Covering arrays are combinatorial designs that are used for testing systems such as software, circuits and networks, where failures can be caused by the interaction between their components or parameters. New generalizations of these objects employ techniques from design theory, graph homomorphisms, combinatorial group testing, among other fields. This minisymposium highlights current research ...

In settings where full incentive-compatibility is not available, such as core-constraint combinatorial auctions and budget-balanced combinatorial exchanges, we may wish to design mechanisms that are as incentive-compatible as possible. This paper offers a new characterization of approximate incentive-compatibility by casting the pricing problem as a meta-game between the center and the particip...

A greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) is an iterative multistart metaheuristic for difficult combinatorial optimization. Each GRASP iteration consists of two phases: a construction phase, in which a feasible solution is produced, and a local search phase, in which a local optimum in the neighborhood of the constructed solution is sought. Since 1989, GRASP has been applied to a w...

Reliability is a major concern in the design of large disk arrays. Hellerstein et al. pioneered the study of erasure-resilient codes that allow one to reconstruct the original data even in the presence of disk failures. In this paper, we take a set systems view of the problem of constructing erasure-resilient codes. This leads to interesting extremal problems in nite set theory. Solutions to so...

Combinatorial techniques play a crucial role in the investigation of problems in Information Theory. We describe a few representative examples, focusing on the tools applied, and mentioning several open problems.