Presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial elections all require state-level polling, but continuous real-time polling of every state during a campaign remains prohibitively expensive, and quite neglected for less competitive states. This paper employs a new dataset of over 500GB of politics-related Tweets from the final months of the 2012 presidential campaign to interpolate and predict state...

Risk-limiting post-election audits guarantee a high probability of correcting incorrect electoral outcomes, regardless of why the outcomes are incorrect. Two types of risk-limiting post-election vote tabulation audits are comparison audits and ballot-polling audits. Comparison audits check some of the subtotals reported by the vote tabulation system, by hand-counting votes on the corresponding ...

Bluetooth has a master–slave configuration called a piconet. Unspecified in the Bluetooth standard, the link polling policy adopted by a master may significantly influence the bandwidth utilization of a piconet. Several works have been dedicated to this issue. However, none of them addresses the asymmetry of traffics between masters and slaves, and the different data packet types provided by Bl...

We consider polling systems with mixtures of exhaustive and gated service in which the server visits the queues periodically according to a general polling table. We derive exact expressions for the steady-state delay incurred at each of the queues, under standard heavy-tra±c scalings. The expressions require the solution of a set of only M ¡ N linear equations, where M is the length of the pol...

Direct search is a methodology for derivative-free optimization whose iterations are characterized by evaluating the objective function using a set of polling directions. In deterministic direct search applied to smooth objectives, these directions must somehow conform to the geometry of the feasible region and typically consist of positive generators of approximate tangent cones (which then re...

A multi-server polling model is a queueing model where many order classes share a set of identical servers and a setup time is incurred whenever a server changes class. This paper develops approximations for the waiting time distribution in a multi-server polling model with cyclic serve-to-exhaustion service. These approximations are derived using previously established heavy-traac results and ...

A typical polling system consists of a number of queues, attended by a single server in a fixed order. The vast majority of papers on polling systems focusses on Poisson arrivals, whereas very few results are available for general arrivals. The current study is the first one presenting simple closed-form approximations for the mean waiting times in polling systems with renewal arrival processes...

Multi-thread polling (MTP) with offline scheduling and offline excess bandwidth distribution has recently been proposed to overcome the long propagation delay of long-reach passive optical networks (LR-PONs). In this paper, we propose a complementary MTP approach with online scheduling and online excess bandwidth distribution. We evaluate the throughput-delay performance of offline and online M...

We consider finite-population and finite-capacity polling systems. The behavior of these systems is described by means of generalized stochastic Petri nets. The exact results for the mean response times are obtained numerically by means of the stochastic Petri net package. Finite population polling systems are generally difficult to analyze. Thus, one of the contributions of this paper is the f...

On the basis of establishing mathematical model and defining the parameters and treating embedded Markov chains and probability generating function as math tools, the paper analyzed discrete-time, nonsymmetric dual-threshold service queue system precisely, and it derived first order and second order characteristics of the system. The paper calculates the average queue length and average waiting...