The research on coalitional games has focused on how to share the reward among a coalition such that players are in-centivised to collaborate together. It assumes that the (deterministic or stochastic) characteristic function is known in advance. This paper studies a new setting (a task allocation problem) where the characteristic function is not known and it is controlled by some private information from the players. Hence, the challenge here is twofold: (i) incentivize players to reveal their private information truthfully, (ii) incentivize them to collaborate together. We show that existing reward distribution mechanisms or auctions cannot solve the challenge. Hence, we propose the very first mechanism for the problem from the perspective of both mechanism design and coalitional games.

Robust MDPs are a promising framework for computing robust policies in reinforcement learning. Ambiguity sets, which represent the plausible errors in transition probabilities, determine the trade-off between robustness and average-case performance. The standard practice of defining ambiguity sets using the $L_1$ norm leads, unfortunately, to loose and impractical guarantees. This paper describes new methods for optimizing the shape of ambiguity sets beyond the $L_1$ norm. We derive new high-confidence sampling bounds for weighted $L_1$ and weighted $L_\infty$ ambiguity sets and describe how to compute near-optimal weights from rough value function estimates. Experimental results on a diverse set of benchmarks show that optimized ambiguity sets provide significantly tighter robustness guarantees.

Our research aims to develop intelligent collaborative agents that are human-aware - they can model, learn, and reason about their human partner's physiological, cognitive, and affective states. In this paper, we study how adaptive coaching interactions can be designed to help people develop sustainable healthy behaviors. We leverage the common model of cognition - CMC [26] - as a framework for unifying several behavior change theories that are known to be useful in human-human coaching. We motivate a set of interactive system desiderata based on the CMC-based view of behavior change. Then, we propose PARCoach - an interactive system that addresses the desiderata. PARCoach helps a trainee pick a relevant health goal, set an implementation intention, and track their behavior. During this process, the trainee identifies a specific goal-directed behavior as well as the situational context in which they will perform it. PARCcoach uses this information to send notifications to the trainee, reminding them of their chosen behavior and the context. We report the results from a 4-week deployment with 60 participants. Our results support the CMC-based view of behavior change and demonstrate that the desiderata for proposed interactive system design is useful in producing behavior change.

India is a software superpower today. This achievement rests on more than four decades of work spanning software processes, rigorous engineering and value-adding technologies, among others. In this article, we present highlights of some of these activities. This regional section also contains other articles that complement this account of exciting work in software systems stemming from India. The Indian software industry is currently valued at approximately US$180 billion, and is projected to touch $350 billion by 2025.a

Internet services like social media, online discussion forums, and crowdsourcing marketplaces have transformed how people participate in the information ecology and digital economy. These services empower mostly urban, affluent, and literate people, and improve their reach to information and instrumental needs. However, these services currently exclude billions of people worldwide who are too poor to afford Internet-enabled devices, too remote to access the Internet, or too low literate to navigate the mostly text-driven Internet. In India and Pakistan alone, there are nearly 1.1 billion people offline. Although 70% of their populations have access to mobile phones, most people still use basic or feature phones, making it difficult to extend existing Internet services on these devices running custom operating systems.

The development of the Indian software industry is an archetype of how economic liberalization combined with an entrepreneurial spirit can build an industry that today contributes as much as 8% to the GDP of a fast-growing country like India. On the back of thousands of IT services companies that were built over the last three decades, the industry has generated US$177 billion in revenue and more than US$135 billion in exports in FY 2018–2019 alone. The IT industry has also created over four million direct jobs and 12 million indirect jobs in India. A testament to this growth is the fact that the largest Indian IT services company is currently valued at over US$100 billion and generates over US$20 billion in revenue. Over the years, the Indian software industry has matured from providing cost-effective back office support to driving the digital transformation agenda ahead in global companies. Increasingly, leaders of more than a thousand global enterprises across the U.S., Europe, and other locations have realized India's potential and have set up their own IT or R&D centers to take advantage of the vibrant Indian software ecosystem. The current wave of Indian software entrepreneurs is focusing on building platforms and products for Indian and global markets. This has led to the creation of more than 7,000 tech startups in India.

Theoretical computer science has been a vibrant part of computing research in India for the past 30 years. India has always had a strong mathematical tradition. One could also argue that in the 1980s and 1990s, theory offered a unique opportunity to keep up with international research in computing despite limited access to state-of-the-art hardware. The Annual International Conference Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS) was launched in 1981. FSTTCS2 allowed Indian researchers a natural opportunity to interact with leading academics worldwide.

The Viewpoint column "Online Voting: We Can Do It! (We Have To)" in the September 2019 issue is naïve and unscientific. Although the column is explicitly framed as a response to the scientific community of experts who explain the dangers of Internet voting, it does not actually cite any of the scientific literature Ms. Orman is claiming to refute. The scientific community (the "9 out of 10 experts" she mentions) have published many articles and reports laying out the scientific basis for why online voting is inherently insecure (given any known or imminently foreseeable technology).1,2,3,4,5,6,7 Yet Ms. Orman does not cite any of these scientific papers among the bibliographic citations in the References section of her column. Given that Communication's Viewpoint format does not permit an extensive bibliography, she did not have room to cite all of references listed here,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 but in a response to the scientific community it would have been appropriate to cite (and explicitly respond to the science in) at least some of them.

Walk into any one of the many start-up events organized across India, and inevitably the image of an Indian bazaar comes to mind: people rushing around, shouting, bargaining, answering phones with great excitement, laughing loudly, boasting, blushing, and generally being optimistic, as if they are at the beginning of a rising trend of well-being. Such optimism might seem justified. According to data compiled by Fortune magazine,a from just eight'unicorns' in 2015, the number of start-ups in India valued at more than $1 billion has grown to 26. What is interesting is that in 2018 alone, India added eight unicorns to the club. These include diverse entities such as Ola, started in India as a competitor to Uber and has since expanded its footprint into the U.K. (and is eyeing Australia); an insurance aggregator called PolicyBazaar; the e-commerce site Paytm Mall; an eyewear retailer called Lenskart; food technology aggregators such as Swiggy and Zomato, and hotel-room aggregators like OYO and FabHotels. Thousands of entrepreneurs start up every year and aspire to become one of the new unicorns.

There has been a phenomenal increase in the use of online social media (OSM) services in India, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In addition to these services, one-to-one messaging services like WhatsApp have 200 million users, the highest in the world. India has 462 million users accessing the Internet, among these: Facebook has 250 million users, LinkedIn 42 million, and Twitter 23 million users, and the majority of users access these services through their mobile phones. These services have had a profound impact in India--overall digital literacy has increased, people are more connected, dissemination of local language content has increased, information exchanged during crises is substantial, and more. The deep penetration of social media services also has negative effects--the propagation of false information and hate, an increase in spammers and phishers, users are losing social skills, and more.