The basic idea of voting protocols is that nodes query a sample of other nodes and adjust their own opinion throughout several rounds based on the proportion of the sampled opinions. In the classic model, it is assumed that all nodes have the same weight. We study voting protocols for heterogeneous weights with respect to fairness. A voting protocol is fair if the influence on the eventual outcome of a given participant is linear in its weight. Previous work used sampling with replacement to construct a fair voting scheme. However, it was shown that using greedy sampling, i.e., sampling with replacement until a given number of distinct elements is chosen, turns out to be more robust and performant.

In this paper, we study fairness of voting protocols with greedy sampling and propose a voting scheme that is asymptotically fair for a broad class of weight distributions. We complement our theoretical findings with numerical results and present several open questions and conjectures.

We consider the problem of group testing (pooled testing), first introduced by Dorfman. For nonadaptive testing strategies, we refer to a nondefective item as “intruding” if it only appears in positive tests. Such items cause misclassification errors in the well-known COMP algorithm and can make other algorithms produce an error. It is therefore of interest to understand the distribution of the number of intruding items. We show that, under Bernoulli matrix designs, this distribution is well approximated in a variety of senses by a negative binomial distribution, allowing us to understand the performance of the two-stage conservative group testing algorithm of Aldridge.

This paper presents a framework for compressed sensing that bridges a gap between existing theory and the current use of compressed sensing in many real-world applications. In doing so, it also introduces a new sampling method that yields substantially improved recovery over existing techniques. In many applications of compressed sensing, including medical imaging, the standard principles of incoherence and sparsity are lacking. Whilst compressed sensing is often used successfully in such applications, it is done largely without mathematical explanation. The framework introduced in this paper provides such a justification. It does so by replacing these standard principles with three more general concepts: asymptotic sparsity, asymptotic incoherence and multilevel random subsampling. Moreover, not only does this work provide such a theoretical justification, it explains several key phenomena witnessed in practice. In particular, and unlike the standard theory, this work demonstrates the dependence of optimal sampling strategies on both the incoherence structure of the sampling operator and on the structure of the signal to be recovered. Another key consequence of this framework is the introduction of a new structured sampling method that exploits these phenomena to achieve significant improvements over current state-of-the-art techniques.

We give a necessary and sufficient condition for a sequence to be a localization set for a determining average sampler.

We establish new sampling representations for linear integral transforms associated with arbitrary general Birkhoff regular boundary value problems. The new approach is developed in connection with the analytical properties of Green’s function, and does not require the root functions to be a basis or complete. Unlike most of the known sampling expansions associated with eigenvalue problems, the results obtained are, generally speaking, of Hermite interpolation type.

In this article, we review known results and present new ones concerning the power spectra of large classes of signals and random fields driven by an underlying point process, such as spatial shot noises (with random impulse response and arbitrary basic stationary point processes described by their Bartlett spectra) and signals or fields sampled at random times or points (where the sampling point process is again quite general). We also obtain the Bartlett spectrum for the general linear Hawkes spatial branching point process (with random fertility rate and general immigrant process described by its Bartlett spectrum). We then obtain the Bochner spectra of general spatial linear birth and death processes. Finally, we address the issues of random sampling and linear reconstruction of a signal from its random samples, reviewing and extending former results.

We investigate the multivariate sampling theory associated with multiparameter eigenvalue problems. A several-variable counterpart of the classical sampling theorem of Whittaker, Kotel’nikov and Shannon is given. It arose when the multiparameter system has order one. Two-dimensional sampling theorems associated with two-parameter systems of second-order differential operators will be established. The sampling formulae are of multivariate non-uniform Lagrange interpolation type. Unlike many of the known formulae, the interpolating functions are not necessarily products of single variable functions.