522 research outputs found
Acceptance conditions in automated negotiation
No full textIn every negotiation with a deadline, one of the negotiating parties has to accept an offer to avoid a break off. A break off is usually an undesirable outcome for both parties, therefore it is important that a negotiator employs a proficient mechanism to decide under which conditions to accept. When designing such conditions one is faced with the acceptance dilemma: accepting the current offer may be suboptimal, as better offers may still be presented. On the other hand, accepting too late may prevent an agreement from being reached, resulting in a break off with no gain for either party. Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between automated agents and by the results and insights of the automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC), we classify and compare state-of-the-art generic acceptance conditions. We focus on decoupled acceptance conditions, i.e. conditions that do not depend on the bidding strategy that is used. We performed extensive experiments to compare the performance of acceptance conditions in combination with a broad range of bidding strategies and negotiation domains. Furthermore we propose new acceptance conditions and we demonstrate that they outperform the other conditions that we study. In particular, it is shown that they outperform the standard acceptance condition of comparing the current offer with the offer the agent is ready to send out. We also provide insight in to why some conditions work better than others and investigate correlations between the properties of the negotiation environment and the efficacy of acceptance conditions.MediamaticsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
ANAC 2018: Repeated Multilateral Negotiation League
No full textThis is an extension from a selected paper from JSAI2019. There are a number of research challenges in the field of Automated Negotiation. The Ninth International Automated Negotiating Agent Competition encourages participants to develop effective negotiating agents, which can negotiate with multiple opponents more than once. This paper discusses research challenges for such negotiations as well as presenting the competition set-up and results. The results show that winner agents mostly adopt hybrid bidding strategies that take their opponents’ preferences as well as their strategy into account.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Interactive Intelligenc
Transcription factor 8 activates R-Ras to regulate angiogenesis
No full textWe have recently reported that transcription factor 8 (TCF8) negatively regulates pathological angiogenesis by regulating endothelial invasiveness by acting as a transcriptional attenuator of matrix metalloproteinase 1. TCF8 also modulates cell–matrix and cell–cell adhesion; however molecular mechanism of this TCF8 function remains obscure. Here, we provide evidence that TCF8 activates R-Ras, another class of angiogenic regulator, to suppress angiogenesis by a mechanism other than a transcriptional attenuator. Tube formation by human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) facilitated by TCF8 suppression was significantly inhibited by the expression of onstitutive active mutant of R-Ras. When we examined the mRNA expression levels of R-Ras regulators, no significant changes were observed to explain the R-Ras activation by TCF8. Interestingly, we found that TCF8 bound to CalDAG-GEFIII, an R-Ras activator, in the cytosol, indicating that TCF8 emanates signaling for R-Ras activation from cytosol to regulate angiogenesis negatively
Distributed Multi-agent Negotiation for Wi-Fi Channel Assignment
No full textChannel allocation in dense, decentralized Wi-Fi networks is a challenging due to the highly nonlinear solution space and the difficulty to estimate the opponent’s utility model. So far, only centralized or mediated approaches have succeeded in applying negotiation to this setting. We propose the first two fully-distributed negotiation approaches for Wi-Fi channel assignment. Both of them leverage a pre-sampling of the utility space with simulated annealing and a noisy estimation of the Wi-Fi utility function. Regarding negotiation protocols, one of the approaches makes use of the Alternating Offers protocol, while the other uses the novel Multiple Offers Protocol for Multilateral Negotiations with Partial Consensus (MOPaC), which naturally matches the problem peculiarities. We compare the performance of our proposed approaches with the previous mediated approach, based on simple text mediation. Our experiments show that our approaches yield better utility outcomes, better fairness and less information disclosure than the mediated approach.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Interactive Intelligenc
A Survey of Decision Support Mechanisms for Negotiation
No full textThis paper introduces a dependency analysis and a categorization of conceptualized and existing economic decision support mechanisms for negotiation. The focus of our survey is on economic decision support mechanisms, although some behavioural support mechanisms were included, to recognize the important work in that area. We categorize support mechanisms from four different aspects: (i) economic versus behavioral decision support, (ii) analytical versus strategical support, (iii) active versus passive support and (iv) implicit versus explicit support. Our survey suggests that active mechanisms would be more effective than passive ones, and that implicit mechanisms can shield the user from mathematical complexities. Furthermore, we provide a list of existing economic support mechanisms.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Interactive Intelligenc
Deniz: A Robust Bidding Strategy for Negotiation Support Systems
No full textThis paper presents the Deniz agent that has been specifically designed to support human negotiators in their bidding. The design of Deniz is done with the criteria of robustness and the availability of small data, due to a small number of negotiation rounds in mind. Deniz’s bidding strategy is based on an existing optimal concession strategy that concedes in relation to the expected duration of the negotiation. This accounts for the small data and small number of rounds. Deniz deploys an adaptive behavior-based mechanism to make it robust against exploitation. We tested Deniz against typical bidding strategies and against human negotiators. Our evaluation shows that Deniz is robust against exploitation and gains statistically significant higher utilities than human test subjects, even though it is not designed specifically to get the highest utility against humans.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Interactive Intelligenc
CoCoa: A Linked Network Visualization System of Co-citation and Co-author Relationships
No full textWe usually use a text-based search engine while surveying research papers. Such search systems have difficulties for novice researchers in case they do not know appropriate keywords or do not understand the positions of papers. Many visualization tools of citation networks have been proposed to help this task. These tools demonstrated that not only text information of papers but citation relationships and co-author relationships also are helpful clues for research survey. We propose CoCoa, a linked network visualization of co-citation and co-author relationships for surveying research papers. Our system visualizes both citation and co-author networks at the same time. To make comparison and grasp of correspondence between co-citation and co-author networks easier, the system treats both a paper and an author as bags of words and cluster them into topics applying LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) at the same time. Based on the clustering result, it places the clusters of a citation network by a hybrid force-directed and space-filling algorithm. The position of topic clusters in the networks would have an influence on the correspondence of a particular topic in the networks. Our system extracts the clusters which consist of the common combinations of topics in two networks. Then it reuses the positions of the clusters in a citation network as the initial cluster positions of a co-author network, supposing there are a large number of authors.EuroVis 2019 - Short PapersText Visualization and Application
Book Review: Aboveground-Belowground Community Ecology
No full textBook Title: Aboveground-Belowground Community Ecology
Book Author: Takayuki Ohgushi, Susanne Wurst & Scott Johnson
2018, Springer International Publishing AG, Basel, Switzerland. 361 pages, hardcover, softcover and e-book. ISBN 978-3-319-91613-2 (hardcover), 978-3-030-0626608 (softcover), 978-3-319-91614-9 (e-book). Price €139.99 (hardcover), €139.99 (softcover), €117.69 (e-book)
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