284,976 research outputs found
Questioning the Quantitative Imperative: Decision Aids, Prevention, and the Ethics of Disclosure
Patients should not always receive hard data about the risks and benefits of a medical intervention. That information should always be available to patients who expressly ask for it, but it should be part of standard disclosure only sometimes, and only for some patients. And even then, we need to think about how to offer it
Different goals in multiscale simulations and how to reach them
In this paper we sum up our works on multiscale programs, mainly simulations.
We first start with describing what multiscaling is about, how it helps
perceiving signal from a background noise in a ?ow of data for example, for a
direct perception by a user or for a further use by another program. We then
give three examples of multiscale techniques we used in the past, maintaining a
summary, using an environmental marker introducing an history in the data and
finally using a knowledge on the behavior of the different scales to really
handle them at the same time
Adaptive Load Balancing: A Study in Multi-Agent Learning
We study the process of multi-agent reinforcement learning in the context of
load balancing in a distributed system, without use of either central
coordination or explicit communication. We first define a precise framework in
which to study adaptive load balancing, important features of which are its
stochastic nature and the purely local information available to individual
agents. Given this framework, we show illuminating results on the interplay
between basic adaptive behavior parameters and their effect on system
efficiency. We then investigate the properties of adaptive load balancing in
heterogeneous populations, and address the issue of exploration vs.
exploitation in that context. Finally, we show that naive use of communication
may not improve, and might even harm system efficiency.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
Effects of communication and utility-based decision making in a simple model of evacuation
We present a simple cellular automaton based model of decision making during
evacuation. Evacuees have to choose between two different exit routes,
resulting in a strategic decision making problem. Agents take their decisions
based on utility functions, these can be revised as the evacuation proceeds,
leading to complex interaction between individuals and to jamming transitions.
The model also includes the possibility to communicate and exchange information
with distant agents, information received may affect the decision of agents. We
show that under a wider range of evacuation scenarios performance of the model
system as a whole is optimal at an intermediate fraction of evacuees with
access to communication.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure
gCSP: A Graphical Tool for Designing CSP systems
For broad acceptance of an engineering paradigm, a graphical notation and a supporting design tool seem necessary. This paper discusses certain issues of developing a design environment for building systems based on CSP. Some of the issues discussed depend specifically on the underlying theory of CSP, while a number of them are common for any graphical notation and supporting tools, such as provisions for complexity management and design overview
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