The Influence of Early Respondents: Information Cascade Effects in Online Event Scheduling

Sequential group decision-making processes, such as online event scheduling, can be subject to social influence if the decisions involve individuals’ subjective preferences and values. Indeed, prior work has shown that scheduling polls that allow respondents to see others’ answers are more likely to succeed than polls that hide other responses, suggesting the impact of social influence and coordination. In this paper, we investigate whether this difference is due to information cascade effects in which later respondents adopt the decisions of earlier respondents. Analyzing more than 1.3 million Doodle polls, we found evidence that cascading effects take place during event scheduling, and in particular, that early respondents have a larger influence on the outcome of a poll than people who come late. Drawing on simulations of an event scheduling model, we compare possible interventions to mitigate this bias and show that we can optimize the success of polls by hiding the responses of a small percentage of low availability respondents.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/134703/1/Romero et al 2017 (WSDM).pd

Arts management beyond eventification

Looking for cultural remedies between the opposite perspectives of marketisation and culturalisation of the arts, is equivalent to trying new logics between instrumental (Benjamin 1936; Bourdieu 1979) and communicative logics (Habermas 1981). This engagement includes the considera-tion of the arts management, that nowadays copes much more with design of the contents and drama-turgy of events, planning and production scheduling, marketing processes of the specific event, com-munication and promotion of the event than with a critic conceptualisation of the forced relation be-tween arts and instrumental thinking. In a new perspective of a cultural and social role of the arts, autonomously and not only instrumentally/economically conceived (i.e. the so called cultural depos-its) the aims and core of a necessary reconceptualisation of the relation between the arts and manage-ment could concern a struggle against the \u2018eventification\u2019 of the arts management: to requalify the relationship between arts and aesthetics in the frame of the need of new categories but the solid of socialspacejournal.eu nr 2/2015(10) 2 modernity; to develop awareness of the importance of creativity and innovation for individual, social and economic development; getting closer to communities; taking advantage of the new technologies; attracting new audiences; to stimulate education and research; to promote and bolster policy debate on art issues; to disseminate good practices (Chong, Gibbons, 1997)

Electronic Social Networks as Supporting Means of Educational Process in Higher Education Institutions

Given research describes experience of electronic social networks use in educational practices. It was determined that electronic social networks can be a powerful tool for support of educational process in higher education institutions, namely to support study of different disciplines. There are main advantages of electronic social networks use for education: universal accessibility and free of charge; possibility of instant messaging and multimedia data; user-friendly intuitive interface; ability to search data and information; availability of event scheduling, invitations, reminder settings; support for synchronous and asynchronous communication between network members; access from different devices. It is emphasized that one of the main advantages of electronic social networks is receipt of quick feedback and convenience of their tools and services. Nowadays, it is important to include network educational interaction in existing models of study organization. It is advisable to use electronic social networks to manage educational process in higher education institution. Efficiency of electronic social networks use depends on intensity and need for their use in educational system management for implementation of organizational, educational, psychological and pedagogical functions and ensuring universal communication with subjects of educational process. Expediency of electronic social networks use to carry out research work at university is described. Electronic social networks are convenient tool to conduct surveys and questionnaires, to create thematic groups for specific issue discussion. Also it is possible to interact with researchers from different countries, share experiences and disseminate research findings, invite those who wish to participate in various scientific activities using these networks

Average-case Approximation Ratio of Scheduling without Payments

Apart from the principles and methodologies inherited from Economics and Game Theory, the studies in Algorithmic Mechanism Design typically employ the worst-case analysis and approximation schemes of Theoretical Computer Science. For instance, the approximation ratio, which is the canonical measure of evaluating how well an incentive-compatible mechanism approximately optimizes the objective, is defined in the worst-case sense. It compares the performance of the optimal mechanism against the performance of a truthful mechanism, for all possible inputs. In this paper, we take the average-case analysis approach, and tackle one of the primary motivating problems in Algorithmic Mechanism Design -- the scheduling problem [Nisan and Ronen 1999]. One version of this problem which includes a verification component is studied by [Koutsoupias 2014]. It was shown that the problem has a tight approximation ratio bound of (n+1)/2 for the single-task setting, where n is the number of machines. We show, however, when the costs of the machines to executing the task follow any independent and identical distribution, the average-case approximation ratio of the mechanism given in [Koutsoupias 2014] is upper bounded by a constant. This positive result asymptotically separates the average-case ratio from the worst-case ratio, and indicates that the optimal mechanism for the problem actually works well on average, although in the worst-case the expected cost of the mechanism is Theta(n) times that of the optimal cost

Operating theatre modelling: integrating social measures

Hospital resource modelling literature is primarily focussed on productivity and efficiency measures. In this paper, our focus is on the alignment of the most valuable revenue factor, the operating room (OR) with the most valuable cost factor, the staff. When aligning these economic and social decisions, respectively, into one sustainable model, simulation results justify the integration of these factors. This research shows that integrating staff decisions and OR decisions results in better solutions for both entities. A discrete event simulation approach is used as a performance test to evaluate an integrated and an iterative model. Experimental analysis show how our integrated approach can benefit the alignment of the planning of the human resources as well as the planning of the capacity of the OR based on both economic related metrics (lead time, overtime, number of patients rejected) and social related metrics (personnel preferences, aversions, roster quality)

The crowd as a cameraman : on-stage display of crowdsourced mobile video at large-scale events

Recording videos with smartphones at large-scale events such as concerts and festivals is very common nowadays. These videos register the atmosphere of the event as it is experienced by the crowd and offer a perspective that is hard to capture by the professional cameras installed throughout the venue. In this article, we present a framework to collect videos from smartphones in the public and blend these into a mosaic that can be readily mixed with professional camera footage and shown on displays during the event. The video upload is prioritized by matching requests of the event director with video metadata, while taking into account the available wireless network capacity. The proposed framework's main novelty is its scalability, supporting the real-time transmission, processing and display of videos recorded by hundreds of simultaneous users in ultra-dense Wi-Fi environments, as well as its proven integration in commercial production environments. The framework has been extensively validated in a controlled lab setting with up to 1 000 clients as well as in a field trial where 1 183 videos were collected from 135 participants recruited from an audience of 8 050 people. 90 % of those videos were uploaded within 6.8 minutes