Risk aversion and agents’ survivability in a financial market

Considering the effect of economic agents’ preferences on their actions, the relationships between conventional summary statistics and forecast profits are investigated. An analytical examination of loss function families demonstrates that investors’ utility maximisation is determined by their risk attitudes. In computational settings, stock traders’ fitness is assessed in response to a slow step increase in the value of the risk aversion coefficient. The experiment rejects the claims that the accuracy of the forecast does not depend upon which error-criteria are used and that none of them is related to the profitability of the forecast. The profitability of networks trained with L ₆ loss function appeared to be statistically significant and stable, although links between the loss functions and the accuracy of forecasts were less conclusive.     

Multi-agent human–machine dialogue: issues in dialogue management and referring expression semantics

This paper presents an implemented model of dialogue management for simple dialogues involving multiple speakers. In our model, the user is one speaker, and the system ‘plays’ a number of other speakers. We present a number of principles governing dialogue management in such cases, which relate to turn-taking and the identification of the addressees of utterances. We also consider how to extend a syntactic and semantic treatment of first- and second-person personal pronouns, and of addressee terms, in order to deal with the multi-speaker scenario. We give some examples of our current system, and conclude by outlining some extensions of the system to include disagreements, interruptions, and private communication between subgroups of dialogue participants.     

Application of DEA in analyzing a bank’s operating performance

This article takes 117 branches of a certain bank in Taiwan in 2006 as the research subject and introduces data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the operating performances of business units of this bank to provide the reference for a bank’s managers in determining operation strategies. The result indicates that, in overall technical efficiency, the case bank has many inefficient branches distinctly; the average overall technical efficiency of branches is 54.8% and the average pure technical efficiency of branches is 67%, which is probably because of lower loan-to-deposit ratio, leading to excessive input waste. The average scale efficiency of the case bank during the sample period is 82%. The ratio of resource waste due to technical inefficiency is 45.2%, of which 55.03% is due to pure technical inefficiency.     

Petersen’s lemma on matrix uncertainty and its generalizations

Various generalizations and refinements are proposed for a well-known result on robust matrix sign-definiteness, which is extensively exploited in quadratic stability, design of robustly quadratically stabilizing controllers, robust LQR-problem, etc. The main emphasis is put on formulating the results in terms of linear matrix inequalities.     

Mobile games and design requirements to increase teenagers’ physical activity

Participating in regular physical activity (PA) can help people maintain a healthy weight, and it reduces their risks of developing cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. Unfortunately, PA declines during early adolescence, particularly in minority populations. This paper explores design requirements for mobile PA-based games to motivate Hispanic teenagers to exercise. We found that some personality traits are significantly correlated to preference for specific motivational phrases and that personality affects game preference. Our qualitative analysis shows that different body weights affect beliefs about PA and games. Design requirements identified from this study include multi-player capabilities, socializing, appropriate challenge level, and variety.     

Design and evaluation of user’s physical experience in an Ambient Interactive Storybook and full body interaction games

The paper presents the design and evaluation of an original Ambient Interactive Storybook (AIS) for children, including its platform, the background story, and 10 full body interactive games. The evaluation, which focused on the user’s physical experience and elements important to the designer, has been methodologically derived from the Kroflič’s and Laban’s framework Body, Space, Time and Relationship, and additionally supported by sport science measurements. An experiment with 8 participants playing 10 games for 20 min was conducted and recorded to a digital video. Participants’ physical experience was evaluated through the analysis of postures, the quality of the movement, the body parts used in the interaction, the playing area, the direction of movement, direction of gaze, tempo, dynamics and the quantity of motion (QoM). Results of the experiment are discussed in relation and with implications for game design. Conclusions are drawn with the summary of main findings, to better understand the mechanisms and principles involved the design of user’s physical activity in full body interactive games for children. The theoretical work of Laban and Kroflič proved to be useful for interaction and games design in the transition from desktop to full body interactive games.     

Lawler’s minmax cost algorithm: optimality conditions and uncertainty

The well-known \(O(n^2)\) minmax cost algorithm of Lawler (MANAGE SCI 19(5):544–546, 1973) was developed to minimize the maximum cost of jobs processed by a single machine under precedence constraints. We propose two results related to Lawler’s algorithm. Lawler’s algorithm delivers one specific optimal schedule while there can exist other optimal schedules. We present necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a schedule for the problem with strictly increasing cost functions. The second result concerns the same scheduling problem under uncertainty. The cost function for each job is of a special decomposable form and depends on the job completion time and on an additional numerical parameter, for which only an interval of possible values is known. For this problem we derive an \(O(n^2)\) algorithm for constructing a schedule that minimizes the maximum regret criterion . To obtain this schedule, we use Lawler’s algorithm as a part of our technique.     

Influence of head-up displays’ characteristics on user experience in video games

Head-up displays (HUD) are important parts of visual interfaces of virtual environments such as video games. However, few studies have investigated their role in player–video game interactions. Two experiments were designed to investigate the influence of HUDs on player experience according to player expertise and game genre. Experiment 1 used eye-tracking and interviews to understand how and to what extent players use and experience HUDs in two types of commercial games: first-person shooter and real-time strategy games. Results showed that displaying a permanent HUD within the visual interface may improve the understanding of this environment by players. They also revealed that two HUD characteristics, namely composition and spatial organization, have particular influence on player experience. These critical characteristics were manipulated in experiment 2 to study more precisely the influence of HUD design choices on player experience. Results showed that manipulation of design of these HUD characteristics influences player experience in different ways according to player expertise and game genre. For games with HUDs that are perceived as very useful, the higher player expertise is, the more player experience is influenced. Recommendations for video game design based on these results are proposed.     

Homocores,cores and operational inefficiency in superadditive n-person games†

Defect in the core as a solution to n-person superadditive characteristic function games are examined and the process of achieving a ‘ reasonable- ’ core by changing the value of tho grand coalition is studied. A new unique solution concept, the ‘ homoeore ’, is proposed based on the ‘ homomollifier ’ notion interpreted as the result of implicit bargaining and weighted averages of coalitional worth. Thereby unreasonable cores are excluded but a core-like dominance property on the average is maintained. It also yields a measure of ‘ operational efficiency ’ where the game may be interpreted as an economic situation of decreasing marginal productivity     

Discovering common outcomes of agents’ communicative actions in various domains

We explore the common patterns of human behavior, expressed via communicative actions, and displayed in various domains of human activities associated with conflicts. We build the generic methodology based on machine learning and reasoning to predict specific communicative actions of human agents, given previous sequence of communicative actions of themselves and their opponents. This methodology is applied to textual as well as structured data on inter-human conflicts of diverse modalities. Scenarios are represented by directed graphs with labeled vertices (for communicative actions) and arcs (for temporal and causal relationships between subjects of these actions). Scenario representation and learning techniques are firstly developed in the domain of textual customer complaints, and then applied to such problems as predicting an outcome of international conflicts, assessment of an attitude of a security clearance candidate, mining emails for suspicious emotional profiles, and recognizing suspicious behavior of cell phone users. We present an evaluation of the proposed methodology in the domain of customer complaint and conduct some comparative evaluation in the other domains mentioned above. Successful use of the proposed methodology in rather distinct domains shows its adequacy for mining human attitude-related data in a wide range of applications.     

Extracting knowledge of customers’ preferences in massively multiplayer online role playing games

Due to fierce competition in game markets, to identify customers’ true needs is one of the crucial factors in online game industry. Traditionally, game producers heavily rely on game testers, who are primarily responsible for analyzing computer games, finding software defects and being a part of quality control process, to achieve this goal. But, it is not often reliable. To ensure the investment can be returned, game producers need an effective approach to discover frequently shifted customer preferences in time. Recently, Kano model and data mining techniques have been successfully applied to recognize customers’ preferences and implement customer relationship management tasks, respectively. However, in traditional Kano analysis, only basically statistical analysis techniques are used, and they are insufficient to provide advanced knowledge to enterprisers. Therefore, in order to discover the relationship between/among quality elements in Kano model and to extract knowledge related to customer preferences, this study proposes a knowledge acquisition scheme that integrates several data mining techniques including association rule discovery, decision tree, and self-organizing map neural network, into traditional Kano model. An actual case of customer satisfaction survey regarding massively multiplayer online role playing game has been provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.     

Successful and unsuccessful multicommunication episodes: Engaging in dialogue or juggling messages?

This paper describes instances of multicommunicating—or engaging in more than one conversation at a time. It uses a critical incident technique to explore successful and unsuccessful incidents of multicommunicating from the perspective of 201 MBA students. Additionally, we asked which media individuals pair together when multicommunicating. We found very frequent pairing of the telephone (which provides partial compartmentalization but no flexibility of tempo) with electroric text (which provides both compartmentalization and flexibility of tempo). We also found that respondents provide a variety of reasons for labeling a particular episode as “unsuccessful.” In many cases the person seemed to describe an episode as unsuccessful when the person or a communicating partner had exceeded his or her ability to juggle multiple conversations as demonstrated by communication errors.     

Divergence-based cross entropy and uncertainty measures of Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy sets with their application in decision making

The uncertainty measure of Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy sets (AIFSs) is important for information discrimination under intuitionistic fuzzy environment. Although many entropy measures and knowledge measures haven been proposed to depict uncertainty of AIFSs, how to measure the uncertainty of AIFSs is still an open topic. The relation between uncertainty and other measures like entropy measures, fuzziness and intuitionism is not clear. This paper introduces uncertainty measures by using new defined divergence-based cross entropy measure of AIFSs. Axiomatic properties of the developed uncertainty measure are analysis, together with the monotony property of uncertainty degree with respect to fuzziness and intuitionism. To adjust the contribution of fuzzy entropy and intuitionistic entropy on the total uncertainty, the proposed cross entropy and uncertainty measures are parameterized. Numerical examples indicate the effectiveness and agility of the biparametric uncertainty measure in quantifying uncertainty degree. Then we apply the cross entropy and uncertainty measures into an optimal model to determine attribute weights in multi-attribute group decision making (MAGDM) problems. A new method for intuitionistic fuzzy MAGDM problems is proposed to show the efficiency of proposed measures in applications. It is demonstrated by application examples that the proposed measures can get reasonable results coinciding with other existing methods.     

Autonomous agents and human cultures in the trust–revenge game

Autonomous agents developed by experts are embedded with the capability to interact well with people from different cultures. When designing expert agents intended to interact with autonomous agents developed by non-game theory agents (NGTE), it is beneficial to obtain insights on the behavior of these NGTE agents. Is the behavior of these NGTE agents similar to human behavior from different cultures? This is an important question as such a quality would allow an expert agent interacting with NGTE agents to model them using the same methods that are used to model humans from different cultures. To study this point, we evaluated NGTE agents behavior using a game called the Trust–Revenge game, which is known in social science for capturing different human tendencies. The Trust–Revenge game has a unique subgame-perfect equilibrium strategy profile, however, very rarely do people follow it. We compared the behavior of autonomous agents to the actions of several human demographic groups—one of which is similar to the designers of the autonomous agents. We claim that autonomous agents are similar to human players from various cultures. This enables the use of approaches, developed for handling cultural diversity among humans, to be applied for interaction with NGTE agents. This paper also analyzes additional aspects of autonomous agents behavior and whether composing autonomous agents affects human behavior.     

Adaptation of an automotive dialogue system to users’ expertise and evaluation of the system

Spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) can be used to operate devices, e.g. in the automotive environment. People using these systems usually have different levels of experience. However, most systems do not take this into account. In this paper, we present a method to build a dialogue system in an automotive environment that automatically adapts to the user’s experience with the system. We implemented the adaptation in a prototype and carried out exhaustive tests. Our usability tests show that adaptation increases both user performance and user satisfaction. We describe the tests that were performed, and the methods used to assess the test results. One of these methods is a modification of PARADISE, a framework for evaluating the performance of SDSs [Walker MA, Litman DJ, Kamm CA, Abella A (Comput Speech Lang 12(3):317–347, 1998)]. We discuss its drawbacks for the evaluation of SDSs like ours, the modifications we have carried out, and the test results.

Form one students’ engagement with computer games and its effect on their academic achievement in a Malaysian secondary school

The main purpose of the study was to address the association between computer games and students’ academic achievement. The exceptional growth in numbers of children playing computer games, the uneasiness and incomplete understanding foundation when starting the discussion on computer games have stimulated this study to be conducted. From a survey conducted on 236 form one students in one of the Malaysian secondary school, 75.8 percent were gamers. Playing computer games seemed to be more stereotypically boy’s activity with 91.3 percent of the boys engaged in computer games compared to 54.1 percent among the girls. They spent an average of 8.47 hours per week playing computer games. Parents and teachers’ concern about computer games was not something that went unwarranted as an overall result was predicting computer games as having negative associations with students’ academic achievement. However, in-depth analyses by combinations of classes done step by step indicated that the initial results could be overruled by students from the last class, whom need extra attentions. As a conclusion, the findings in this study suggest some interesting yet ultimately weak associations between playing computer games and students’ academic achievement. Nevertheless, caution is warranted in making any generalization as looking at the population as a whole will be different from its components. The generalizability of this study’s findings is limited by the nature of the sample. Even so, blaming computer games for the students’ bad academic performance in school is unjustified as there are many more other factors to look into before finding computer games as the scapegoat.