48,497 research outputs found
Designing cost-sharing methods for Bayesian games
We study the design of cost-sharing protocols for two fundamental resource allocation problems, the Set Cover and the Steiner Tree Problem, under environments of incomplete information (Bayesian model). Our objective is to design protocols where the worst-case Bayesian Nash equilibria, have low cost, i.e. the Bayesian Price of Anarchy (PoA) is minimized. Although budget balance is a very natural requirement, it puts considerable restrictions on the design space, resulting in high PoA. We propose an alternative, relaxed requirement called budget balance in the equilibrium (BBiE).We show an interesting connection between algorithms for Oblivious Stochastic optimization problems and cost-sharing design with low PoA. We exploit this connection for both problems and we enforce approximate solutions of the stochastic problem, as Bayesian Nash equilibria, with the same guarantees on the PoA. More interestingly, we show how to obtain the same bounds on the PoA, by using anonymous posted prices which are desirable because they are easy to implement and, as we show, induce dominant strategies for the players
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Technology and Caregiving: Emerging Interventions and Directions for Research.
An array of technology-based interventions has increasingly become available to support family caregivers, primarily focusing on health and well-being, social isolation, financial, and psychological support. More recently the emergence of new technologies such as mobile and cloud, robotics, connected sensors, virtual/augmented/mixed reality, voice, and the evermore ubiquitous tools supported by advanced data analytics, coupled with the integration of multiple technologies through platform solutions, have opened a new era of technology-enabled interventions that can empower and support family caregivers. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for identifying and addressing the challenges that may need to be overcome to effectively apply technology-enabled solutions for family caregivers. The paper identifies a number of challenges that either moderate or mediate the full use of technologies for the benefit of caregivers. The challenges include issues related to equity, inclusion, and access; ethical concerns related to privacy and security; political and regulatory factors affecting interoperability and lack of standards; inclusive/human-centric design and issues; and inherent economic and distribution channel difficulties. The paper concludes with a summary of research questions and issues that form a framework for global research priorities
Non-clairvoyant Scheduling Games
In a scheduling game, each player owns a job and chooses a machine to execute
it. While the social cost is the maximal load over all machines (makespan), the
cost (disutility) of each player is the completion time of its own job. In the
game, players may follow selfish strategies to optimize their cost and
therefore their behaviors do not necessarily lead the game to an equilibrium.
Even in the case there is an equilibrium, its makespan might be much larger
than the social optimum, and this inefficiency is measured by the price of
anarchy -- the worst ratio between the makespan of an equilibrium and the
optimum. Coordination mechanisms aim to reduce the price of anarchy by
designing scheduling policies that specify how jobs assigned to a same machine
are to be scheduled. Typically these policies define the schedule according to
the processing times as announced by the jobs. One could wonder if there are
policies that do not require this knowledge, and still provide a good price of
anarchy. This would make the processing times be private information and avoid
the problem of truthfulness. In this paper we study these so-called
non-clairvoyant policies. In particular, we study the RANDOM policy that
schedules the jobs in a random order without preemption, and the EQUI policy
that schedules the jobs in parallel using time-multiplexing, assigning each job
an equal fraction of CPU time
Distributed Averaging via Lifted Markov Chains
Motivated by applications of distributed linear estimation, distributed
control and distributed optimization, we consider the question of designing
linear iterative algorithms for computing the average of numbers in a network.
Specifically, our interest is in designing such an algorithm with the fastest
rate of convergence given the topological constraints of the network. As the
main result of this paper, we design an algorithm with the fastest possible
rate of convergence using a non-reversible Markov chain on the given network
graph. We construct such a Markov chain by transforming the standard Markov
chain, which is obtained using the Metropolis-Hastings method. We call this
novel transformation pseudo-lifting. We apply our method to graphs with
geometry, or graphs with doubling dimension. Specifically, the convergence time
of our algorithm (equivalently, the mixing time of our Markov chain) is
proportional to the diameter of the network graph and hence optimal. As a
byproduct, our result provides the fastest mixing Markov chain given the
network topological constraints, and should naturally find their applications
in the context of distributed optimization, estimation and control
Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective
This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective
Designing Network Protocols for Good Equilibria
Designing and deploying a network protocol determines the rules by which end users interact with each other and with the network. We consider the problem of designing a protocol to optimize the equilibrium behavior of a network with selfish users. We consider network cost-sharing games, where the set of Nash equilibria depends fundamentally on the choice of an edge cost-sharing protocol. Previous research focused on the Shapley protocol, in which the cost of each edge is shared equally among its users. We systematically study the design of optimal cost-sharing protocols for undirected and directed graphs, single-sink and multicommodity networks, and different measures of the inefficiency of equilibria. Our primary technical tool is a precise characterization of the cost-sharing protocols that induce only network games with pure-strategy Nash equilibria. We use this characterization to prove, among other results, that the Shapley protocol is optimal in directed graphs and that simple priority protocols are essentially optimal in undirected graphs
Artificial Intelligence and Systems Theory: Applied to Cooperative Robots
This paper describes an approach to the design of a population of cooperative
robots based on concepts borrowed from Systems Theory and Artificial
Intelligence. The research has been developed under the SocRob project, carried
out by the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Institute for Systems and
Robotics - Instituto Superior Tecnico (ISR/IST) in Lisbon. The acronym of the
project stands both for "Society of Robots" and "Soccer Robots", the case study
where we are testing our population of robots. Designing soccer robots is a
very challenging problem, where the robots must act not only to shoot a ball
towards the goal, but also to detect and avoid static (walls, stopped robots)
and dynamic (moving robots) obstacles. Furthermore, they must cooperate to
defeat an opposing team. Our past and current research in soccer robotics
includes cooperative sensor fusion for world modeling, object recognition and
tracking, robot navigation, multi-robot distributed task planning and
coordination, including cooperative reinforcement learning in cooperative and
adversarial environments, and behavior-based architectures for real time task
execution of cooperating robot teams
Personal Volunteer Computing
We propose personal volunteer computing, a novel paradigm to encourage
technical solutions that leverage personal devices, such as smartphones and
laptops, for personal applications that require significant computations, such
as animation rendering and image processing. The paradigm requires no
investment in additional hardware, relying instead on devices that are already
owned by users and their community, and favours simple tools that can be
implemented part-time by a single developer. We show that samples of personal
devices of today are competitive with a top-of-the-line laptop from two years
ago. We also propose new directions to extend the paradigm
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