E-Commerce Oriented Human-Computer Negotiation Strategy Model

Human-computer negotiation plays an important role in B2C e-commerce. There is a paucity of further scientific investigation and a pressing need on designing the software agent that can deal with the human’s random and dynamic offer, which is crucially useful in human-computer negotiation to achieve better online negotiation outcomes. The lack of such studies has decelerated the process of applying automated negotiation to real world applications. To address the critical issue, this paper develops a strategy concession model.The theoretical model and algorithm of the combined strategy were developed. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this model, we implement a prototype and conduct human-computer negotiations over 121 subjects. The experimental analysis not only confirms our model’s effect but also reveals some insights into future work about human-computer negotiation systems

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Urban design theory and practice aimed at sustainability. The Liverpool Study Cases in the United Kingdom planning system

Urban design is the most traditional field of physical planning which focuses more on the physical design of places and deals with fine-tuned design approaches (John Lang, 2005). It is founded upon the social, environmental, political, aesthetic and economical sector, but public realm is also important factor for the urban design, to serve the public interest and to provide opportunities and cultural dimensions. In present, urban design challenges are very different from the past. In contemporary situation the cities have been facing environmental, social and economic challenges that demand to devise new planning approaches. At the same time, the cities also have been suffering the lack of policies to resolve these problems, and any singular approach is not sufficient to address the new challenges. The design theories applied to city planning are traditional- which are not capable to meet the demand of the growing complexity of the world. To cope up with the urban design challenges, the main contributions of this thesis are detail evaluation of the urban design methods, analysis of applying these methods in real life practice. The main questions are: What are the theoretical approaches for the urban design for sustainable changes? And how to react with the sustainable changes in theory to practices? Firstly, I describe the urban design land-use plan and policies, application fields, participating actors, different types of urban projects, considering related issues and methods for implementation process. Secondly, I have done a case study of contemporary practices in the United Kingdom, specially the Liverpool city's urban regeneration planning approaches toward sustainable developments. In this case study, I analyze the land-use plan and planning rules, urban projects and their context, local and transit oriented development, the decision making and the implementation process. After detail analysis of urban design methods, this thesis bridges the gap between theory and practice, by focusing on how to improve the theoretical approaches and how to use these approaches in contemporary planning practic

Urban design theory and practice aimed at sustainability. The Liverpool Study Cases in the United Kingdom planning system

Urban design is the most traditional field of physical planning which focuses more on the physical design of places and deals with fine-tuned design approaches (John Lang, 2005). It is founded upon the social, environmental, political, aesthetic and economical sector, but public realm is also important factor for the urban design, to serve the public interest and to provide opportunities and cultural dimensions. In present, urban design challenges are very different from the past. In contemporary situation the cities have been facing environmental, social and economic challenges that demand to devise new planning approaches. At the same time, the cities also have been suffering the lack of policies to resolve these problems, and any singular approach is not sufficient to address the new challenges. The design theories applied to city planning are traditional- which are not capable to meet the demand of the growing complexity of the world. To cope up with the urban design challenges, the main contributions of this thesis are detail evaluation of the urban design methods, analysis of applying these methods in real life practice. The main questions are: What are the theoretical approaches for the urban design for sustainable changes? And how to react with the sustainable changes in theory to practices? Firstly, I describe the urban design land-use plan and policies, application fields, participating actors, different types of urban projects, considering related issues and methods for implementation process. Secondly, I have done a case study of contemporary practices in the United Kingdom, specially the Liverpool city’s urban regeneration planning approaches toward sustainable developments. In this case study, I analyze the land-use plan and planning rules, urban projects and their context, local and transit oriented development, the decision making and the implementation process. After detail analysis of urban design methods, this thesis bridges the gap between theory and practice, by focusing on how to improve the theoretical approaches and how to use these approaches in contemporary planning practice