Improved Bounds for Metric Capacitated Covering Problems

In the Metric Capacitated Covering (MCC) problem, given a set of balls ? in a metric space P with metric d and a capacity parameter U, the goal is to find a minimum sized subset ?\u27 ? ? and an assignment of the points in P to the balls in ?\u27 such that each point is assigned to a ball that contains it and each ball is assigned with at most U points. MCC achieves an O(log |P|)-approximation using a greedy algorithm. On the other hand, it is hard to approximate within a factor of o(log |P|) even with ? < 3 factor expansion of the balls. Bandyapadhyay et al. [SoCG 2018, DCG 2019] showed that one can obtain an O(1)-approximation for the problem with 6.47 factor expansion of the balls. An open question left by their work is to reduce the gap between the lower bound 3 and the upper bound 6.47. In this current work, we show that it is possible to obtain an O(1)-approximation with only 4.24 factor expansion of the balls. We also show a similar upper bound of 5 for a more generalized version of MCC for which the best previously known bound was 9

Truthful Facility Assignment with Resource Augmentation: An Exact Analysis of Serial Dictatorship

We study the truthful facility assignment problem, where a set of agents with private most-preferred points on a metric space are assigned to facilities that lie on the metric space, under capacity constraints on the facilities. The goal is to produce such an assignment that minimizes the social cost, i.e., the total distance between the most-preferred points of the agents and their corresponding facilities in the assignment, under the constraint of truthfulness, which ensures that agents do not misreport their most-preferred points. We propose a resource augmentation framework, where a truthful mechanism is evaluated by its worst-case performance on an instance with enhanced facility capacities against the optimal mechanism on the same instance with the original capacities. We study a very well-known mechanism, Serial Dictatorship, and provide an exact analysis of its performance. Although Serial Dictatorship is a purely combinatorial mechanism, our analysis uses linear programming; a linear program expresses its greedy nature as well as the structure of the input, and finds the input instance that enforces the mechanism have its worst-case performance. Bounding the objective of the linear program using duality arguments allows us to compute tight bounds on the approximation ratio. Among other results, we prove that Serial Dictatorship has approximation ratio $g/(g-2)$ when the capacities are multiplied by any integer $g \geq 3$. Our results suggest that even a limited augmentation of the resources can have wondrous effects on the performance of the mechanism and in particular, the approximation ratio goes to 1 as the augmentation factor becomes large. We complement our results with bounds on the approximation ratio of Random Serial Dictatorship, the randomized version of Serial Dictatorship, when there is no resource augmentation

Numerical Relativity: A review

Computer simulations are enabling researchers to investigate systems which are extremely difficult to handle analytically. In the particular case of General Relativity, numerical models have proved extremely valuable for investigations of strong field scenarios and been crucial to reveal unexpected phenomena. Considerable efforts are being spent to simulate astrophysically relevant simulations, understand different aspects of the theory and even provide insights in the search for a quantum theory of gravity. In the present article I review the present status of the field of Numerical Relativity, describe the techniques most commonly used and discuss open problems and (some) future prospects.Comment: 2 References added; 1 corrected. 67 pages. To appear in Classical and Quantum Gravity. (uses iopart.cls