Experiments in Designing Computational Economies For Mobile Users

Distributed operating systems provide users with transparent access to networkwide resources. As changes occur to network resources or as user locations and preferences evolve, the system must be able to adapt by reallocating, replicating, or moving its resources. We explore a market-based approach to resource allocation in suchenvironments, and describe initial experiments in designing and building computational markets for distributed operating system resources. We focus on the problem of redistributing network file allocations for a mobile user population in order to improvelocality and accessibility

Decision-Theoretic Troubleshooting: A Framework for Repair and Experiment

We develop and extend existing decision-theoretic methods for troubleshooting a nonfunctioning device. Traditionally, diagnosis with Bayesian networks has focused on belief updating -- determining the probabilities of various faults given current observations. In this paper, we extend this paradigm to include taking actions. In particular, we consider three classes of actions: (1) we can make observations regarding the behavior of a device and infer likely faults as in traditional diagnosis, (2) we can repair a component and then observe the behavior of the device to infer likely faults, and (3) we can change the configuration of the device, observe its new behavior, and infer the likelihood of faults. Analysis of latter two classes of troubleshooting actions requires incorporating notions of persistence into the belief-network formalism used for probabilistic inference