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Weighted Completion Time Minimization for Unrelated Machines via Iterative Fair Contention Resolution

We give a 1.488-approximation for the classic scheduling problem of minimizing total weighted completion time on unrelated machines. This is a considerable improvement on the recent breakthrough of $(1.5 - 10^{-7})$-approximation (STOC 2016, Bansal-Srinivasan-Svensson) and the follow-up result of $(1.5 - 1/6000)$-approximation (FOCS 2017, Li). Bansal et al. introduced a novel rounding scheme yielding strong negative correlations for the first time and applied it to the scheduling problem to obtain their breakthrough, which resolved the open problem if one can beat out the long-standing $1.5$-approximation barrier based on independent rounding. Our key technical contribution is in achieving significantly stronger negative correlations via iterative fair contention resolution, which is of independent interest. Previously, Bansal et al. obtained strong negative correlations via a variant of pipage type rounding and Li used it as a black box.