Sharif Digital Repository

In massively parallel processing systems that incorporate hundreds and thousands of processing nodes, the problem of placing a limited number of resources (e.g. printers, disks, software copies, etc.) over processing nodes is of great importance. In this paper, we investigate resource placement in the three-dimensional torus network which is the underlying interconnection network in most current multicomputer. We show that there exists an irregular distance-1 placement only for tori of the form 2 × 3 i × 6 j, i, j ∈ N. In addition, we present a new formal proof for the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of irregular distance-d placement in 3D tori. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All... 

We study bargaining games between suppliers and manufacturers in a network context. Agents wish to enter into contracts in order to generate surplus which then must be divided among the participants. Potential contracts and their surplus are represented by weighted edges in our bipartite network. Each agent in the market is additionally limited by a capacity representing the number of contracts which he or she may undertake. When all agents are limited to just one contract each, prior research applied natural generalizations of the Nash bargaining solution to the networked setting, defined the new solution concepts of stable and balanced, and characterized the resulting bargaining outcomes.... 

Blur identification is one important part of image restoration process. Linear motion blur is one of the most common degradation functions that corrupts images. Since 1976, many researchers tried to estimate motion blur parameters and this problem is solved in noise free images but in noisy images improvement can be done when image SNR is low. In this paper we have proposed a method to estimate motion blur parameters such as direction and length using Radon transform and Feed-Forward back propagation neural network for noisy images. To design the desired neural network, we used Weierstrass approximation theorem and Steifel reference Sets. The experimental results showed algorithm precision... 

In this paper we consider optimal edge colored complete graphs. We show that in any optimal edge coloring of the complete graph Kn, there is a Hamilton cycle with at most √8n different colors. We also prove that in every proper edge coloring of the complete graph Kn, there is a rainbow cycle with at least n/2 - 1 colors (A rainbow cycle is a cycle whose all edges have different colors). We show that for sufficiently large n, the expected number of different colors appearing on a random Hamilton cycle is approximately (1 - e-1)n for any optimal edge coloring of Kn. Finally it is proved that if Kn is colored using an abelian group of odd order n, then it has a rainbow Hamilton cycle  

We study Nash equilibria in the setting of network creation games introduced recently by Fabrikant, Luthra, Maneva, Papadimitriou, and Shenker. In this game we have a set of selfish node players, each creating some incident links, and the goal is to minimize α times the cost of the created links plus sum of the distances to all other players. Fabrikant et al. proved an upper bound O(√α) on the price of anarchy: the relative cost of the lack of coordination. Albers, Eilts, Even-Dar, Mansour, and Roditty show that the price of anarchy is constant for α = O(√n) and for α ≥ 12n[lgn], and that the price of anarchy is 15(1 + (min{α/n, n 2/alpha;}) 1/3) for any α. The latter bound shows the first... 

We consider a market in which two competing sellers offer two similar products on a social network. In this market, each agent chooses iteratively between the products based on her neighbors reactions and prices. This introduces two games: one between the agents and one between the sellers. We show that the first game is a full potential game and provide an algorithm to compute its convergence point. We also study various properties of the second game such as its equilibrium points and convergence  

We analyze the structure of equilibria and the price of anarchy in the family of network creation games considered extensively in the past few years, which attempt to unify the network design and network routing problems by modeling both creation and usage costs. In general, the games are played on a host graph, where each node is a selfish independent agent (player) and each edge has a fixed link creation cost α. Together the agents create a network (a subgraph of the host graph) while selfishly minimizing the link creation costs plus the sum of the distances to all other players (usage cost). In this paper, we pursue two important facets of the network creation game. First, we study... 

We study Nash equilibria in the setting of network creation games introduced recently by Fabrikant, Luthra, Maneva, Papadimitriou and Shenker. In this game we have a set of selfish node players, each creating some incident links, and the goal is to minimize times the cost of the created links plus sum of the distances to all other players. Fabrikant et al. proved an upper bound O(p ) on the price of anarchy, i.e., the relative cost of the lack of coordination. Albers, Eilts, Even-Dar, Mansour, and Roditty show that the price of anarchy is constant for = O(pn) and for ≥ 12 n [dlg] n, and that the price of anarchy is 15 1 + (min{α 2/n , n2 })1/3 for any . The latter bound shows the first... 

We study the optimal pricing strategy for profit maximization in presence of network externalities where a decision to buy a product depends on the price offered to the buyer and also on the set of her friends who have already bought that product. We model the network influences by a weighted graph where the utility of each buyer is the sum of her initial value on the product, and the linearly additive influence from her friends. We assume that the buyers arrive online and the seller should offer a price to each buyer when she enters the market. We also take into account the manufacturing cost. In this paper, we first assume that the monopolist defines a unique price for the product and... 

In this paper it is shown that every m × n array in which each symbol appears at most (mn - 1) / (m - 1) times has a transversal, when n ≥ 2 m3. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved  

People make decisions and express their opinions according to their communities. A natural idea for controlling the diffusion of a behavior is to find influential people, and employ them to spread a desired behavior. We investigate an influencing problem when individuals' behaviors are affected by their friends in an opinion formation process. Our goal is to design efficient algorithms for finding opinion leaders such that changing their opinions has a great impact on the overall external behaviors in the society. We study directed social networks and define a set of problems like maximizing the sum of individuals' behaviors or maximizing the number of individuals whose external behaviors... 

We study the optimal pricing for revenue maximization over social networks in the presence of positive network externalities. In our model, the value of a digital good for a buyer is a function of the set of buyers who have already bought the item. In this setting, a decision to buy an item depends on its price and also on the set of other buyers that have already owned that item. The revenue maximization problem in the context of social networks has been studied by Hartline, Mirrokni, and Sundararajan [4], following the previous line of research on optimal viral marketing over social networks [5,6,7]. We consider the Bayesian setting in which there are some prior knowledge of the... 

This paper presents a feature-based license plate localization algorithm that copes with multi-object problem in different image capturing conditions. The proposed algorithm is robust against illumination, shadow, scale, rotation, and weather condition. It extracts license plate candidates using edge statistics and morphological operations and removes the incorrect candidates according to the determined features of license plates. We have formed a rather complete database of 269 images in different conditions. The proposed algorithm successfully detecteds the accurate location of the license plates in 96.5% cases, which outperforms the other available approaches in the literature. © 2006... 

We study the problem of selling an item to strategic buyers in the presence of positive historical externalities, where the value of a product increases as more people buy and use it. This increase in the value of the product is the result of resolving bugs or security holes after more usage. We consider a continuum of buyers that are partitioned into types where each type has a valuation function based on the actions of other buyers. Given a fixed sequence of prices, or price trajectory, buyers choose a day on which to purchase the product, i.e. they have to decide whether to purchase the product early in the game or later after more people already own it. We model this strategic setting as... 

We study the problem of selling an item to strategic buyers in the presence of positive historical externalities, where the value of a product increases as more people buy and use it. This increase in the value of the product is the result of resolving bugs or security holes after more usage. We consider a continuum of buyers that are partitioned into types where each type has a valuation function based on the actions of other buyers. Given a fixed sequence of prices, or price trajectory, buyers choose a day on which to purchase the product, i.e., they have to decide whether to purchase the product early in the game or later after more people already own it. We model this strategic setting... 

We give approximation algorithms and inapproximability results for a class of movement problems. In general, these problems involve planning the coordinated motion of a large collection of objects (representing anything from a robot swarm or firefighter team to map labels or network messages) to achieve a global property of the network while minimizing the maximum or average movement. In particular, we consider the goals of achieving connectivity (undirected and directed), achieving connectivity between a given pair of vertices, achieving independence (a dispersion problem), and achieving a perfect matching (with applications to multicasting). This general family of movement problems... 

We give approximation algorithms and inapproximability results for a class of movement problems. In general, these problems involve planning the coordinated motion of a large collection of objects (representing anything from a robot swarm or firefighter team to map labels or network messages) to achieve a global property of the network while minimizing the maximum or average movement. In particular, we consider the goals of achieving connectivity (undirected and directed), achieving connectivity between a given pair of vertices, achieving independence (a dispersion problem), and achieving a perfect matching (with applications to multicasting). This general family of movement problems... 

We study the problem of mapping concurrent tasks of an application to cores of a chip multiprocessor that utilize circuit-switched interconnect and global asynchronous local synchronous (GALS) clocking domains. We develop a configurable algorithm that naturally handles a number of practical requirements, such as architectural features of the target platform, core failures, and hardware accelerators, and in addition, is scalable to a large number of tasks and cores. Experiments with several real life applications show that our algorithm outperforms manual mapping, integer linear programming-based mapping after ten days of solver run time, and a recent packet-switched network on chip-based...