Reallocation Problems in Agent Societies: A Local Mechanism to Maximize Social Welfare

Resource reallocation problems are common in real life and therefore gain an increasing interest in Computer Science and Economics. Such problems consider agents living in a society and negotiating their resources with each other in order to improve the welfare of the population. In many studies however, the unrealistic context considered, where agents have a flawless knowledge and unlimited interaction abilities, impedes the application of these techniques in real life problematics. In this paper, we study how agents should behave in order to maximize the welfare of the society. We propose a multi-agent method based on autonomous agents endowed with a local knowledge and local interactions. Our approach features a more realistic environment based on social networks, inside which we provide the behavior for the agents and the negotiation settings required for them to lead the negotiation processes towards socially optimal allocations. We prove that bilateral transactions of restricted cardinality are sufficient in practice to converge towards an optimal solution for different social objectives. An experimental study supports our claims and highlights the impact of a realistic environment on the efficiency of the techniques utilized.Resource Allocation, Negotiation, Social Welfare, Agent Society, Behavior, Emergence

Peer-to-peer and community-based markets: A comprehensive review

The advent of more proactive consumers, the so-called "prosumers", with production and storage capabilities, is empowering the consumers and bringing new opportunities and challenges to the operation of power systems in a market environment. Recently, a novel proposal for the design and operation of electricity markets has emerged: these so-called peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity markets conceptually allow the prosumers to directly share their electrical energy and investment. Such P2P markets rely on a consumer-centric and bottom-up perspective by giving the opportunity to consumers to freely choose the way they are to source their electric energy. A community can also be formed by prosumers who want to collaborate, or in terms of operational energy management. This paper contributes with an overview of these new P2P markets that starts with the motivation, challenges, market designs moving to the potential future developments in this field, providing recommendations while considering a test-case

Online Tensor Methods for Learning Latent Variable Models

We introduce an online tensor decomposition based approach for two latent variable modeling problems namely, (1) community detection, in which we learn the latent communities that the social actors in social networks belong to, and (2) topic modeling, in which we infer hidden topics of text articles. We consider decomposition of moment tensors using stochastic gradient descent. We conduct optimization of multilinear operations in SGD and avoid directly forming the tensors, to save computational and storage costs. We present optimized algorithm in two platforms. Our GPU-based implementation exploits the parallelism of SIMD architectures to allow for maximum speed-up by a careful optimization of storage and data transfer, whereas our CPU-based implementation uses efficient sparse matrix computations and is suitable for large sparse datasets. For the community detection problem, we demonstrate accuracy and computational efficiency on Facebook, Yelp and DBLP datasets, and for the topic modeling problem, we also demonstrate good performance on the New York Times dataset. We compare our results to the state-of-the-art algorithms such as the variational method, and report a gain of accuracy and a gain of several orders of magnitude in the execution time.Comment: JMLR 201

Quantum Europe, Quantum Poland

Quantum Information Technologies promises are very serious, greatly exceeding only technical and market levels. Development of QIT in Europe, treated as building a new infrastructural civilization level, requires a broader view of coordination, funding and priority-setting policy. Simple measures used in the case of the development of new technologies, but not creating a significant ecosystem, are insufficient in this case. Quantum technologies are poised to create a new information layer of knowledge-based society. In this essay, the author subjectively addresses some of the issues such as: what we already know and what we don't know, and what efforts are being made in Europe

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

Context-Aware Security for 6G Wireless The Role of Physical Layer Security

Sixth generation systems are expected to face new security challenges, while opening up new frontiers towards context awareness in the wireless edge. The workhorse behind this projected technological leap will be a whole new set of sensing capabilities predicted for 6G devices, in addition to the ability to achieve high precision localization. The combination of these enhanced traits can give rise to a new breed of context-aware security protocols, following the quality of security (QoSec) paradigm. In this framework, physical layer security solutions emerge as competitive candidates for low complexity, low-delay and low-footprint, adaptive, flexible and context aware security schemes, leveraging the physical layer of the communications in genuinely cross-layer protocols, for the first time.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2011.0732