Automated agents for reward determination for human work in crowdsourcing applications

Crowdsourcing applications frequently employ many individual workers, each performing a small amount of work. In such settings, individually determining the reward for each assignment and worker may seem economically beneficial, but is inapplicable if manually performed. We thus consider the problem of designing automated agents for automatic reward determination and negotiation in such settings. We formally describe this problem and show that it is NP-hard. We therefore present two automated agents for the problem, based on two different models of human behavior. The first, the Reservation Price Based Agent (RPBA), is based on the concept of a RP, and the second, the No Bargaining Agent (NBA) which tries to avoid any negotiation. The performance of the agents is tested in extensive experiments with real human subjects, where both NBA and RPBA outperform strategies developed by human experts.     

On the complexity of short-term production planning and the near-optimality of a sequential assignment problem heuristic approach

In semiconductor manufacturing, the process of short-term production planning requires setting clear and yet challenging and doable goals to each operation and toolset in the process flow per each product type. We demonstrate the complexity of this problem using an experimental study performed with proficient workforce, and then show how the problem can be decomposed, aggregated, and solved using sequential recurrent linear programming assignment problems. We also refer to the improvements that the proposed algorithm has achieved in practice when applied to multiple semiconductor production facilities, and discuss its efficiency and uniqueness as a fast heuristic relative to other proposed methods.     

Effects of Familiarity on the Perceptual Integrality of the Identity and Expression of Faces: The Parallel-Route Hypothesis Revisited.

The effects of familiarity on selective attention for the identity and expression of faces were tested using Garner's speeded-classification task. In 2 experiments, participants classified expression (or identity) of familiar and unfamiliar faces while the irrelevant dimension of identity (or expression) was either held constant (baseline condition) or varied randomly (filtering condition). Selective attention was measured by the difference in performance between these 2 conditions. Failure of selective attention was larger for familiar than for unfamiliar faces. In addition, failure of selective attention was found both for identity and for expression judgments. These findings show that familiarity increases (he perceptual integrality between identity and expression, and they question previous studies arguing that identity judgments are always resistant to irrelevant variations in expression. The authors suggest that the systems processing identity and expression are interconnected in that facial identity serves as a reference from which expressions can be more easily derived. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

InAs Nanocrystals with Robust p-Type Doping

Robust control over the carrier type is fundamental for the fabrication of nanocrystal-based optoelectronic devices, such as the p–n homojunction, but effective incorporation of impurities in semiconductor nanocrystals and its characterization is highly challenging due to their small size. Herein, InAs nanocrystals (NCs), post-synthetically doped with Cd, serve as a model system for successful p-type doping of originally n-type InAs nanocrystals, as demonstrated in field effect transistors (FETs). Advanced structural analysis, using atomic resolution electron microscopy and synchrotron X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy reveal that Cd impurities reside near and on the nanocrystal surface acting as substitutional p-dopants replacing Indium. Commensurately, Cd-doped InAs FETs exhibit remarkable stability of their hole conduction, mobility, and hysteretic behavior over time when exposed to air, while intrinsic InAs NCs FETs are easily oxidized and their performance quickly declines. Therefore, Cd plays a dual role acting as a p-type dopant, and also protects the nanocrystals from oxidation, as evidenced directly by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements of air exposed samples of intrinsic and Cd-doped InAs NCs films. This study demonstrates robust p-type doping of InAs nanocrystals, setting the stage for implementation of such doped nanocrystal systems in printed electronic devices.     

Separating consciously controlled and automatic influences in memory for new associations.

The process dissociation paradigm was applied to investigate the contributions of automatic and consciously controlled processes to the repetition priming effect for new associations, under elaborative encoding (Experiments 1 and 2) and copy instructions (Experiment 3). Semantically unrelated context–target word pairs were presented during study, and context words and stems were presented during test. Target word stems were paired with the same context words as at study (intact), paired with different context words from study (recombined), or were the stems of unstudied words (control). Participants had to complete stems with the first word that came to mind (indirect), with studied words (inclusion), or with new, unstudied words (exclusion). Results indicated that consciously controlled processes mediated the associative repetition effect under elaborative encoding, whereas automatic processes were implicated under copy instructions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)