Stable matchings were introduced in 1962 by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley to study the college admissions problem. The seminal work of Gale and Shapley has motivated hundreds of research papers and found applications in many areas of mathematics, computer science, economics, and even medicine. This thesis studies stable matchings in graphs and hypergraphs. We begin by introducing the work of Gal...

ITERATIVE COMBINATORIAL AUCTIONS: ACHIEVING ECONOMIC AND COMPUTATIONAL EFFICIENCY David Christopher Parkes Supervisor: Lyle H. Ungar This thesis presents new auction-based mechanisms to coordinate systems of selfinterested and autonomous agents, and new methods to design such mechanisms and prove their optimality. Computation is increasingly carried out on open networks, with self-interested pr...

is satisfied for any two distinct points P, Q of L. Since the work of Thue on circle packings in the plane, many people have noted that the mesh of a lattice is the inverse of the density of its points and have asked whether there are arbitrary pointsets of maximal density satisfying the packing condition. C. A. Rogers [8] showed in 1951, for example, that for the Euclidean plane no packing is ...

BACKGROUND AND STUDY AIMS Endoscopic interventions require accurate and precise control of the endoscope tip. The endoscope tip response depends on a cable pulling system, which is known to deliver a significantly nonlinear response that eventually reduces control. It is unknown whether the current technique of endoscope tip control is adequate for a future of high precision procedures, steerab...

In this paper we describe deterministic parallel algorithms for planar point location and for building the Voronoi Diagram of n co-planar points. These algorithms are designed for BSP-like models of computation, where p processors, with O(~) ~> O(1) local memory each, communicate through some arbitrary interconnection network. They axe communication-efficient since they require, respectively, O...

and do not do justice to the rest of this large, admirable book. Hufton's approach is panoramic and sweeping: a large brush applied to a Rubenesque canvas surveying many countries over many centuries. She locates women, particularly ordinary women, within the generations of poverty, plague, and epidemic. She views them vis-a-vis the entrapment of the female body ("the female body was colder [th...

Automobiles are equipped with Electronic Control Units (ECU) that communicate via in-vehicle network protocol standards such as Controller Area Network (CAN). These protocols are designed under the assumption that separating invehicle communications from external networks is sufficient for protection against cyber attacks. This assumption, however, has been shown to be invalid by recent attacks...

Nonstationary infinite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) generalize the most well-studied class of sequential decision models in operations research, namely, that of stationaryMDPs, by relaxing the restrictive assumption that problem data do not change over time. Linearprogramming (LP) has been very successful in obtaining structural insights and devising solutionmeth...

We consider the following scheduling problem. There is a single machine and the jobs will arrive for completion online. Each job j is preemptive and, upon its arrival at time aj , its other characteristics are immediately revealed to the machine: the deadline dj , the workload Dj and the value vj . The objective is to maximize the aggregate value of jobs completed by their deadlines. Using the ...

Motivated by online advertisement and exchange settings, greedy randomized algorithms for the maximum matching problem have been studied, in which the algorithm makes (random) decisions that are essentially oblivious to the input graph. Any greedy algorithm can achieve performance ratio 0.5, which is the expected number of matched nodes to the number of nodes in a maximum matching. Since Aronso...