In recent years, the possibility that users might be interrupted by information systems has been increasing with the growing popularity of the Internet and the ubiquity of computing environments. However, the timing of interruptions is not controlled in most systems. In this study, we propose a secretary agent to mediate interaction initiation between users or human-computer. The agent appeals ...

In the matroid secretary problem we are given a stream of elements in random order and asked to choose a set of elements that maximizes the total value of the set, subject to being an independent set of a matroid given in advance. The difficulty comes from the assumption that decisions are irrevocable: if we choose to accept an element when it is presented by the stream then we can never get ri...

We consider situations in which a decision-maker with a fixed budget faces a sequence of options, each with a cost and a value, and must select a subset of them online so as to maximize the total value. Such situations arise in many contexts, e.g., hiring workers, scheduling jobs, and bidding in sponsored search auctions. This problem, often called the online knapsack problem, is known to be in...