Genetic Programming for Smart Phone Personalisation

Personalisation in smart phones requires adaptability to dynamic context based on user mobility, application usage and sensor inputs. Current personalisation approaches, which rely on static logic that is developed a priori, do not provide sufficient adaptability to dynamic and unexpected context. This paper proposes genetic programming (GP), which can evolve program logic in realtime, as an online learning method to deal with the highly dynamic context in smart phone personalisation. We introduce the concept of collaborative smart phone personalisation through the GP Island Model, in order to exploit shared context among co-located phone users and reduce convergence time. We implement these concepts on real smartphones to demonstrate the capability of personalisation through GP and to explore the benefits of the Island Model. Our empirical evaluations on two example applications confirm that the Island Model can reduce convergence time by up to two-thirds over standalone GP personalisation.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figure

Operational Research in Education

Operational Research (OR) techniques have been applied, from the early stages of the discipline, to a wide variety of issues in education. At the government level, these include questions of what resources should be allocated to education as a whole and how these should be divided amongst the individual sectors of education and the institutions within the sectors. Another pertinent issue concerns the efficient operation of institutions, how to measure it, and whether resource allocation can be used to incentivise efficiency savings. Local governments, as well as being concerned with issues of resource allocation, may also need to make decisions regarding, for example, the creation and location of new institutions or closure of existing ones, as well as the day-to-day logistics of getting pupils to schools. Issues of concern for managers within schools and colleges include allocating the budgets, scheduling lessons and the assignment of students to courses. This survey provides an overview of the diverse problems faced by government, managers and consumers of education, and the OR techniques which have typically been applied in an effort to improve operations and provide solutions

Designing Climate Mitigation Policy

This paper provides an exhaustive review of critical issues in the design of climate mitigation policy by pulling together key findings and controversies from diverse literatures on mitigation costs, damage valuation, policy instrument choice, technological innovation, and international climate policy. We begin with the broadest issue of how high assessments suggest the near and medium term price on greenhouse gases would need to be, both under cost-effective stabilization of global climate and under net benefit maximization or Pigouvian emissions pricing. The remainder of the paper focuses on the appropriate scope of regulation, issues in policy instrument choice, complementary technology policy, and international policy architectures.global warming damages, mitigation cost, climate policy, instrument choice, technology policy

Transmission of Sex Preferences Across Generations: The Allocation of Educational Resources Among Siblings

The purpose of this paper is to test whether there is an intergenerational transmission of gender preferences in educational resource allocation among children. The unique data set of Taiwan’s Panel Study of Family Dynamics project provides us a rich 3-generation education information and allows us to probe into this question. We performed our analysis along two directions: the first is to see whether the society as a whole has any macro change in gender-specific education achievement, and the second is to see whether there is any within-lineage transmission of gender preferences across generations. After carefully reviewing the education system and societal characteristics in Taiwan, we set up an empirical model to estimate and test the hypotheses of intergenerational transmission of gender preferences. We also perform various statistical analyses to support our findings, e.g. contraposition of a proposition. As far as the macro pattern is concerned, we found that although there is a clear tendency of differential treatment against females in the old generation, this tendency is significantly weakened and nearly vanishes in the young generation. Furthermore, the supporting effect of senior siblings in the old generation becomes a crowding (resource-dilution) effect in the young generation. However, within each micro lineage, there is a mild “habitus” effect in gender-specific educational resource allocation in the sense that parents who had the experience of gender-specific differential treatment tend to treat their children in a similar fashion. Moreover, this mild habitus effect is stronger for female respondents (who were the deprived group) than for male respondents (who were the privileged group).

Abstracts : policy research working paper series - numbers 3135-3170

This paper contains abstracts of Policy Research Working Paper series Numbers 3135-3170.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Achieving Shared Growth,Poverty Assessment

Scaling laws in bacterial genomes: A side-effect of selection of mutational robustness?

In the past few years, numerous research projects have focused on identifying and understanding scaling properties in the gene content of prokaryote genomes and the intricacy of their regulation networks. Yet, and despite the increasing amount of data available, the origins of these scalings remain an open question. The RAevol model, a digital genetics model, provides us with an insight into the mechanisms involved in an evolutionary process. The results we present here show that (i) our model reproduces qualitatively these scaling laws and that (ii) these laws are not due to differences in lifestyles but to differences in the spontaneous rates of mutations and rearrangements. We argue that this is due to an indirect selective pressure for robustness that constrains the genome size

Design agency:prototyping multi-agent systems in architecture

This paper presents research on the prototyping of multi-agent systems for architectural design. It proposes a design exploration methodology at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and computer science. The motivation of the work includes exploring bottom up generative methods coupled with optimizing performance criteria including for geometric complexity and objective functions for environmental, structural and fabrication parameters. The paper presents the development of a research framework and initial experiments to provide design solutions, which simultaneously satisfy complexly coupled and often contradicting objectives. The prototypical experiments and initial algorithms are described through a set of different design cases and agents within this framework; for the generation of façade panels for light control; for emergent design of shell structures; for actual construction of reciprocal frames; and for robotic fabrication. Initial results include multi-agent derived efficiencies for environmental and fabrication criteria and discussion of future steps for inclusion of human and structural factors