Planning in partially observable environments remains a challenging problem, despite significant recent advances in offline approximation techniques. A few online methods have also been proposed recently, and proven to be remarkably scalable, but without the theoretical guarantees of their offline counterparts. Thus it seems natural to try to unify offline and online techniques, preserving the ...

Group theoretical methods have important applications in many areas of condensed matter physics. As a first example, we present an investigation of “quadrupolar” phases in UPd3, a system which has a three-component order parameter resulting in an interesting phase diagram with an “octacritical” point. In our second example we discuss an unconventional (tetragonal) superconductor and show that t...

The interaction of light with matter has triggered the interest of scientists for long time. The area of plasmonics emerges in this context through the interaction of light with valence electrons in metals. The random phase approximation in the long wavelength limit is used for analytical investigation of plasmons in three-dimensional metals, in a two-dimensional electron gas and finally in the...

In combinatorics we often meet two kinds of extremal problems. In one kind , optimal configurations consist of 'objects' , which are somehow uniformly spread in the space under consideration ; and in the other kind , optimal configurations consist of 'objects' , which are somehow compressed. To the first kind belong packing , covering and coding problems , whereas diametric (especially of Erdö ...

Phylogenetic inference for molecular data by the maximum-likelihood approach has been attacked from a theoretical point of view, because the likelihood functions take different forms for different trees, so that optimised likelihood values for different trees do not appear directly comparable (Nei, 1987). Here, a new "super-tree" perspective is introduced to refute these criticisms. A super-tre...

The aim in a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is to find an assignment of values to a given set of variables, subject to constraints on the values which can be assigned simultaneously to certain specified subsets of variables. CSPs are used to model a wide variety of computational problems in computer science, discrete mathematics, artificial intelligence, and elsewhere, and they have foun...

We model a family of peer-reviewing processes as game-theoretic problems. This helps to understand elements of existing peer-reviewing procedures, and to predict the impact of new mechanisms. Real world conference peer-reviewing processes are overly complex and here we define and analyze simple versions. Our versions provides a contribution towards formalizing and understanding these complex re...

In recent years manifold methods have attracted a considerable amount of attention in machine learning. However most algorithms in that class may be termed “manifold-motivated” as they lack any explicit theoretical guarantees. In this paper we take a step towards closing the gap between theory and practice for a class of Laplacian-based manifold methods. These methods utilize the graph Laplacia...

We analyze estimation methods for DataOriented Parsing, as well as the theoretical criteria used to evaluate them. We show that all current estimation methods are inconsistent in the “weight-distribution test”, and argue that these results force us to rethink both the methods proposed and the criteria used.