Hon. Secretary Message

The Hon. Lady Darwin

A message from the ERS President and the ERS Secretary for EU Affairs.

We would like to emphasise to European Respiratory Society (ERS) members and to all physicians and researchers dealing with respiratory diseases the importance of the editorial written by Adoración Navarro-Torné and distinguished colleagues from the Health Directorate of DG Research and Innovation of the European Commission. The authors rightly note that chronic respiratory diseases (CRDs) (par...

The secretary returns

In the online random-arrival model, an algorithm receives a sequence of n requests that arrive in a random order. The algorithm is expected to make an irrevocable decision with regard to each request based only on the observed history. We consider the following natural extension of this model: each request arrives k times, and the arrival order is a random permutation of the kn arrivals; the al...

Matroid Secretary Problems

In 1963, Dynkin introduced the secretary problem [6]. In this problem, an algorithm is presented with n positive values, one by one. After each value, the algorithm must either accept or reject the value, where all decisions are final. The algorithm can only pick one value, and the goal is to pick the maximum value in the sequence. The name for this problem arises from a situation where n candi...

The Submodular Secretary Problem

Online auction is an essence of many modern markets, particularly networked markets, in which information about goods, agents, and outcomes is revealed over a period of time, and the agents must make irrevocable decisions without knowing future information. Optimal stopping theory, especially the classic secretary problem, is a powerful tool for analyzing such online scenarios which generally r...