Inside a trader in global trading

As defined by the APM¹, a trader provides a ‘rendezvous mechanism for dynamic binding of clients to some well-known or published services’. Information becomes more involved and inaccessible between clients and servers when the environment grows into a very large-scale networked community. The functions to manage the dynamics of trading become so sophisticated and complicated compared to the simple client/ server concept that they require some special system module to provide such services to both the clients and servers. Standard trading policy also must be established to enable diverse clients and servers to participate in this general trading facility. This paper discusses the increasing prominence of traders and the different stages of growth of the environment in which the traders perform. It examines various standards related to trading. It provides a practicable technical approach, and suggests an implementable architecture leading to the development of a standard-compliant trader that can perform at various stages as the environment matures.     

Detecting stock-price manipulation in an emerging market: The case of Turkey

This paper aims to develop methods that are capable of detecting manipulation in the Istanbul Stock Exchange. We take the difference between manipulated stock’s and index’s average daily return, average daily change in trading volume and average daily volatility and used these statistics as explanatory variables. The data in post-manipulation and pre-manipulation periods are used as non-manipulated instances while the data in the manipulation period are used as manipulated instances. Test performance of classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity statistics for Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) are compared with the results of discriminant analysis and logistics regression (logit). We found that the data mining techniques (ANN and SVM) are better suited to detect stock-price manipulation than multivariate statistical techniques (discriminant analysis, logistics regression) as the performances of the data mining techniques in terms of total classification accuracy and sensitivity statistics are better than those of multivariate techniques. We also found that unit change in difference between average daily return of manipulated stock and the index has the largest effect while unit change in difference between average daily change in trading volume of manipulated stock and index has the least effect on multivariate classifiers’ decision functions.     

An AI-based open recommender system for personalized labor market driven education

Attaining those skills that match labor market demand is getting increasingly complicated, not in the last place in engineering education, as prerequisite knowledge, skills, and abilities are evolving dynamically through an uncontrollable and seemingly unpredictable process. Anticipating and addressing such dynamism is a fundamental challenge to twenty-first century education. The burgeoning availability of data, not only on the demand side but also on the supply side (in the form of open educational resources) coupled with smart technologies, may provide a fertile ground for addressing this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel, Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven approach to the development of an open, personalized, and labor market oriented learning recommender system, called eDoer. We discuss the complete system development cycle starting with a systematic user requirements gathering, and followed by system design, implementation, and validation. Our recommender prototype (1) derives the skill requirements for particular occupations through an analysis of online job vacancy announcements; (2) decomposes skills into learning topics; (3) collects a variety of open online educational resources that address those topics; (4) checks the quality of those resources and topic relevance with three intelligent prediction models; (5) helps learners to set their learning goals towards their desired job-related skills; (6) recommends personalized learning pathways and learning content based on individual learning goals; and (7) provides assessment services for learners to monitor their progress towards their desired learning objectives. Accordingly, we created a learning dashboard focusing on three Data Science related jobs and conducted an initial validation of eDoer through a randomized experiment. Controlling for the effects of prior knowledge as assessed by means of a pretest, the randomized experiment provided tentative support for the hypothesis that learners who engaged with personal recommendations provided by eDoer to acquire knowledge of basic statistics, attained higher scores on the posttest than those who did not. The hypothesis that learners who received personalized content in terms of format, length, level of detail, and content type, would achieve higher scores than those receiving non-personalized content was not supported.     

GraphLMI: A data driven system for exploring labor market information through graph databases

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Labor Market Intelligence (LMI) is an emerging field of study that has been gaining interest as it allows employing Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms on...     

Characterising online museum users: a study of the National Museums Liverpool museum website

International Journal on Digital Libraries - Museums are increasing access to their collections and providing richer user experiences via web-based interfaces. However, they are seeing high numbers...     

Bifurcations in a stock market model

A theoretical framework is laid out, where a Stock Exchange is represented as a process under decentralized control. Attention is devoted to a specific case, in which the trading activity is described by a second order dynamical system. Three economically significant modes of behavior are identified. The stock market can (1)_adjust to a stable equilibrium, (2) approach a stable limit cycle, (3) diverge to infinity. The transition from mode (1) to mode (2) is a supercritical Hopf bifurcation, whereas the transition from mode (2) to mode (3) is a homoclinic bifurcation.     

Whole-finger manipulation with a two-fingered robot hand

This paper describes a method for whole-finger rolling manipulation using a two-fingered robot hand. 'Whole-finger' refers to the use of the complete phalangeal surface during the manipulation. An example of whole-finger manipulation by the human hand is the rolling of a pen between two fingers. The proposed method is based on a two-dimensional model for modelling an object manipulation and is derived from a study of the movement of the contact line between both fingers. Also, the method uses tactile sensor information to estimate the contact point position together with the local curvature of the object. This whole-finger dexterous manipulation is demonstrated on a prototype two-fingered hand. This 5 d.o.f. hand consists of a tendon driven index and thumb, and is equipped with force and tactile sensors. The dimensions and performance of this device are 'human-sized'. A hybrid force-position control scheme is used. The hierarchical control structure is implemented on a dual transputer system. This paper first describes the kinematic model used for whole-finger manipulation. In the second part, the main emphasis is put on the mechanical design and on the transputer-based control system.     

Multiple tasks manipulation for a robotic manipulator

Robotic manipulators can execute multiple tasks precisely at the same time and, thus, the task-priority scheme plays an important role in implementing multiple tasks. Until now, several algorithms for task-priority have been used in solving the inverse kinematics for redundant manipulators. In this paper, through the comparative study of existing algorithms, we will propose a new method for task-priority manipulation in terms of two important criteria—algorithmic singularity and task error. This manipulation scheme will be applied to a planar three-link manipulator to demonstrate its effectiveness.     

Record manipulation in prolog

Prolog is a relatively new programming language that has proved excellent for symbolic computation. However, Prolog was not specifically designed for industrial scale work and it lacks some standard features that are useful for reading, maintaining and debugging large programs. In particular, Prolog has no record mechanism, and programs often require major changes when data structures are modified. The record is a standard data abstraction concept that improves the robustness of programs. The main advantage in using records is that data structures can be modified and extended with minimal repercussion to program code. Furthermore, the use of significant names to access data fields means that the intent of code is generally clearer. We present a set of primitive operators that support a readable and robust programming style for the manipulation of record data structures in standard Prolog. The proposal covers both simple and imbricated record types and handles selective modification of records cleanly. We also treat property lists and records in a uniform way. These benefits are achieved with minimal overhead while retaining the traditional Prolog non-deterministic style.     

Blood flow driven by surface tension in a microchannel

This study aims to identify distinct blood flow characteristics in a microchannel at different sloping angles. The channel is determined by a bottom hydrophilic stripe on a glass substrate and a fully covered hydrophobic glass substrate. The channel has a height of 3 μm, and a width of 100 μm. It is observed that increasing the sloping angle from −90° (downward flow) to 90° (upward flow) increases the blood flow rate monotonically. These peculiar behaviors on the micro scale are explained by a dynamic model that establishes the balance among the inertial, surface tension, gravitational, and frictional forces. The frictional force is further related to the effective hematocrit. The model is used to calculate the frictional force, and thus the corresponding hematocrit, which is smaller when the blood flows upward, reducing the frictional force.     

Advertising channel selection in a segmented market

We consider a market with a finite number of segments and assume that several advertising channels are available, with different diffusion spectra and efficiencies. The problem of the choice of an advertising channel to direct the pre-launch campaign for a new product is analyzed in two steps. First, an optimal control problem is solved explicitly in order to determine the optimal advertising policy for each channel. Then a maximum profit channel is chosen. In a simulation example we consider the choice of a newspaper among six available and analyze the relations among the firm target market and the advertising channels environment which induce the optimal decision.     

Price suppression stimulation in a local market

In the paper, we study possible organization of a free multi-agent multi-commodity local market that stimulates price suppression. Market participants (agents) produce different commodities and services sold both in the local and external markets. Agents are interdependent: produce of one agents is a product of industrial consumption of other agents. Agents independently make decisions about shares of a product sent to external and internal markets and about prices that they fix in the local market. Prices of sale and purchase in the external market are fixed and do not depend on actions of the agents of the local market. Commodities of industrial consumption required for the agents cam be bought both in the local or external markets. We study a mechanism of price suppression based on the priority of access to resources granted to more compliant agents. It is shown that at sufficiently soft conditions of “valid competition,” all agents of the local market can obtain an increase in profitability concerning the strategy of purchase and sale in the external market only. Small and low-profitable enterprises obtain the highest relative gains in profitability.     

Extremely localized interaction in a market model

The model of self-organized criticality (SOC) is a useful tool to understand the complexity of natural systems in the form of the artificial life and the artificial market. However, SOC remains the question what guarantees the criticality even though the natural systems seem to keep itself in the critical state. In this paper, we focus on the locality of interaction in zero-intelligence plus (ZIP) model. The extremely localized interaction changes the behavior of the ZIP model from equilibrium to intermittency. Although the original ZIP model falls into unstable with some noise, extremely localized interaction model archives robust intermittency against the noise parameter. Further, the statistical property of intermittent behavior shows the power-law nature.     

Chicon—a Chinese text manipulation language

Text processing is an important computer application. Due to its importance, a number of text manipulation programming languages have been devised (e.g. Icon). These programming languages are very useful for applications such as natural language processing, text analysis, text editing, document formatting, text generation, etc. However, they were mainly designed to handle English texts, and are ineffective for Chinese. This is because English and Chinese texts are represented very differently in a computer. An English character is mainly represented in 7-bit ASCII, and its Chinese counterpart commonly in 16-bit GB or BIG-5. This difference makes direct application of English-based text manipulation programming languages to Chinese erroneous, e.g. application of Icon to reverse a string of Chinese characters. In this paper, a new dialect of Icon, referred to as Chicon (i.e. Chinese Icon), is proposed. In the design of Chicon, new data types were introduced to differentiate pure English and English/Chinese mixed texts. In addition, existing Icon text manipulation functions were modified to account for Chinese texts. Experiments have shown that Chicon not only could overcome the problems of Chinese processing in Icon, but its execution speed was actually superior to Icon in handling Chinese. Furthermore, application of Chicon to a real sized problem, namely word segmentation, has proved that the language is practical. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.