Bidder Support in Multi-item Multi-unit Continuous Combinatorial Auctions: A Unifying Theoretical Framework

Author(s):  
Gediminas Adomavicius ◽  
Alok Gupta ◽  
Mochen Yang

Combinatorial auctions have seen limited applications in large-scale consumer-oriented marketplaces, partly due to the substantial complexity to keep track of auction status and formulate informed bidding strategies. We study the bidder support problem for the general multi-item multi-unit (MIMU) combinatorial auctions, where multiple heterogeneous items are being auctioned and multiple homogeneous units are available for each item. Under two prevalent bidding languages (OR bidding and XOR bidding), we derive theoretical results and design efficient algorithmic procedures to calculate important bidder support information, such as the winning bids of an auction and the minimum bidding value for a bid to win an auction either immediately or potentially in the future. Our results unify the theoretical insights on bidder support problem for different bidding languages as well as different special cases of general MIMU auctions, namely the single-item multi-unit (SIMU) auctions and the multi-item single-unit (MISU) auctions. We also consider auctions with additional bidding constraints, including batch-based combinatorial auctions and hierarchical combinatorial auctions, as well as the combinatorial reverse auctions, all of which have relevant practical applications (e.g., industrial procurements). Our results can be readily extended to solve the bidder support problems in these auction mechanisms.

Author(s):  
Ron Avi Astor ◽  
Rami Benbenisthty

Since 2005, the bullying, school violence, and school safety literatures have expanded dramatically in content, disciplines, and empirical studies. However, with this massive expansion of research, there is also a surprising lack of theoretical and empirical direction to guide efforts on how to advance our basic science and practical applications of this growing scientific area of interest. Parallel to this surge in interest, cultural norms, media coverage, and policies to address school safety and bullying have evolved at a remarkably quick pace over the past 13 years. For example, behaviors and populations that just a decade ago were not included in the school violence, bullying, and school safety discourse are now accepted areas of inquiry. These include, for instance, cyberbullying, sexting, social media shaming, teacher–student and student–teacher bullying, sexual harassment and assault, homicide, and suicide. Populations in schools not previously explored, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students and educators and military- and veteran-connected students, become the foci of new research, policies, and programs. As a result, all US states and most industrialized countries now have a complex quilt of new school safety and bullying legislation and policies. Large-scale research and intervention funding programs are often linked to these policies. This book suggests an empirically driven unifying model that brings together these previously distinct literatures. This book presents an ecological model of school violence, bullying, and safety in evolving contexts that integrates all we have learned in the 13 years, and suggests ways to move forward.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 979
Author(s):  
Sandeep Kumar ◽  
Rajesh K. Pandey ◽  
H. M. Srivastava ◽  
G. N. Singh

In this paper, we present a convergent collocation method with which to find the numerical solution of a generalized fractional integro-differential equation (GFIDE). The presented approach is based on the collocation method using Jacobi poly-fractonomials. The GFIDE is defined in terms of the B-operator introduced recently, and it reduces to Caputo fractional derivative and other fractional derivatives in special cases. The convergence and error analysis of the proposed method are also established. Linear and nonlinear cases of the considered GFIDEs are numerically solved and simulation results are presented to validate the theoretical results.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Md Al Mahadi Hasan ◽  
Yuanhao Wang ◽  
Chris R. Bowen ◽  
Ya Yang

AbstractThe development of a nation is deeply related to its energy consumption. 2D nanomaterials have become a spotlight for energy harvesting applications from the small-scale of low-power electronics to a large-scale for industry-level applications, such as self-powered sensor devices, environmental monitoring, and large-scale power generation. Scientists from around the world are working to utilize their engrossing properties to overcome the challenges in material selection and fabrication technologies for compact energy scavenging devices to replace batteries and traditional power sources. In this review, the variety of techniques for scavenging energies from sustainable sources such as solar, air, waste heat, and surrounding mechanical forces are discussed that exploit the fascinating properties of 2D nanomaterials. In addition, practical applications of these fabricated power generating devices and their performance as an alternative to conventional power supplies are discussed with the future pertinence to solve the energy problems in various fields and applications.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 395
Author(s):  
Mohammad Yousefi ◽  
Masoud Aman Mohammadi ◽  
Maryam Zabihzadeh Khajavi ◽  
Ali Ehsani ◽  
Vladimír Scholtz

Mycotoxins cause adverse effects on human health. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to confront them, particularly in agriculture and food systems. Non-thermal plasma, electron beam radiation, and pulsed light are possible novel non-thermal technologies offering promising results in degrading mycotoxins with potential for practical applications. In this paper, the available publications are reviewed—some of them report efficiency of more than 90%, sometimes almost 100%. The mechanisms of action, advantages, efficacy, limitations, and undesirable effects are reviewed and discussed. The first foretastes of plasma and electron beam application in the industry are in the developing stages, while pulsed light has not been employed in large-scale application yet.


Metals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 864
Author(s):  
Suguna Perumal ◽  
Raji Atchudan ◽  
Thomas Nesakumar Jebakumar Immanuel Edison ◽  
Rajendran Suresh Babu ◽  
Petchimuthu Karpagavinayagam ◽  
...  

The growth of industry fulfills our necessity and promotes economic development. However, pollutants from such industries pollute water bodies which pose a high risk for living organisms. Thus, researchers have been urged to develop an efficient method to remove toxic heavy metal ions from water bodies. The adsorption method shows promising results for the removal of heavy metal ions and is easy to operate on a large scale, thus can be applied to practical applications. Numerous adsorbents were developed and reported, among them hydrogels, which attract great attention because of the reusability, ease of preparation, and handling. Hydrogels are generally prepared by the cross-linking of polymers that result in a three-dimensional structure, showing high porosity and high functionality. They are hydrophilic in nature because of the functional groups, and are non-toxic. Thus, this review provides various methods of hydrogel adsorbents preparation and summarizes recent progress in the use of hydrogel adsorbents for the removal of heavy metal ions. Further, the mechanism involved in the removal of heavy metal ions is briefly discussed. The most recent studies about the adsorption method for the treatment of heavy metal ions contaminated water are presented.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (01) ◽  
pp. 630-637 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ferdinando Fioretto ◽  
Terrence W.K. Mak ◽  
Pascal Van Hentenryck

The Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem is a fundamental building block for the optimization of electrical power systems. It is nonlinear and nonconvex and computes the generator setpoints for power and voltage, given a set of load demands. It is often solved repeatedly under various conditions, either in real-time or in large-scale studies. This need is further exacerbated by the increasing stochasticity of power systems due to renewable energy sources in front and behind the meter. To address these challenges, this paper presents a deep learning approach to the OPF. The learning model exploits the information available in the similar states of the system (which is commonly available in practical applications), as well as a dual Lagrangian method to satisfy the physical and engineering constraints present in the OPF. The proposed model is evaluated on a large collection of realistic medium-sized power systems. The experimental results show that its predictions are highly accurate with average errors as low as 0.2%. Additionally, the proposed approach is shown to improve the accuracy of the widely adopted linear DC approximation by at least two orders of magnitude.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Achille ◽  
Giovanni Paolini ◽  
Glen Mbeng ◽  
Stefano Soatto

Abstract We introduce an asymmetric distance in the space of learning tasks and a framework to compute their complexity. These concepts are foundational for the practice of transfer learning, whereby a parametric model is pre-trained for a task, and then fine tuned for another. The framework we develop is non-asymptotic, captures the finite nature of the training dataset and allows distinguishing learning from memorization. It encompasses, as special cases, classical notions from Kolmogorov complexity and Shannon and Fisher information. However, unlike some of those frameworks, it can be applied to large-scale models and real-world datasets. Our framework is the first to measure complexity in a way that accounts for the effect of the optimization scheme, which is critical in deep learning.


2014 ◽  
Vol 513-517 ◽  
pp. 1092-1095
Author(s):  
Bo Wu ◽  
Yan Peng Feng ◽  
Hong Yan Zheng

Bayesian reinforcement learning has turned out to be an effective solution to the optimal tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. However, in practical applications, the learning parameters with exponential growth are the main impediment for online planning and learning. To overcome this problem, we bring factored representations, model-based learning, and Bayesian reinforcement learning together in a new approach. Firstly, we exploit a factored representation to describe the states to reduce the size of learning parameters, and adopt Bayesian inference method to learn the unknown structure and parameters simultaneously. Then, we use an online point-based value iteration algorithm to plan and learn. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is an effective way for improving the learning efficiency in large-scale state spaces.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 2564
Author(s):  
Mauro Martini ◽  
Vittorio Mazzia ◽  
Aleem Khaliq ◽  
Marcello Chiaberge

The increasing availability of large-scale remote sensing labeled data has prompted researchers to develop increasingly precise and accurate data-driven models for land cover and crop classification (LC&CC). Moreover, with the introduction of self-attention and introspection mechanisms, deep learning approaches have shown promising results in processing long temporal sequences in the multi-spectral domain with a contained computational request. Nevertheless, most practical applications cannot rely on labeled data, and in the field, surveys are a time-consuming solution that pose strict limitations to the number of collected samples. Moreover, atmospheric conditions and specific geographical region characteristics constitute a relevant domain gap that does not allow direct applicability of a trained model on the available dataset to the area of interest. In this paper, we investigate adversarial training of deep neural networks to bridge the domain discrepancy between distinct geographical zones. In particular, we perform a thorough analysis of domain adaptation applied to challenging multi-spectral, multi-temporal data, accurately highlighting the advantages of adapting state-of-the-art self-attention-based models for LC&CC to different target zones where labeled data are not available. Extensive experimentation demonstrated significant performance and generalization gain in applying domain-adversarial training to source and target regions with marked dissimilarities between the distribution of extracted features.


2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Schober ◽  
Jürgen Prestin ◽  
Serhii A. Stasyuk

AbstractIn this paper, we show that certain trigonometric polynomial shearlets which are special cases of directional de la Vallée Poussin-type wavelets are able to detect step discontinuities along boundary curves of periodic characteristic functions. Motivated by recent results for discrete shearlets in two dimensions, we provide lower and upper estimates for the magnitude of the corresponding inner products. In the proof, we use localization properties of trigonometric polynomial shearlets in the time and frequency domain and, among other things, bounds for certain Fresnel integrals. Moreover, we give numerical examples which underline the theoretical results.


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