Many scienti c applications are described through work ow structures. Due to the increasing level of parallelism o ered by modern computing infrastructures, work ow applications now have to be composed not only of sequential programs, but also of parallel ones. Cloud platforms bring on-demand resource provisioning and pay-as-you-go payment charging. Then the execution of a work ow corresponds t...

This paper extends the concept of investment efficiency from investment management structures to include strategic asset allocation and liability related issues. The concept of risk budgeting is developed. It represents a valuable way of incorporating risk and return information to produce more efficient investment decisions. Information ratio is a key measurement in the process, and it is conc...

The optimal allocation of resources for maximizing influence, spread of information or coverage, has gained attention in the past years, in particular in machine learning and data mining. But in applications, the parameters of the problem are rarely known exactly, and using wrong parameters can lead to undesirable outcomes. We hence revisit a continuous version of the Budget Allocation or Bipar...

The sample average approximation approach to solving stochastic programs induces a sampling error, caused by replacing an expectation by a sample average, as well as an optimization error due to approximating the solution of the resulting sample average problem. We obtain estimators of an optimal solution and the optimal value of the original stochastic program after executing a finite number o...

In this article we study the allocation of a budget to promote an opinion in a group of agents. We assume that their opinion dynamics are based on the wellknown voter model. We are interested in finding the most efficient use of a budget over time in order to manipulate a social network. We address the problem using the theory of discounted Markov decision processes. Our contributions can be su...

This article presents evidence that high-ranking public officials in the Ministry of Strategy and Finance South Korea affect local budget allocation. Applying a regression model on uniquely constructed panel dataset, I found growth rate per-capita National Subsidy, which is subcomponent national susceptible to discretionary behaviors, increases approximately 7 percent hometowns bureaucrats. To ...

BACKGROUND Reliable exposure data is a vital concern in medical epidemiology and intervention studies. The present study addresses the needs of the medical researcher to spend monetary resources devoted to exposure assessment with an optimal cost-efficiency, i.e. obtain the best possible statistical performance at a specified budget. A few previous studies have suggested mathematical optimizati...