and addresses the problem of incorporating the associated uncertainty into the optimal operation of these networks. Joint chance…

The random walk with choice is a well known variation to the random walk that first selects a subset of $d$ neighbours nodes and then decides to move to the node which maximizes the value of a certain metric; this metric captures the number…

Random walks can be used to search a complex networks for a desired resource. To reduce the number of hops necessary to find the resource, we propose a search mechanism based on building random walks connecting together partial walks that…

We consider information diffusion on Web-like networks and how random walks can simulate it. A well-studied problem in this domain is Partial Cover Time, i.e., the calculation of the expected number of steps a random walker needs to visit a…

We consider a setting with agents that have preferences over alternatives and are partitioned into disjoint districts. The goal is to choose one alternative as the winner using a mechanism which first decides a representative alternative…

Hit-and-Run is known to be one of the best random sampling algorithms, its mixing time is polynomial in dimension. Nevertheless, in practice the number of steps required to achieve uniformly distributed samples is rather high. We propose…

Planning problems are hard, motion planning, for example, isPSPACE-hard. Such problems are even more difficult in the presence of uncertainty. Although, Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) provide a formal framework for such problems, finding…

We solve a sequential decision-making problem under uncertainty that takes into account the failure probability of a task. This problem cannot be handled by the stochastic shortest path problem, which is the standard model for sequential…

We introduce a model of interacting random walkers on a finite one dimensional chain with absorbing boundaries or targets at the ends. Walkers are of two types: informed particles that move ballistically towards a given target, and…

Efficiency of search for randomly distributed targets is a prominent problem in many branches of the sciences. For the stochastic process of L\'evy walks, a specific range of optimal efficiencies was suggested under variation of search…

We study a limit behavior of a sequence of Markov processes (or Markov chains) such that their distributions outside of any neighborhood of a "singular" point attract to some probability law. In any neighborhood of this point the behavior…

In this invited contribution, we revisit the stochastic shortest path problem, and show how recent results allow one to improve over the classical solutions: we present algorithms to synthesize strategies with multiple guarantees on the…

Performing random walks in networks is a fundamental primitive that has found applications in many areas of computer science, including distributed computing. In this paper, we focus on the problem of sampling random walks efficiently in a…

After every U.S. national census, a state legislature is required to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts in order to account for changes in population. At the moment this is done in a highly partisan way, with districting done…