We develop a new framework for designing online policies given access to an oracle providing statistical information about an offline benchmark. Having access to such prediction oracles enables simple and natural Bayesian selection policies, and …
Ridesharing platforms such as Didi, Lyft, Ola and Uber are increasingly important components of the transportation infrastructure. However, our understanding of their design and operations, and their effect on society at large, is not yet well …
Optimizing shared vehicle systems (bike-sharing/car-sharing/ride-sharing) is more challenging compared to traditional resource allocation settings due to the presence of complex network externalities - changes in the demand/supply at any location …
A common phenomena in modern recommendation systems is the use of feedback from one user to infer the 'value' of an item to other users. This results in an exploration vs. exploitation trade-off, in which items of possibly low value have to be …
We develop a new bidirectional algorithm for estimating Markov chain multi-step transition probabilities: given a Markov chain, we want to estimate the probability of hitting a given target state in $\ell$ steps after starting from a given source …
We study epidemic spreading processes in large networks, when the spread is assisted by a small number of external agents: infection sources with bounded spreading power, but whose movement is unrestricted vis-a-vis the underlying network topology. …
We propose a new algorithm, FAST-PPR, for estimating personalized PageRank: given start node $s$ and target node $t$ in a directed graph, and given a threshold $\delta$, FAST-PPR estimates the Personalized PageRank $\pi_s(t)$ from $s$ to $t$, …
We investigate the sensitivity of epidemic behavior to a bounded susceptibility constraint -- susceptible nodes are infected by their neighbors via the regular SI/SIS dynamics, but subject to a cap on the infection rate. Such a constraint is …
Estimation in resource constrained sensor networks where the fusion center selects a fixed-size subset from a pool of available sensors observing the states of a linear dynamical system is considered. With some probability, the communication between …