Finding Consensus Without Computation

Finding Consensus Bayesian Network Structures

Suppose that multiple experts (or learning algorithms) provide us with alternative Bayesian network (BN) structures over a domain, and that we are interested in combining them into a single consensus BN structure. Specifically, we are interested in that the consensus BN structure only represents independences all the given BN structures agree upon and that it has as few parameters associated as...

Finding without Searching

Computation without Representation

The received view is that computational states are individuated at least in part by their semantic properties. I offer an alternative, according to which computational states are individuated by their functional properties. Functional properties are specified by a mechanistic explanation without appealing to any semantic properties. The primary purpose of this paper is to formulate the alternat...

Secure Computation without Agreement

It has recently been shown that executions of authenticated Byzantine Agreement protocols in which more than a third of the parties are corrupted, cannot be composed concurrently, in parallel, or even sequentially (where the latter is true for deterministic protocols). This result puts into question any usage of authenticated Byzantine agreement in a setting where many executions take place. In...

On Finding the Adams Consensus Tree

This paper presents a fast algorithm for finding the Adams consensus tree of a set of conflicting phylogenetic trees with identical leaf labels, for the first time improving the time complexity of a widely used algorithm invented by Adams in 1972 [1]. Our algorithm applies the centroid path decomposition technique [9] in a new way to traverse the input trees’ centroid paths in unison, and runs ...