159 research outputs found

    Integrated care in the daily work: coordination beyond organisational boundaries

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    Objectives: In this paper, integrated care in an inter-organisational cooperative setting of in-home elderly care is studied. The aim is to explore how home care workers coordinate their daily work, identify coordination issues in situ and discuss possible actions for supporting seamless and integrated elderly care at home. <br><br> Method: The empirical findings are drawn from an ethnographic workplace study of the cooperation and coordination taking place between home care workers in a Swedish county. Data were collected through observational studies, interviews and group discussions. <br><br> Findings: The paper identifies a need to support two core issues. Firstly, it must be made clear how the care interventions that are currently defined as ‘self-treatment’ by the home health care should be divided. Secondly, the distributed and asynchronous coordination between all care workers involved, regardless of organisational belonging must be better supported. <br><br> Conclusion: Integrated care needs to be developed between organisations as well as within each organisation. As a matter of fact, integrated care needs to be built up beyond organisational boundaries. Organisational boundaries affect the planning of the division of care interventions, but not the coordination during the home care process. During the home care process, the main challenge is the coordination difficulties that arise from the fact that workers are distributed in time and/or space, regardless of organisational belonging. A core subject for future practice and research is to develop IT tools that reach beyond formal organisational boundaries and processes while remaining adaptable in view of future structure changes

    Multi-item Auctions for Automatic Negotiation

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    Available resources can often be limited with regard to the number of demands. In this paper we propose an approach for solving this problem which consists of using the mechanisms of multi-item auctions for allocating the resources to a set of software agents. We consider the resource problem as a market in which there are vendor agents and buyer agents trading on items representing the resources. These agents use multi-item auctions which are viewed here as a process of automatic negotiation, and implemented as a network of intelligent software agents. In this negotiation, agents exhibit different acquisition capabilities which let them act differently depending on the current context or situation of the market. For example, the "richer" an agent is, the more items it can buy, i.e. the more resources it can acquire. We present a model for this approach based on the English auction, then we discuss experimental evidence of such a model. Dans un environnement multiagent, les ressources peuvent toujours s'avĂ©rer insuffisantes relativement Ă  un nombre Ă©levĂ© de demandes. Dans ce cahier, nous proposons une approche mixant les enchĂšres et les agents logiciels en vue de contribuer Ă  rĂ©soudre ce problĂšme. Cette approche consiste en fait Ă  utiliser le mĂ©canisme d'enchĂšres multi-articles en vue d'allouer les ressources Ă  un ensemble d'agents. À cet effet, nous considĂ©rons le problĂšme de ressources comme un marchĂ© dans lequel Ă©voluent des agents acheteurs et des agents vendeurs nĂ©gociant des articles reprĂ©sentant des ressources. Ces agents utilisent des enchĂšres multi-articles et par consĂ©quent ils constituent un processus de nĂ©gociation automatisĂ© et programmĂ© comme un rĂ©seau d'agents logiciels. Dans ce type de nĂ©gociation, chaque agent exhibe diffĂ©rentes capacitĂ©s d'acquisition lui permettant ainsi d'agir diffĂ©remment selon le contexte ou la situation de marchĂ©. Par exemple, plus on est riche, plus on peut acheter d'articles. Nous prĂ©sentons pour ce modĂšle une enchĂšre anglaise et nous discuterons ses rĂ©sultats expĂ©rimentaux.Multi-agent systems, Negotiations, Multi-item auctions, SystĂšmes multiagents, nĂ©gociations, enchĂšres multi items

    Assorted notes on the metaphysical notion of ‘sharing’

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    In CSCW, phrases such as ‘shared goal’ or ‘shared understanding’ are often used to denote what is taken to be a defining feature of cooperative work or at least what is thought to be an essential precondition of the orderliness without which cooperative work in practice is impossible; that is, these terms are used in an explanatory function [e.g., 1; 6]. To take but one example: In one of her articles on ‘situation awareness’ the muchcited Mica Endsley posits: ‘In a smoothly functioning team, each team member shares a common understanding of what is happening on those [Situation Awareness] elements that are common — that is, they have shared situation awareness, which refers to the overlap among the SA requirements of the team members.’ However, she prudently adds, ‘The concept of shared mental models is not universally heralded’ and ‘The development of shared mental models has not been the subject of much research’ [4, pp. 48, 52 f.]. A ‘shared situation awareness’? A ‘shared mental model’? What does she mean

    Multi-item Auctions for Automatic Negotiation

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    Dans un environnement multiagent, les ressources peuvent toujours s'avĂ©rer insuffisantes relativement Ă  un nombre Ă©levĂ© de demandes. Dans ce cahier, nous proposons une approche mixant les enchĂšres et les agents logiciels en vue de contribuer Ă  rĂ©soudre ce problĂšme. Cette approche consiste en fait Ă  utiliser le mĂ©canisme d'enchĂšres multi-articles en vue d'allouer les ressources Ă  un ensemble d'agents. À cet effet, nous considĂ©rons le problĂšme de ressources comme un marchĂ© dans lequel Ă©voluent des agents acheteurs et des agents vendeurs nĂ©gociant des articles reprĂ©sentant des ressources. Ces agents utilisent des enchĂšres multi-articles et par consĂ©quent ils constituent un processus de nĂ©gociation automatisĂ© et programmĂ© comme un rĂ©seau d'agents logiciels. Dans ce type de nĂ©gociation, chaque agent exhibe diffĂ©rentes capacitĂ©s d'acquisition lui permettant ainsi d'agir diffĂ©remment selon le contexte ou la situation de marchĂ©. Par exemple, plus on est riche, plus on peut acheter d'articles. Nous prĂ©sentons pour ce modĂšle une enchĂšre anglaise et nous discuterons ses rĂ©sultats expĂ©rimentaux.Available resources can often be limited with regard to the number of demands. In this paper we propose an approach for solving this problem which consists of using the mechanisms of multi-item auctions for allocating the resources to a set of software agents. We consider the resource problem as a market in which there are vendor agents and buyer agents trading on items representing the resources. These agents use multi-item auctions which are viewed here as a process of automatic negotiation, and implemented as a network of intelligent software agents. In this negotiation, agents exhibit different acquisition capabilities which let them act differently depending on the current context or situation of the market. For example, the "richer" an agent is, the more items it can buy, i.e. the more resources it can acquire. We present a model for this approach based on the English auction, then we discuss experimental evidence of such a model

    De-ossifying the Internet Transport Layer : A Survey and Future Perspectives

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    ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and comments.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

    Design Ltd.: Renovated Myths for the Development of Socially Embedded Technologies

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    This paper argues that traditional and mainstream mythologies, which have been continually told within the Information Technology domain among designers and advocators of conceptual modelling since the 1960s in different fields of computing sciences, could now be renovated or substituted in the mould of more recent discourses about performativity, complexity and end-user creativity that have been constructed across different fields in the meanwhile. In the paper, it is submitted that these discourses could motivate IT professionals in undertaking alternative approaches toward the co-construction of socio-technical systems, i.e., social settings where humans cooperate to reach common goals by means of mediating computational tools. The authors advocate further discussion about and consolidation of some concepts in design research, design practice and more generally Information Technology (IT) development, like those of: task-artifact entanglement, universatility (sic) of End-User Development (EUD) environments, bricolant/bricoleur end-user, logic of bricolage, maieuta-designers (sic), and laissez-faire method to socio-technical construction. Points backing these and similar concepts are made to promote further discussion on the need to rethink the main assumptions underlying IT design and development some fifty years later the coming of age of software and modern IT in the organizational domain.Comment: This is the peer-unreviewed of a manuscript that is to appear in D. Randall, K. Schmidt, & V. Wulf (Eds.), Designing Socially Embedded Technologies: A European Challenge (2013, forthcoming) with the title "Building Socially Embedded Technologies: Implications on Design" within an EUSSET editorial initiative (www.eusset.eu/

    Applications of Repeated Games in Wireless Networks: A Survey

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    A repeated game is an effective tool to model interactions and conflicts for players aiming to achieve their objectives in a long-term basis. Contrary to static noncooperative games that model an interaction among players in only one period, in repeated games, interactions of players repeat for multiple periods; and thus the players become aware of other players' past behaviors and their future benefits, and will adapt their behavior accordingly. In wireless networks, conflicts among wireless nodes can lead to selfish behaviors, resulting in poor network performances and detrimental individual payoffs. In this paper, we survey the applications of repeated games in different wireless networks. The main goal is to demonstrate the use of repeated games to encourage wireless nodes to cooperate, thereby improving network performances and avoiding network disruption due to selfish behaviors. Furthermore, various problems in wireless networks and variations of repeated game models together with the corresponding solutions are discussed in this survey. Finally, we outline some open issues and future research directions.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figures, 5 tables, 168 reference
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