3,428 research outputs found
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
Slow culture: an introduction
No full text[Extract] There is a powerful message permeating our social lives today, found in our self-help networks, talkback television and radio shows, and online forums. It is a warning that, through technology and modernisation, our lifestyles have become increasingly hectic, fast, complex and immediate. 'Life', writes online author Leo Babauta (2009, para. 2), 'moves at such a fast pace that it seems to pass us by before we can really enjoy it'. We are encouraged to take a step back, to breathe deeply and 'slow down', in order to recapture the essence of 'real' living. By doing so, we can escape the seemingly endless stresses associated with our multi-tasked, time-compressed and instantaneous speed culture (Tomlinson 2007). This book presents illustrations of how people are beginning to disentangle themselves from a speed culture by embracing slowness. It is not simply a matter of slowing down, as the term implies, but of undertaking changes in the way we do things at an everyday level. Underpinning these transformations is a concern, as Babauta (2009) suggests, with the uniquely stressful lifestyles we are living in contemporary culture
Algorithms and mechanisms for procuring services with uncertain durations using redundancy
No full textIn emerging service-oriented systems, such as computational clouds or grids, software agents are able to automatically procure distributed services to complete computational tasks. However, service execution times are often highly uncertain and service providers may have incentives to lie strategically about this uncertainty to win more customers. In this paper, we argue that techniques from the field of artificial intelligence are instrumental to addressing these challenges.To this end, we first propose a new decision-theoretic algorithm that allows a single service consumer agent to procure services for a computational task with a strict deadline. Crucially, this algorithm uses redundancy in a principled manner to mitigate uncertain execution times and maximise the consumer's expected utility. We present both an optimal variant that uses a novel branch-and-bound formulation, and a fast heuristic that achieves near-optimal performance. Using simulations, we demonstrate that our algorithms outperform approaches that do not employ redundancy by up to 130% in some settings.Next, as the algorithms require private information about the providers? capabilities, we show how techniques from mechanism design can be used to incentivise truthfulness. As no existing work in this area deals with uncertain execution times and redundant invocations, we extend the state of the art by proposing a number of payment schemes for these settings. In a detailed analysis, we prove that our mechanisms fulfil a range of desirable economic properties, including incentive compatibility, and we discuss suboptimal variants that scale to realistic settings with hundreds of providers. We show experimentally that our mechanisms extract a high surplus and that even our suboptimal variants typically achieve a high efficiency (95% or more in a wide range of settings)
Nick Earls launches 'Wisdom Tree' - a new model for novella publishing, 9 Jun 2016
No full textBrisbane author Nick Earls discusses 'Wisdom Tree' a new model for novella publishing with fellow author and UQ Senior Lecturer in writing Dr Kim Wilkins. In 2013, Nick Earls realised his five best story ideas would need padding to become novels and would lose something if he tried to trim them to short-story size. He had to write them, and they had to be novellas. He also realised it was time to confront head-on the publishing industry's reluctance to work with the novella form. The result is Wisdom Tree, a new model for novella publishing, a PhD project and a chance to turn his best ideas into a series of five novellas to be published as individual paper, e and audiobooks at monthly intervals from May to September 2016.Introductions by Professor Doune Macdonald, Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic)
Nick de Grandmaison Jr. Reading Our Heritage by John Fisher
No full textAn audograph recording of Nick de Grandmaison Junior reading an excerpt from Our Heritage by John Fisher. The text details the author encountering Red Cloud and David Bearspaw, members of the Stoney tribe, in a Banff hotel lobby on their way to sit for Nicholas de Grandmaison. From here, the clip speaks to why he chose to paint Indigenous peoples, the history of the Blackfoot people, language and colonial contact.The University of Lethbridge Library received permission from the University of Lethbridge Archives and the Dr. Margaret (Marmie) Perkins Hess Gallery to digitize and display this content.Not yet availabl
Bold masked robbers; or, Nick Carter's lively conflict / by the author of "Nick Carter," [Incomplete].
No full textNick Carter in Wall Street; or, Tracking a stolen fortune / by the author of "Nick Carter."
No full text
Nick DiChario
No full textNick DiChario visited The College at Brockport in September 1996. He is an author and essayist of fiction.Archived web contentSUNY BrockportWriters Forum Author Photo
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
- …
