A Time and Space Routing Game Model applied to Visibility Competition on Online Social Networks

International audienceCompanies or users that want to do advertising on Online Social Networks, need to know in which News Feed it would be more efficient to post, at what time of day the posts would have more visibility and which topic of message they should choose to reach popularity. We propose to answer these questions with the help of the Routing Game Theory, which considers a finite number of players and splittable demands. First, we propose a visibility measure on a News Feed. Next, we present our game based on visibility measures, which is similar to the Weighted Allocation Game. Following this consideration, we provide the uniqueness of the Nash Equilibrium, a characterization via concave programming, and its closed form. Then, we propose a two time scale decentralized algorithm where each user estimates the total flow of messages in each News Feed and uses stochastic gradient algorithm to update their own flows. Finally, we use a real data set in order to estimate the parameters of our model. The goal of this model is to provide to the Online Social Network Authority a better knowledge of posting behavior of competitive users

The Social Medium Selection Game

We consider in this paper competition of content creators in routing their content through various media. The routing decisions may correspond to the selection of a social network (e.g. twitter versus facebook or linkedin) or of a group within a given social network. The utility for a player to send its content to some medium is given as the difference between the dissemination utility at this medium and some transmission cost. We model this game as a congestion game and compute the pure potential of the game. In contrast to the continuous case, we show that there may be various equilibria. We show that the potential is M-concave which allows us to characterize the equilibria and to propose an algorithm for computing it. We then give a learning mechanism which allow us to give an efficient algorithm to determine an equilibrium. We finally determine the asymptotic form of the equilibrium and discuss the implications on the social medium selection problem

From supply chains to demand networks. Agents in retailing: the electrical bazaar

A paradigm shift is taking place in logistics. The focus is changing from operational effectiveness to adaptation. Supply Chains will develop into networks that will adapt to consumer demand in almost real time. Time to market, capacity of adaptation and enrichment of customer experience seem to be the key elements of this new paradigm. In this environment emerging technologies like RFID (Radio Frequency ID), Intelligent Products and the Internet, are triggering a reconsideration of methods, procedures and goals. We present a Multiagent System framework specialized in retail that addresses these changes with the use of rational agents and takes advantages of the new market opportunities. Like in an old bazaar, agents able to learn, cooperate, take advantage of gossip and distinguish between collaborators and competitors, have the ability to adapt, learn and react to a changing environment better than any other structure. Keywords: Supply Chains, Distributed Artificial Intelligence, Multiagent System.Postprint (published version

Routeing in military tourism: gamification as an implementation proposal

This dissertation approaches three main concepts, routeing applied to tourism, Military Tourism as a segment of Cultural Tourism and Gamification as a tool for tourist fruition, with the aim at establishing a link between them. Following a literature review from various authors in each of these areas, and after the establishment of a firm conceptual base, this project investigates the possible links between them. In this specific case the application of the benefits of gamification to promote the development of Military Tourism products and their organisation in military themed tourism routes. In conclusion this dissertation presents a guiding model explaining the use of different forms of game based technology to develop different Military Tourism products and how this tool can aid in the organisation in a Military Tourism Route

Self-Evaluation Applied Mathematics 2003-2008 University of Twente

This report contains the self-study for the research assessment of the Department of Applied Mathematics (AM) of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at the University of Twente (UT). The report provides the information for the Research Assessment Committee for Applied Mathematics, dealing with mathematical sciences at the three universities of technology in the Netherlands. It describes the state of affairs pertaining to the period 1 January 2003 to 31 December 2008

Dynamic Games for analyzing competition in the Internet and in on-line social networks

International audienceThe global Internet has enabled a massive access of internauts to content. At the same time it allowed individuals to use the Internet in order to distribute content. This introduced new types of competition between content over popularity, visibility, influence, reputation and user attention. The rules of these competitions are new with respect to those of traditional media, and they are determined by the way resources are allocated through network protocols (such as page rank in search engines and recommendation systems that are widely spread in social networks). In this paper we first present in the introduction an overview of some central competition issues both in the Internet as well as in other types of networks. We then describe the model of when to send content in order to maximize the exposure of the content. In the two last sections we finally describe research on two bio-inspired tools that have bben used to study various competition aspects