Crowdsourcing marketplaces are widely used for curating large annotated datasets by collecting labels from multiple annotators. In such scenarios one has to balance the tradeoff between the accuracy of the collected labels, the cost of acquiring these labels, and the time taken to finish the labeling task. With the goal of reducing the labeling cost, we introduce the notion of sequential crowds...

It has been established elsewhere [Reyn92] that hardware to support parallel discrete event simulations (PDES) is desirable. We describe the steps leading to the implementation of a hardware-based framework to support PDES. We begin with an exploration of the criteria necessary to make such a framework both practical and useful, concluding that maintenance of sequential consistency is sufficien...

We consider Bayesian information collection, in which a measurement policy collects information to support a future decision. This framework includes ranking and selection, continuous global optimization, and many other problems in sequential experimental design. We give a sufficient condition under which measurement policies sample each measurement type infinitely often, ensuring consistency, ...

Can one parallelize complex exploration– exploitation tradeoffs? As an example, consider the problem of optimal highthroughput experimental design, where we wish to sequentially design batches of experiments in order to simultaneously learn a surrogate function mapping stimulus to response and identify the maximum of the function. We formalize the task as a multiarmed bandit problem, where the ...

Examining the relevance of 'animal personality' involves linking consistent among- and within-individual behavioural variation to fitness in the wild. Studies aiming to do this typically assay personality in captivity and rely on the assumption that measures of traits in the laboratory reflect their expression in nature. We examined this rarely tested assumption by comparing laboratory and fiel...

The multi-robot exploration problem is to explore an unknown graph of size n and depth d with k robots starting from the same node. For known graphs a traversal of all nodes takes at most O(d + n/k) steps. The ratio between the time until cooperating robots explore an unknown graph and the optimal traversal of a known graph is called the competitive exploration time ratio. It is known that for ...

The sequential importance sampling method and its various modifications have been developed intensively and used effectively in diverse research areas ranging from polymer simulation to signal processing and statistical inference. We propose a new variant of the method, sequential importance sampling with pilot-exploration resampling ~SISPER!, and demonstrate its successful application in foldi...

This dissertation research addresses the challenge of scaling up algorithms for sequential decision making under uncertainty. In my dissertation, I developed new approximation strategies for planning and learning in the presence of uncertainty while maintaining useful theoretical properties that allow larger problems to be tackled than is practical with exact methods. In particular, my research...

The Dolatabad area located in SE Iran is a well-endowed terrain owning several chromite mineralized zones. These chromite ore bodies are all hosted in a colored mélange complex zone comprising harzburgite, dunite, and pyroxenite. These deposits are irregular in shape, and are distributed as small lenses along colored mélange zones. The area has a great potential for discovering further chromite...