In this paper, we describe a representation for spatial information, called the stochastic map, and associated procedures for building it, reading information from it, and revising it incrementally as new information is obtained. The map contains the estimates of relationships among objects in the map, and their uncertainties, given all the available information. The procedures provide a genera...

A symmetric multiple-valued function can be realized as the disjunction of fwrdamental symmetric functions. A simpler disjunction can be formed when the latter functions combine in the same way that minterms combine to form simpler product terms for sum-of-products expressions. We solve a problem posed by Muzio [7], who seeks the worst case symmetric function in the sense that the maximum numbe...

In 1984, B. Chazelle [SIAM J. Comp., 13 (1984), pp. 488{507] proposed a notch-cutting procedure for decomposing a non-convex polyhedron into convex pieces. This paper shows that notch-cutting, when applied to a polyhedron with n faces and r re ex dihedral angles, gives a convex decomposition with (nr + r7=3) worst-case complexity. The upper and lower bounds are obtained by studying the complexi...

While video conferencing is often viewed as a greener alternative to physically travelling to meet inperson, it has its own energy, carbon dioxide and time costs. In this paper we present the first analysis of the total cost of videoconferencing, including operating costs of the network and videoconferencing equipment, lifecycle assessment of equipment costs, and the time cost of people involve...

Although recent years have seen a surge of interest in the computational aspects of social choice, no attention has previously been devoted to elections with multiple winners, e.g., elections of an assembly or committee. In this paper, we fully characterize the worst-case complexity of manipulation and control in the context of four prominent multi-winner voting systems. Additionally, we show t...

Although recent years have seen a surge of interest in the computational aspects of social choice, no specific attention has previously been devoted to elections with multiple winners, e.g., elections of an assembly or committee. In this paper, we characterize the worst-case complexity of manipulation and control in the context of four prominent multiwinner voting systems, under different formu...

The past decades have witnessed a growing interest in research on deductive games such as Mastermind and AB game. Because of the complicated behavior of deductive games, tree-search approaches are often adopted to find their optimal strategies. In this paper, a generalized version of deductive games, called 3 × n AB games, is introduced. However, tranditional tree-search approaches are not appr...

The present paper analyses and presents several improvements to the algorithm for finding the (a, b)-pairs of integers used in the k-ary reduction of the right-shift k-ary integer GCD algorithm. While the worst-case complexity of Weber’s “Accelerated integer GCD algorithm” is O (

How much influence can the media exert on the political process and how can regulation reduce such influence? We define media power as the ability of subsets of jointly owned media outlets to affect electoral outcomes by providing biased information to voters. We characterize the worst-case scenario media power index over a range of assumptions on the beliefs and attention patterns of voters. W...

We study the worst case complexity of regular operations on cofinite languages (i.e., languages whose complement is finite) and provide algorithms to compute efficiently the resulting minimal automata.