U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Search Publications by: Fern Hunt (Assoc)

Search Title, Abstract, Conference, Citation, Keyword or Author
Displaying 1 - 25 of 33

Fast Methods for Finding Multiple Effective Influencers in Real Networks

December 31, 2020
Author(s)
Fern Y. Hunt, Roldan Pozo
We present scalable first hitting time methods for finding a collection of nodes that enables the fastest time for the spread of consensus in a network. That is, given a graph G = (V,E) and a natural number k, these methods find k vertices in G that

The Structure of Optimal and Near Optimal Target Sets in Consensus Models

December 19, 2014
Author(s)
Fern Y. Hunt
We consider the problem of identifying a subset of nodes in a network that will enable the fastest spread of information in a decentralized environment. In a model of communication based on a random walk on an undirected graph, the optimal set over all

Optimal Spread in Network Consensus Models

January 27, 2014
Author(s)
Fern Y. Hunt
Suppose we seek a set of nodes in a network that will enable the fastest spread of information in a decentralized communication environment. If communication resources are limited there are constraints on the number of nodes that can be selected. In this

Predicting Failure in Complex Systems by Perturbing Markov Chain Models

July 21, 2011
Author(s)
Christopher E. Dabrowski, Fern Y. Hunt
In recent years, substantial research has been devoted to monitoring and predicting performance degradations in real-world complex systems within large entities such as nuclear power plants, electrical grids, and distributed computing systems. Special

Measuring the Utility/Path Diversity Tradeoff in Multipath Protocols

October 20, 2009
Author(s)
Fern Y. Hunt, Vladimir V. Marbukh
We derive a model of congestion control where the trade-off between utility and path diversity can be investigated. In a network where there can be multiple routes between locations, each source is assigned a route according to a random allocation scheme

Markov Chain Analysis for Large-Scale Grid Systems

April 20, 2009
Author(s)
Christopher E. Dabrowski, Fern Y. Hunt
In large-scale grid systems with decentralized control, the interactions of many service providers and consumers will likely lead to emergent global system behaviours that result in unpredictable, often detrimental outcomes. This possibility argues for

Modeling of Photochemical Reactions in a Focused Laser Beam, II

September 1, 2008
Author(s)
Adolfas K. Gaigalas, Fern Y. Hunt, Lili Wang
A method is described for obtaining rate constants of photodegradation process of fluorophores illuminated by a focused laser beam. The explicit kinetic equations, describing the population dynamics of excited singlet and triplet states, are averaged over

Dynamic Routing and Congestion Control Through Random Assignment of Routes

July 15, 2008
Author(s)
Fern Y. Hunt, Vladimir V. Marbukh
We introduce an algorithm for maximizing utility through congestion control and random allocation of routes to users. The allocation is defined by a probability distribution whose degree of randomness as measured by its entropy, is controlled. We seek to

Modeling of Photochemical Reactions in a Focused Laser Beam

July 1, 2007
Author(s)
Fern Y. Hunt, Adolfas Gaigalas, Lili Wang
This paper presents a mathematical model of photodegradation of fluorophores passing through a laser beam. The beam is focused on the sample and thus the power distribution of incident light is strongly dependent on spatial location while the fluorophores

Sensitivity of Multiple Sequence Alignments to Perturbations in Cost Matrices

October 12, 2005
Author(s)
Fern Y. Hunt, Agnes A. O'Gallagher
A description of a new method for aligning biological sequences is presented. It is based on a formulation as a Markov decision optimization problem. Alignment is obtained by solving an associated linear programming problem. In this paper we show that the

An Optimization Approach to Multiple Sequence Alignment

July 1, 2003
Author(s)
Fern Y. Hunt, Anthony J. Kearsley, H H Wan
The problem of multiple sequence alignment is recast as an optimization problem using Markov decision theory. One seeks to minimize the expected or average cost of alignment subject to data-derived constraints. In this setting the problem is equivalent to