Two-player games of billiards, of the sort seen in recent Computer Olympiads held by the International Computer Games Association, are an emerging area with unique challenges for A.I. research. Drawing on the insight gained from our victory in the 2008 ICGA billiards tournament, we define a game-theoretic model of these types of billiards games. The modeling is surprisingly subtle. While sharin...

Stackelberg security games have been applied to address challenges in security resource allocation of realworld infrastructure protection tasks. The key to such an application is to efficiently compute the defender’s optimal strategy in consideration of the attacker’s surveillance capability and best response. Experimental results show that the defender’s optimal strategy often uses only a smal...

This paper proposes a model of competitive bundling with an arbitrary number of …rms. In the regime of pure bundling, we …nd that relative to separate sales pure bundling tends to raise market prices, bene…t …rms, and harm consumers when the number of …rms is above a threshold. This is in contrast to the …ndings in the duopoly case on which the existing literature often focuses. Our analysis al...

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to recognize and classify named entities in unstructured text into predefined categories such as the names of persons, organizations, locations, etc. The majority of researchers used machine learning, while few researchers used handcrafted rules to solve the NER problem. We focus here on NER for the Arabic language...

The electrical conductivity of pure Cu powder is typically deteriorated at elevated temperatures due to the oxidation by forming non-conducting oxides on surface, while enhancing oxidation resistance via alloying is often accompanied by a drastic decline of electrical conductivity. Obtaining Cu powder with both a high electrical conductivity and a high oxidation resistance represents one of the...

Modeling intergenerational altruism is crucial to evaluate the long-term consequences of current decisions, and requires a set of principles guiding such altruism. We axiomatically develop a theory of pure, direct altruism: Altruism is pure if it concerns the total utility (rather than the mere consumption utility) of future generations, and direct if it directly incorporates the utility of all...

The generalized second-pri ce (G SP) mech anism is th e mo st wid ely-used au ction format in sponsored search markets . However , figuring ou t how to bi d on GSP auctions presents major theoretical and computational challenges due to the complex nature of the auction format and the infinite nu mber o f equ ilibria. Ou r stud y cha racterizes vario us eq uilibrium bidding behaviors in GSP auct...

Pure Peer-to-peer architecture is becoming an important model for information sharing among dynamic groups of users with its low cost of entry and its natural model for resource scaling with the community size. Recent studies on several pure P2P information-sharing systems have posed new questions and challenges in this area. By identifying two key factors in such an environment, we propose a n...

Biological specimens such as cells, tissues and biofluids (urine, blood) contain mixtures of many different biomolecules, all of which contribute to a Raman spectrum at any given point. The separation and identification of pure biochemical components remains one of the biggest challenges in Raman spectroscopy. Multivariate curve resolution, a matrix factorization method, is a powerful, yet flex...