Insurance Industry and E-Business

亀井利明教授古稀記念特

Conversational Sensing

Recent developments in sensing technologies, mobile devices and context-aware user interfaces have made it possible to represent information fusion and situational awareness as a conversational process among actors - human and machine agents - at or near the tactical edges of a network. Motivated by use cases in the domain of security, policing and emergency response, this paper presents an approach to information collection, fusion and sense-making based on the use of natural language (NL) and controlled natural language (CNL) to support richer forms of human-machine interaction. The approach uses a conversational protocol to facilitate a flow of collaborative messages from NL to CNL and back again in support of interactions such as: turning eyewitness reports from human observers into actionable information (from both trained and untrained sources); fusing information from humans and physical sensors (with associated quality metadata); and assisting human analysts to make the best use of available sensing assets in an area of interest (governed by management and security policies). CNL is used as a common formal knowledge representation for both machine and human agents to support reasoning, semantic information fusion and generation of rationale for inferences, in ways that remain transparent to human users. Examples are provided of various alternative styles for user feedback, including NL, CNL and graphical feedback. A pilot experiment with human subjects shows that a prototype conversational agent is able to gather usable CNL information from untrained human subjects

Matching Demand and Supply in a Weightless Economy: Market-Driven Creativity With and Without IPRs

Many cultural products have the same nonrival nature as scientific knowledge. They therefore face identical difficulties in creation and dissemination. One traditional view says market failure is endemic: societies tolerate monopolistic inefficiency in intellectual property (IP) protection to incentivize the creation and distribution of intellectual assets. This paper examines that tradeoff in dynamic, representative agent general equilibrium, and characterizes socially efficient creativity. Markets for intellectual assets protected by IP rights can produce too much or too little innovation.cultural good, finitely expansible, innovation, intellectual asset, intellectual property, Internet, IP valuation, IPR, knowledge product, MP3, nonrival, software

Supply Chain Design for High Quality Products: Economic Concepts and Examples form the United States

The food system is undergoing significant structural change at local, national, and international levels. As the food system evolves, some segments along the chain between producers and consumers are disappearing. Others are being transformed. Supply chain concepts are useful for identifying and assessing alternative designs for the reconfiguration of food product production systems. Changes in the food system will require farm managers to adopt new ways of thinking and new perspectives on collaboration with trading partners. They also will require farm management economists to draw on a wider set of economic theories and concepts than we have in the past. This paper begins with brief descriptions of emerging supply chains for high quality food products in the U.S.: (i) a branded product chain, (ii) a genetics-based chain, and (iii) a production-practice based chain. These illustrate the variety of emerging supply chain structures and the challenges firms face in designing new supply chains. The next section presents an overview of key elements of four theoretical frameworks that are helpful in supply chain analysis and design: (i) transaction cost economics, (ii) agency theory, (iii) property rights theory, and (iv) the resource based view of the firm. Concepts from these theories are used to explain structural differences in the three illustrative cases. Looking to the future, key challenges include improving system-wide efficiency through information sharing and logistics management, promoting transparency and trust among trading partners, and designing incentive systems that ensure an equitable distribution of costs and returns.Farm Management,

Information-Driven Housing

This paper suggests a new information-driven framework is needed to help consumers evaluate the sustainability of their housing options. The paper provides an outline of this new framework and how it would work