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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Hibs-Ksharing: Hierarchical Identity-Based Signature Key Sharing For Automotive, Zhuo Wei, Yanjiang Yang, Yongdong Wu, Jian Weng, Robert H. Deng Aug 2017

Hibs-Ksharing: Hierarchical Identity-Based Signature Key Sharing For Automotive, Zhuo Wei, Yanjiang Yang, Yongdong Wu, Jian Weng, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Equipped with various sensors and intelligent systems, modern cars turn into entities with connectivity, autonomy, and safety. Car rental/car sharing is an innovative transportation concept and integral in today's urban living. It enables users to access a fleet of vehicles located throughout cities. Complementing public transportation, the car-sharing service helps people to meet their transportation needs economically and in an environmentally responsible manner. When a customer wants to rent a car from a rental company or an owner wants to share a private car with his/her friends or family members, the customer or the user should gain admission to the …


Proactive And Reactive Coordination Of Non-Dedicated Agent Teams Operating In Uncertain Environments, Pritee Agrawal, Pradeep Varakantham Aug 2017

Proactive And Reactive Coordination Of Non-Dedicated Agent Teams Operating In Uncertain Environments, Pritee Agrawal, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Domains such as disaster rescue, security patrolling etc. often feature dynamic environments where allocations of tasks to agents become ineffective due to unforeseen conditions that may require agents to leave the team. Agents leave the team either due to arrival of high priority tasks (e.g., emergency, accident or violation) or due to some damage to the agent. Existing research in task allocation has only considered fixed number of agents and in some instances arrival of new agents on the team. However, there is little or no literature that considers situations where agents leave the team after task allocation. To that …


Time-Aware Conversion Prediction, Wendi Ji, Xiaoling Wang, Feida Zhu Aug 2017

Time-Aware Conversion Prediction, Wendi Ji, Xiaoling Wang, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The importance of product recommendation has been well recognized as a central task in business intelligence for e-commerce websites. Interestingly, what has been less aware of is the fact that different products take different time periods for conversion. The “conversion” here refers to actually a more general set of pre-defined actions, including for example purchases or registrations in recommendation and advertising systems. The mismatch between the product’s actual conversion period and the application’s target conversion period has been the subtle culprit compromising many existing recommendation algorithms.The challenging question: what products should be recommended for a given time period to maximize …


Embedding-Based Representation Of Categorical Data By Hierarchical Value Coupling Learning, Songlei Jian, Longbing Cao, Guansong Pang, Kai Lu, Hang Gao Aug 2017

Embedding-Based Representation Of Categorical Data By Hierarchical Value Coupling Learning, Songlei Jian, Longbing Cao, Guansong Pang, Kai Lu, Hang Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning the representation of categorical data with hierarchical value coupling relationships is very challenging but critical for the effective analysis and learning of such data. This paper proposes a novel coupled unsupervised categorical data representation (CURE) framework and its instantiation, i.e., a coupled data embedding (CDE) method, for representing categorical data by hierarchical value-to-value cluster coupling learning. Unlike existing embedding- and similarity-based representation methods which can capture only a part or none of these complex couplings, CDE explicitly incorporates the hierarchical couplings into its embedding representation. CDE first learns two complementary feature value couplings which are then used to cluster …


Cyber Foraging: Fifteen Years Later, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Jason Flinn Jul 2017

Cyber Foraging: Fifteen Years Later, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Jason Flinn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Revisiting Mahadev Satyanarayanan's original vision of cyber foraging and reflecting on the last 15 years of related research, the authors discuss the major accomplishments achieved as well as remaining challenges. They also look to current and future applications that could provide compelling application scenarios for making cyber foraging a widely deployed technology. This article is part of a special issue on pervasive computing revisited.


Mining Capstone Project Wikis For Knowledge Discovery, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Melvrivk Goh Jul 2017

Mining Capstone Project Wikis For Knowledge Discovery, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Melvrivk Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wikis are widely used collaborative environments as sources of information and knowledge. The facilitate students to engage in collaboration and share information among members and enable collaborative learning. In particular, Wikis play an important role in capstone projects. Wikis aid in various project related tasks and aid to organize information and share. Mining project Wikis is critical to understand the students learning and latest trends in industry. Mining Wikis is useful to educationists and academicians for decision-making about how to modify the educational environment to improve student's learning. The main challenge is that the content or data in project Wikis …


Attribute-Based Encryption With Expressive And Authorized Keyword Search, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Joseph K. Liu, Yingjiu Li Jul 2017

Attribute-Based Encryption With Expressive And Authorized Keyword Search, Hui Cui, Robert H. Deng, Joseph K. Liu, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To protect data security and privacy in cloud storage systems, a common solution is to outsource data in encrypted forms so that the data will remain secure and private even if storage systems are compromised. The encrypted data, however, must be pliable to search and access control. In this paper, we introduce a notion of attribute-based encryption with expressive and authorized keyword search (ABE-EAKS) to support both expressive keyword search and fine-grained access control over encrypted data in the cloud. In ABE-EAKS, every data user is associated with a set of attributes and is issued a private attribute-key corresponding to …


A Unified Framework For Vehicle Rerouting And Traffic Light Control To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Zhiguang Cao, Siwei Jiang, Jie Zhang, Hongliang Guo Jul 2017

A Unified Framework For Vehicle Rerouting And Traffic Light Control To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Zhiguang Cao, Siwei Jiang, Jie Zhang, Hongliang Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the number of vehicles grows rapidly each year, more and more traffic congestion occurs, becoming a big issue for civil engineers in almost all metropolitan cities. In this paper, we propose a novel pheromone-based traffic management framework for reducing traffic congestion, which unifies the strategies of both dynamic vehicle rerouting and traffic light control. Specifically, each vehicle, represented as an agent, deposits digital pheromones over its route, while roadside infrastructure agents collect the pheromones and fuse them to evaluate real-time traffic conditions as well as to predict expected road congestion levels in near future. Once road congestion is predicted, …


Discovering Newsworthy Themes From Sequenced Data: A Step Towards Computational Journalism, Qi Fan, Yuchen Li, Dongxiang Zhang, Kian-Lee Tan Tan Jul 2017

Discovering Newsworthy Themes From Sequenced Data: A Step Towards Computational Journalism, Qi Fan, Yuchen Li, Dongxiang Zhang, Kian-Lee Tan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic discovery of newsworthy themes from sequenced data can relieve journalists from manually poring over a large amount of data in order to find interesting news. In this paper, we propose a novel k -Sketch query that aims to find k striking streaks to best summarize a subject. Our scoring function takes into account streak strikingness and streak coverage at the same time. We study the k -Sketch query processing in both offline and online scenarios, and propose various streak-level pruning techniques to find striking candidates. Among those candidates, we then develop approximate methods to discover the k most representative …


Deepmon: Mobile Gpu-Based Deep Learning Framework For Continuous Vision Applications, Nguyen Loc Huynh, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan Jun 2017

Deepmon: Mobile Gpu-Based Deep Learning Framework For Continuous Vision Applications, Nguyen Loc Huynh, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid emergence of head-mounted devices such as the Microsoft Holo-lens enables a wide variety of continuous vision applications. Such applications often adopt deep-learning algorithms such as CNN and RNN to extract rich contextual information from the first-person-view video streams. Despite the high accuracy, use of deep learning algorithms in mobile devices raises critical challenges, i.e., high processing latency and power consumption. In this paper, we propose DeepMon, a mobile deep learning inference system to run a variety of deep learning inferences purely on a mobile device in a fast and energy-efficient manner. For this, we designed a suite of …


Scan: Multi-Hop Calibration For Mobile Sensor Arrays, Balz Maag, Zimu Zhou, Olga Saukh, Lothar Thiele Jun 2017

Scan: Multi-Hop Calibration For Mobile Sensor Arrays, Balz Maag, Zimu Zhou, Olga Saukh, Lothar Thiele

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Urban air pollution monitoring with mobile, portable, low-cost sensors has attracted increasing research interest for their wide spatial coverage and affordable expenses to the general public. However, low-cost air quality sensors not only drift over time but also suffer from cross-sensitivities and dependency on meteorological effects. Therefore calibration of measurements from low-cost sensors is indispensable to guarantee data accuracy and consistency to be fit for quantitative studies on air pollution. In this work we propose sensor array network calibration (SCAN), a multi-hop calibration technique for dependent low-cost sensors. SCAN is applicable to sets of co-located, heterogeneous sensors, known as sensor …


Sap: Improving Continuous Top-K Queries Over Streaming Data, Rui Zhu, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang, Baihua Zheng, Guoren Wang Jun 2017

Sap: Improving Continuous Top-K Queries Over Streaming Data, Rui Zhu, Bin Wang, Xiaochun Yang, Baihua Zheng, Guoren Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Continuous top-k query over streaming data is a fundamental problem in database. In this paper, we focus on the sliding window scenario, where a continuous top-k query returns the top-k objects within each query window on the data stream. Existing algorithms support this type of queries via incrementally maintaining a subset of objects in the window and try to retrieve the answer from this subset as much as possible whenever the window slides. However, since all the existing algorithms are sensitive to query parameters and data distribution, they all suffer from expensive incremental maintenance cost. In this paper, we propose …


Demo: Deepmon - Building Mobile Gpu Deep Learning Models For Continuous Vision Applications, Loc Nguyen Huynh, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee Jun 2017

Demo: Deepmon - Building Mobile Gpu Deep Learning Models For Continuous Vision Applications, Loc Nguyen Huynh, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning has revolutionized vision sensing applications in terms of accuracy comparing to other techniques. Its breakthrough comes from the ability to extract complex high level features directly from sensor data. However, deep learning models are still yet to be natively supported on mobile devices due to high computational requirements. In this paper, we present DeepMon, a next generation of DeepSense [1] framework, to enable deep learning models on conventional mobile devices (e.g. Samsung Galaxy S7) for continuous vision sensing applications. Firstly, Deep-Mon exploits similarity between consecutive video frames for intermediate data caching within models to enhance inference latency. Secondly, …


Webapirec: Recommending Web Apis To Software Projects Via Personalized Ranking, Ferdian Thung, Richard J. Oentaryo, David Lo, Yuan Tian Jun 2017

Webapirec: Recommending Web Apis To Software Projects Via Personalized Ranking, Ferdian Thung, Richard J. Oentaryo, David Lo, Yuan Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Application programming interfaces (APIs) offer a plethora of functionalities for developers to reuse without reinventing the wheel. Identifying the appropriate APIs given a project requirement is critical for the success of a project, as many functionalities can be reused to achieve faster development. However, the massive number of APIs would often hinder the developers' ability to quickly find the right APIs. In this light, we propose a new, automated approach called WebAPIRec that takes as input a project profile and outputs a ranked list of web APIs that can be used to implement the project. At its heart, WebAPIRec employs …


Is The Whole Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts?, Liangyue Li, Hanghang Tong, Yong Wang, Conglei Shi, Nan Cao, Norbou Buchler Jun 2017

Is The Whole Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts?, Liangyue Li, Hanghang Tong, Yong Wang, Conglei Shi, Nan Cao, Norbou Buchler

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The PART-WHOLE relationship routinely finds itself in many disciplines, ranging from collaborative teams, crowdsourcing, autonomous systems to networked systems. From the algorithmic perspective, the existing work has primarily focused on predicting the outcomes of the whole and parts, by either separate models or linear joint models, which assume the outcome of the parts has a linear and independent effect on the outcome of the whole. In this paper, we propose a joint predictive method named PAROLE to simultaneously and mutually predict the part and whole outcomes. The proposed method offers two distinct advantages over the existing work. First (Model Generality), …


Inferring Motion Direction Using Commodity Wi-Fi For Interactive Exergames, Kun Qian, Chenshu Wu, Zimu Zhou, Yue Zheng, Yang Zheng, Yunhao Liu May 2017

Inferring Motion Direction Using Commodity Wi-Fi For Interactive Exergames, Kun Qian, Chenshu Wu, Zimu Zhou, Yue Zheng, Yang Zheng, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In-air interaction acts as a key enabler for ambient intelligence and augmented reality. As an increasing popular example, exergames, and the alike gesture recognition applications, have attracted extensive research in designing accurate, pervasive and low-cost user interfaces. Recent advances in wireless sensing show promise for a ubiquitous gesture-based interaction interface with Wi-Fi. In this work, we extract complete information of motion-induced Doppler shifts with only commodity Wi-Fi. The key insight is to harness antenna diversity to carefully eliminate random phase shifts while retaining relevant Doppler shifts. We further correlate Doppler shifts with motion directions, and propose a light-weight pipeline to …


Tum: Towards Ubiquitous Multi-Device Localization For Cross-Device Interaction, Han Xu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Ke Yi, Chunyi Peng May 2017

Tum: Towards Ubiquitous Multi-Device Localization For Cross-Device Interaction, Han Xu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Ke Yi, Chunyi Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cross-device interaction is becoming an increasingly hot topic as we often have multiple devices at our immediate disposal in this era of mobile computing. Various cross-device applications such as file sharing, multi-screen display, and crossdevice authentication have been proposed and investigated. However, one of the most fundamental enablers remains unsolved: How to achieve ubiquitous multi-device localization? Though pioneer efforts have resorted to gesture-assisted or sensing-assisted localization, they either require extensive user participation or impose some strong assumptions on device sensing abilities. This introduces extra costs and constraints, and thus degrades their practicality. To overcome these limitations, we propose TUM, an …


Discovering Your Selling Points: Personalized Social Influential Tags Exploration, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan, Ju Fan, Dongxiang Zhang May 2017

Discovering Your Selling Points: Personalized Social Influential Tags Exploration, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan, Ju Fan, Dongxiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social influence has attracted significant attention owing to the prevalence of social networks (SNs). In this paper, we study a new social influence problem, called personalized social influential tags exploration (PITEX), to help any user in the SN explore how she influences the network. Given a target user, it finds a size-k tag set that maximizes this user’s social influence. We prove the problem is NP-hard to be approximated within any constant ratio. To solve it, we introduce a sampling-based framework, which has an approximation ratio of 1−ǫ 1+ǫ with high probabilistic guarantee. To speedup the computation, we devise more …


A Data-Driven Approach For Benchmarking Energy Efficiency Of Warehouse Buildings, Wee Leong Lee, Kar Way Tan, Zui Young Lim May 2017

A Data-Driven Approach For Benchmarking Energy Efficiency Of Warehouse Buildings, Wee Leong Lee, Kar Way Tan, Zui Young Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study proposes adata-driven approach for benchmarking energy efficiency of warehouse buildings.Our proposed approach provides an alternative to the limitation of existingbenchmarking approaches where a theoretical energy-efficient warehouse was usedas a reference. Our approach starts by defining the questions needed to capturethe characteristics of warehouses relating to energy consumption. Using an existingdata set of warehouse building containing various attributes, we first cluster theminto groups by their characteristics. The warehouses characteristics derivedfrom the cluster assignments along with their past annual energy consumptionare subsequently used to train a decision tree model. The decision tree providesa classification of what factors contribute to different …


Cryptography And Data Security In Cloud Computing, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng, Vijay Varadharajan May 2017

Cryptography And Data Security In Cloud Computing, Zheng Yan, Robert H. Deng, Vijay Varadharajan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud computing offers a new way of services by re-arranging various resources and providing them to users based on their demands. It also plays an important role in the next generation mobile networks and services (5G) and Cyber-Physical and Social Computing (CPSC). Storing data in the cloud greatly reduces storage burden of users and brings them access convenience, thus it has become one of the most important cloud services. However, cloud data security, privacy and trust become a crucial issue that impacts the success of cloud computing and may impede the development of 5G and CPSC. First, storing data at …


A Multi-Agent System For Coordinating Vessel Traffic, Teck-Hou Teng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Akshat Kumar May 2017

A Multi-Agent System For Coordinating Vessel Traffic, Teck-Hou Teng, Hoong Chuin Lau, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Environmental, regulatory and resource constraints affects the safety and efficiency of vessels navigating in and out of the ports. Movement of vessels under such constraints must be coordinated for improving safety and efficiency. Thus, we frame the vessel coordination problem as a multi-agent path-finding (MAPF) problem. We solve this MAPF problem using a Coordinated Path-Finding (CPF) algorithm. Based on the local search paradigm, the CPF algorithm improves on the aggregated path quality of the vessels iteratively. Outputs of the CPF algorithm are the coordinated trajectories. The Vessel Coordination Module (VCM) described here is the module encapsulating our MAPF-based approach for …


Related-Key Secure Key Encapsulation From Extended Computational Bilinear Diffie–Hellman, Brandon Qin, Shengli Liu, Shifeng Sun, Robert H. Deng, Dawu Gu Apr 2017

Related-Key Secure Key Encapsulation From Extended Computational Bilinear Diffie–Hellman, Brandon Qin, Shengli Liu, Shifeng Sun, Robert H. Deng, Dawu Gu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As a special type of fault injection attacks, Related-Key Attacks (RKAs) allow an adversary to manipulate a cryptographic key and subsequently observe the outcomes of the cryptographic scheme under these modified keys. In the real life, related-key attacks are already practical enough to be implemented on cryptographic devices. To avoid cryptographic devices suffering from related-key attacks, it is necessary to design a cryptographic scheme that resists against such attacks. This paper proposes an efficient RKA-secure Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), in which the adversary can modify the secret key sk to any value f(sk), as long as, f is a polynomial …


Aspect Extraction From Product Reviews Using Category Hierarchy Information, Yifeng Yang, Chen Cen, Minghui Qiu, Forrest Sheng Bao Apr 2017

Aspect Extraction From Product Reviews Using Category Hierarchy Information, Yifeng Yang, Chen Cen, Minghui Qiu, Forrest Sheng Bao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aspect extraction is a task to abstract the common properties of objects from corpora discussing them, such as reviews of products. Recent work on aspect extraction is leveraging the hierarchical relationship between products and their categories. However, such effort focuses on the aspects of child categories but ignores those from parent categories. Hence, we propose an LDA-based generative topic model inducing the two-layer categorical information (CAT-LDA), to balance the aspects of both a parent category and its child categories. Our hypothesis is that child categories inherit aspects from parent categories, controlled by the hierarchy between them. Experimental results on 5 …


Online Growing Neural Gas For Anomaly Detection In Changing Surveillance Scenes, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu, Tatsuya Harada Apr 2017

Online Growing Neural Gas For Anomaly Detection In Changing Surveillance Scenes, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu, Tatsuya Harada

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection is still a challenging task for video surveillance due to complex environments and unpredictable human behaviors. Most existing approaches train offline detectors using manually labeled data and predefined parameters, and are hard to model changing scenes. This paper introduces a neural network based model called online Growing Neural Gas (online GNG) to perform an unsupervised learning. Unlike a parameter-fixed GNG, our model updates learning parameters continuously, for which we propose several online neighbor-related strategies. Specific operations, namely neuron insertion, deletion, learning rate adaptation and stopping criteria selection, get upgraded to online modes. In the anomaly detection stage, the …


Collaboration Trumps Homophily In Urban Mobile Crowdsourcing, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Randy Tandriansyah Mar 2017

Collaboration Trumps Homophily In Urban Mobile Crowdsourcing, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Randy Tandriansyah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper establishes the power of dynamic collaborative task completion among workers for urban mobile crowdsourcing. Collaboration is defined via the notion of peer referrals, whereby a worker who has accepted a location-specific task, but is unlikely to visit that location, offloads the task to a willing friend. Such a collaborative framework might be particularly useful for task bundles, especially for bundles that have higher geographic dispersion. The challenge, however, comes from the high similarity observed in the spatiotemporal pattern of task completion among friends. Using extensive real-world crowd-sourcing studies conducted over 7 weeks and 1000+ workers on a campus-based …


Ui X-Ray: Interactive Mobile Ui Testing Based On Computer Vision, Chun-Fu Richard Chen, Marco Pistoia, Conglei Shi, Paolo Girolami, Joseph W. Ligman, Yong Wang Mar 2017

Ui X-Ray: Interactive Mobile Ui Testing Based On Computer Vision, Chun-Fu Richard Chen, Marco Pistoia, Conglei Shi, Paolo Girolami, Joseph W. Ligman, Yong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User Interface/eXperience (UI/UX) significantly affects the lifetime of any software program, particularly mobile apps. A bad UX can undermine the success of a mobile app even if that app enables sophisticated capabilities. A good UX, however, needs to be supported of a highly functional and user friendly UI design. In spite of the importance of building mobile apps based on solid UI designs, UI discrepancies- inconsistencies between UI design and implementation-Are among the most numerous and expensive defects encountered during testing. This paper presents UI X-RAY, an interactive UI testing system that integrates computer-vision methods to facilitate the correction of …


An Efficient Approach To Model-Based Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Zhuoru Li, Akshay Narayan, Tze-Yun Leong Feb 2017

An Efficient Approach To Model-Based Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Zhuoru Li, Akshay Narayan, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a model-based approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning that exploits shared knowledge and selective execution at different levels of abstraction, to efficiently solve large, complex problems. Our framework adopts a new transition dynamics learning algorithm that identifies the common action-feature combinations of the subtasks, and evaluates the subtask execution choices through simulation. The framework is sample efficient, and tolerates uncertain and incomplete problem characterization of the subtasks. We test the framework on common benchmark problems and complex simulated robotic environments. It compares favorably against the stateof-the-art algorithms, and scales well in very large problems.


Dynamic Repositioning To Reduce Lost Demand In Bike Sharing Systems, Supriyo Ghosh, Pradeep Varakantham, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet Feb 2017

Dynamic Repositioning To Reduce Lost Demand In Bike Sharing Systems, Supriyo Ghosh, Pradeep Varakantham, Yossiri Adulyasak, Patrick Jaillet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bike Sharing Systems (BSSs) are widely adopted in major cities of the world due to concerns associated with extensive private vehicle usage, namely, increased carbon emissions, traffic congestion and usage of nonrenewable resources. In a BSS, base stations are strategically placed throughout a city and each station is stocked with a pre-determined number of bikes at the beginning of the day. Customers hire the bikes from one station and return them at another station. Due to unpredictable movements of customers hiring bikes, there is either congestion (more than required) or starvation (fewer than required) of bikes at base stations. Existing …


Decentralized Planning In Stochastic Environments With Submodular Rewards, Rajiv Ranjan Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar Feb 2017

Decentralized Planning In Stochastic Environments With Submodular Rewards, Rajiv Ranjan Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Decentralized Markov Decision Process (Dec-MDP) providesa rich framework to represent cooperative decentralizedand stochastic planning problems under transition uncertainty.However, solving a Dec-MDP to generate coordinatedyet decentralized policies is NEXP-Hard. Researchershave made significant progress in providing approximate approachesto improve scalability with respect to number ofagents. However, there has been little or no research devotedto finding guarantees on solution quality for approximateapproaches considering multiple (more than 2 agents)agents. We have a similar situation with respect to the competitivedecentralized planning problem and the StochasticGame (SG) model. To address this, we identify models in thecooperative and competitive case that rely on submodular rewards,where we show …