1,721,073 research outputs found
Cultivating Desired Behaviour: Policy Teaching Via Environment-Dynamics Tweaks
No full textIn this paper we study, for the first time explicitly, the implications of endowing an interested party (i.e. a teacher) with the ability to modify the underlying dynamics of the environment, in order to encourage an agent to learn to follow a specific policy. We introduce a cost function which can be used by the teacher to balance the modifications it makes to the underlying environment dynamics, with the learner's performance compared to some ideal, desired, policy. We formulate teacher's problem of determining optimal environment changes as a planning and control problem, and empirically validate the effectiveness of our model
Eliciting Expert Advice in Service-Oriented Computing
No full textWe consider a setting where a consumer would like to elicit independent but costly reports from third-party experts about the reliability of a number of service providers. These reports can be of variable accuracy, but more accurate reports will be more costly to produce. The consumer can fuse reports from several experts to choose the provider with the highest probability of success. The goal in this paper is to find a mechanism which incentivises the experts to truthfully reveal the accuracy of the reports, and to induce the experts to invest costly resources in order to increase this accuracy. The challenge in doing so is that, while we can verify the success or failure of the selected service provider, we have no feedback about those service providers which were not selected. Moreover, we need to determine how to reward individual experts when the choice of service provider is based on a fused report from all exeperts. We explore a number of mechanisms to address this setting, including scoring rules, and indicate the problems in obtaining both truth telling and inducing the experts to produce accurate reports. We present a partial solution to this problem, and discuss remaining challenges
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Scalable Mechanism Design for the Procurement of Services with Uncertain Durations
No full textIn this paper, we study a service procurement problem with uncertainty as to whether service providers are capable of completing a given task within a specified deadline. This type of setting is often encountered in large and dynamic multi-agent systems, such as computational Grids or clouds. To effectively deal with this uncertainty, the consumer may dynamically and redundantly procure multiple services over time, in order to increase the probability of success, while at the same time balancing this with the additional procurement costs. However, in order to do this optimally, the consumer requires information about the providers' costs and their success probabilities over time. This information is typically held privately by the providers and they may have incentives to misreport this, so as to increase their own profits. To address this problem, we introduce a novel mechanism that incentivises self-interested providers to reveal their true costs and capabilities, and we show that this mechanism is ex-post incentive compatible, efficient and individually rational. However, for these properties to hold, it generally needs to compute the optimal solution, which can be intractable in large settings. Therefore, we show how we can generate approximate solutions while maintaining the economic properties of the mechanism. This approximation admits a polynomial-time solution that can be computed in seconds even for hundreds of providers, and we demonstrate empirically that it performs as well as the optimal in typical scenarios. In particularly challenging settings, we show that it still achieves 97% or more of the optimal
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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