The global community has called for the elimination of new HIV infections among children by 2015 and keeping their mothers alive [1]. Though viewed by some as overly optimistic and aspirational, this call to action has generated unprecedented momentum and transformed the global dialogue around prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission (PMTCT) to emphasize efficiency, effectiveness and meas...

We analyze the design of a high energy 11 +Wcollider based on electro-production of muons. We derive an expression for the luminosity in terms of analytic formulae for the electron-to-muon conversion efficiency and the electron beam power on the production target . On the basis of studies of self-consistent sets of collider parameters under "realistic" ("optimistic") assumptions about available...

Interval DEA frontiers are here used in situations where one input or output is subject to uncertainty in its measurement and is presented as an interval data. We built an efficient frontier without any assumption about the probability distribution function of the imprecise variable. We take into account only the minimum and the maximum values of each imprecise variable. Two frontiers are const...

The growing imbalance between network latency and throughput is causing nodes in distributed systems to appear to be moving farther apart. Many distributed systems are turning to replication as a mechanism to make resources appear closer. However, maintaining one-copy consistency in a system containing replicated elements has proven diicult. In particular, the checks required to make consistent...

We study the problem of global maximization of a function f given a finite number of evaluations perturbed by noise. We consider a very weak assumption on the function, namely that it is locally smooth (in some precise sense) with respect to some semi-metric, around one of its global maxima. Compared to previous works on bandits in general spaces (Kleinberg et al., 2008; Bubeck et al., 2011a) o...

We present an efficient and fair protocol for secure two-party computation in the optimistic model, where a partially trusted third party T is available, but not involved in normal protocol executions. T is needed only if communication is disrupted or if one of the two parties misbehaves. The protocol guarantees that although one party may terminate the protocol at any time, the computation rem...

Traditionally, fault tolerance has been considered a pivotal component of system design. However, as modern commodity hardware becomes increasingly reliable, building dedicated fault tolerance systems becomes unnecessary. Therefore, while in this paper we propose nothing novel and make no technical contributions, we nevertheless identify a unique approach to fault tolerance, which we dub optimi...

We consider the problem of planning in a stochastic and discounted environment with a limited numerical budget. More precisely, we investigate strategies exploring the set of possible sequences of actions, so that, once all available numerical resources (e.g. CPU time, number of calls to a generative model) have been used, one returns a recommendation on the best possible immediate action to fo...

We consider an asynchronous system with the Ω failure detector, and investigate the number of communication steps required by various broadcast protocols in runs in which the leader does not change. Atomic Broadcast, used for example in state machine replication, requires three communication steps. Optimistic Atomic Broadcast requires only two steps if all correct processes receive messages in ...

Starting with the Thomspon sampling algorithm, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Bayesian algorithms for the Multi-armed Bandit (MAB) problem. These algorithms seek to exploit prior information on arm biases and while several have been shown to be regret optimal, their design has not emerged from a principled approach. In contrast, if one cared about Bayesian regret discounted ...