Cores of Cooperative Games in Information Theory

Cores of cooperative games are ubiquitous in information theory, and arise most frequently in the characterization of fundamental limits in various scenarios involving multiple users. Examples include classical settings in network information theory such as Slepian-Wolf source coding and multiple access channels, classical settings in statistics such as robust hypothesis testing, and new settings at the intersection of networking and statistics such as distributed estimation problems for sensor networks. Cooperative game theory allows one to understand aspects of all of these problems from a fresh and unifying perspective that treats users as players in a game, sometimes leading to new insights. At the heart of these analyses are fundamental dualities that have been long studied in the context of cooperative games; for information theoretic purposes, these are dualities between information inequalities on the one hand and properties of rate, capacity or other resource allocation regions on the other.Comment: 12 pages, published at http://www.hindawi.com/GetArticle.aspx?doi=10.1155/2008/318704 in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Special Issue on "Theory and Applications in Multiuser/Multiterminal Communications", April 200

Information Access in a Multilingual World: Transitioning from Research to Real-World Applications

Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) is at a turning point wherein substantial real-world applications are being introduced after fifteen years of research into cross-language information retrieval, question answering, statistical machine translation and named entity recognition. Previous workshops on this topic have focused on research and small- scale applications. The focus of this workshop was on technology transfer from research to applications and on what future research needs to be done which facilitates MLIA in an increasingly connected multilingual world

Harmonised Principles for Public Participation in Quality Assurance of Integrated Water Resources Modelling

The main purpose of public participation in integrated water resources modelling is to improve decision-making by ensuring that decisions are soundly based on shared knowledge, experience and scientific evidence. The present paper describes stakeholder involvement in the modelling process. The point of departure is the guidelines for quality assurance for `scientific` water resources modelling developed under the EU research project HarmoniQuA, which has developed a computer based Modelling Support Tool (MoST) to provide a user-friendly guidance and a quality assurance framework that aim for enhancing the credibility of river basin modelling. MoST prescribes interaction, which is a form of participation above consultation but below engagement of stakeholders and the public in the early phases of the modelling cycle and under review tasks throughout the process. MoST is a flexible tool which supports different types of users and facilitates interaction between modeller, manager and stakeholders. The perspective of using MoST for engagement of stakeholders e.g. higher level participation throughout the modelling process as part of integrated water resource management is evaluate

Improving the translation environment for professional translators

When using computer-aided translation systems in a typical, professional translation workflow, there are several stages at which there is room for improvement. The SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment) project investigated several of these aspects, both from a human-computer interaction point of view, as well as from a purely technological side. This paper describes the SCATE research with respect to improved fuzzy matching, parallel treebanks, the integration of translation memories with machine translation, quality estimation, terminology extraction from comparable texts, the use of speech recognition in the translation process, and human computer interaction and interface design for the professional translation environment. For each of these topics, we describe the experiments we performed and the conclusions drawn, providing an overview of the highlights of the entire SCATE project

Cross-concordances: terminology mapping and its effectiveness for information retrieval

The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded a major terminology mapping initiative, which found its conclusion in 2007. The task of this terminology mapping initiative was to organize, create and manage 'cross-concordances' between controlled vocabularies (thesauri, classification systems, subject heading lists) centred around the social sciences but quickly extending to other subject areas. 64 crosswalks with more than 500,000 relations were established. In the final phase of the project, a major evaluation effort to test and measure the effectiveness of the vocabulary mappings in an information system environment was conducted. The paper reports on the cross-concordance work and evaluation results.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, 11 tables, IFLA conference 200

Planning ahead with children with life-limiting conditions and their families : development, implementation and evaluation of ‘My Choices’

Background: The United Kingdom has led the world in the development of children’s palliative care. Over the past two decades, the illness trajectories of children with life-limiting conditions have extended with new treatments and better home-based care. Future planning is a critically under-researched aspect of children’s palliative care globally. This paper describes the development, implementation and evaluation of innovative child and parent-held palliative care planning resources. The resources were designed to facilitate parent and child thinking and engagement in future planning, and to determine care preferences and preferred locations of care for children with life-limiting conditions from diagnosis onwards. These resources fill a significant gap in palliative care planning before the end-of-life phase. Methods: Drawing on contemporaneous research on producing evidence-based children’s health information, we collaborated with leading children’s not-for-profit organisations, parents, children, and professionals. A set of resources (My Choices booklets) were developed for parents and children and evaluated using interviews (parents, children, professionals) and questionnaires (professionals) and an open web-based consultation. Results: Parents and children responded in three ways: Some used the booklets to produce detailed written plans with clear outcomes and ideas about how best to achieve desired outcomes. Others preferred to use the booklet to help them think about potential options. Remaining parents found it difficult to think about the future and felt there was no point because they perceived there to be no suitable local services. Professionals varied in confidence in their ability to engage with families to plan ahead and identified many challenges that prevented them from doing so. Few families shared their plans with professionals. Parents and children have far stronger preferences for home-care than professionals. Conclusion: The My Choices booklets were revised in light of findings, have been endorsed by Together for Short Lives, and are free to download in English and Welsh for use by parents and young people globally. More work needs to be done to support families who are not yet receptive to planning ahead. Professionals would benefit from more training in person-centred approaches to future planning and additional communications skills to increase confidence and ability to engage with families to deliver sensitive palliative care planning

Enabling preemptive multiprogramming on GPUs

GPUs are being increasingly adopted as compute accelerators in many domains, spanning environments from mobile systems to cloud computing. These systems are usually running multiple applications, from one or several users. However GPUs do not provide the support for resource sharing traditionally expected in these scenarios. Thus, such systems are unable to provide key multiprogrammed workload requirements, such as responsiveness, fairness or quality of service. In this paper, we propose a set of hardware extensions that allow GPUs to efficiently support multiprogrammed GPU workloads. We argue for preemptive multitasking and design two preemption mechanisms that can be used to implement GPU scheduling policies. We extend the architecture to allow concurrent execution of GPU kernels from different user processes and implement a scheduling policy that dynamically distributes the GPU cores among concurrently running kernels, according to their priorities. We extend the NVIDIA GK110 (Kepler) like GPU architecture with our proposals and evaluate them on a set of multiprogrammed workloads with up to eight concurrent processes. Our proposals improve execution time of high-priority processes by 15.6x, the average application turnaround time between 1.5x to 2x, and system fairness up to 3.4x.We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Alexan- der Veidenbaum, Carlos Villavieja, Lluis Vilanova, Lluc Al- varez, and Marc Jorda on their comments and help improving our work and this paper. This work is supported by Euro- pean Commission through TERAFLUX (FP7-249013), Mont- Blanc (FP7-288777), and RoMoL (GA-321253) projects, NVIDIA through the CUDA Center of Excellence program, Spanish Government through Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2011-0067) and Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through TIN2007-60625 and TIN2012-34557 projects.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft