Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar

Robert D

[Pioneers and pit crews].

T he word pioneer conjures many images, especially that of the first to discover something. It implies aloneness, if not loneliness. In research—especially family medicine research—nothing could be further from the truth. Although all of the College of Family Physicians of Canada’s Top 20 Pioneers in Family Medicine Research1 were among the first to discover and achieve things in their areas, n...

The portrait of Robert Kerr (d. 1824).

The importance of Dr. Robert Kerr in Canadian history is not large, but he played a significant role in the early years of what is now Ontario. Though his Canadian years were spent largely in active military service and, after his discharge, at Kingston and in the Niagara peninsula, nevertheless, in the compact and sparse settlements and posts of the times he was widely known and influential. M...

Prophet Secretary for Combinatorial Auctions and Matroids

The secretary and the prophet inequality problems are central to the field of Stopping Theory. Recently, there has been a lot of work in generalizing these models to multiple items because of their applications in mechanism design. The most important of these generalizations are to matroids and to combinatorial auctions (extends bipartite matching). Kleinberg-Weinberg [KW12] and Feldman et al. ...

TSAR - Tool for System Availability and Reliability Analysis

The article describes the TSAR tool for system availability and availability analysis. Failure and repair model is based on Markov chain defined by states and transitions. Each state can be interpreted as working or broken. Transitions are defined by transition probabilities and transition time probability density functions. Availability and reliability analysis is based on discrete event Monte...