Value-Based Policy Teaching with Active Indirect Elicitation

Many situations arise in which an interested party's utility is dependent on the actions of an agent; e.g., a teacher is interested in a student learning effectively and a firm is interested in a consumer's behavior. We consider an environment in which the interested party can provide incentives to affect the agent's actions but cannot otherwise enforce actions. In value-based policy teaching, we situate this within the framework of sequential decision tasks modeled by Markov Decision Processes, and seek to associate limited rewards with states that induce the agent to follow a policy that maximizes the total expected value of the interested party. We show value-based policy teaching is NP-hard and provide a mixed integer program formulation. Focusing in particular on environments in which the agent's reward is unknown to the interested party, we provide a method for active indirect elicitation wherein the agent's reward function is inferred from observations about its response to incentives. Experimental results suggest that we can generally find the optimal incentive provision in a small number of elicitation rounds.Engineering and Applied Science

E-COMMERCE EVALUATION AND E BUSINESS TRENDS

E-Commerce in recent times has exploded many folds due to the invention of new Information and Communication (ICT) technologies and applications. Business models of today are highly depending upon internet based transaction and trading platforms, use of Web portals and mobile applications. Proposition of new business models sans the inclusion of internet and their application has become almost impossible for business. Business data pertaining to E Commerce has become highly valuable in recent times. Social networking websites, sharing of product data and its reviews in blogs paves ways for promoting business in new methods. There is need to develop metrics to assess the strength of E Commerce penetration in Business and also evaluate the various E Commerce platforms. Use of E business tools for data analysis, prediction and decision making has become the latest order of the day. Changing trends in E business has a drastic impact on the organizations depending upon internet based applications for handling its business processes and day to day transactions.E-Commerce in recent times has exploded many folds due to the invention of new Information and Communication (ICT) technologies and applications. Business models of today are highly depending upon internet based transaction and trading platforms, use of Web portals and mobile applications. Proposition of new business models sans the inclusion of internet and their application has become almost impossible for business. Business data pertaining to E Commerce has become highly valuable in recent times. Social networking websites, sharing of product data and its reviews in blogs paves ways for promoting business in new methods. There is need to develop metrics to assess the strength of E Commerce penetration in Business and also evaluate the various E Commerce platforms. Use of E business tools for data analysis, prediction and decision making has become the latest order of the day. Changing trends in E business has a drastic impact on the organizations depending upon internet based applications for handling its business processes and day to day transactions

Online Food Retailing: Is Market Segmentation The Key To Success?

The online grocery business was one of many e-commerce opportunities from the late 1990s that was full of promise and resulted in disappointment. Based on a review of current literature and telephone surveys with managers from a number of the top 10 retail grocers in the United States, the importance of market segmentation emerges. Technology is less of an issue than several years ago. The reality of the online grocery business as a niche market has sunk in.  Enormous data warehouses with customer data are now ready to be analyzed. Market segmentation is now both possible and critical for the near future to identify how to define and implement a profitable online grocery presence

Competition and cooperation: Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals

The conversion of scholarly journals to digital format is proceeding rapidly, especially for those from large commercial and learned society publishers. This conversion offers the best hope for survival for such publishers. The infamous "journal crisis" is more of a library cost crisis than a publisher pricing problem, with internal library costs much higher than the amount spent on purchasing books and journals. Therefore publishers may be able to retain or even increase their revenues and profits, while at the same time providing a superior service. To do this, they will have to take over many of the function of libraries, and they can do that only in the digital domain. This paper examines publishers' strategies, how they are likely to evolve, and how they will affect libraries

Bitcoin: the wrong implementation of the right idea at the right time

This paper is a study into some of the regulatory implications of cryptocurrencies using the CAMPO research framework (Context, Actors, Methods, Methods, Practice, Outcomes). We explain in CAMPO format why virtual currencies are of interest, how self-regulation has failed, and what useful lessons can be learned. We are hopeful that the full paper will produce useful and semi-permanent findings into the usefulness of virtual currencies in general, block chains as a means of mining currency, and the profundity of current ‘media darling’ currency Bitcoin as compared with the development of block chain generator Ethereum. While virtual currencies can play a role in creating better trading conditions in virtual communities, despite the risks of non-sovereign issuance and therefore only regulation by code (Brown/Marsden 2013), the methodology used poses significant challenges to researching this ‘community’, if BitCoin can even be said to have created a single community, as opposed to enabling an alternate method of exchange for potentially all virtual community transactions. First, BitCoin users have transparency of ownership but anonymity in many transactions, necessary for libertarians or outright criminals in such illicit markets as #SilkRoad. Studying community dynamics is therefore made much more difficult than even such pseudonymous or avatar based communities as Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft or SecondLife. The ethical implications of studying such communities raise similar problems as those of Tor, Anonymous, Lulzsec and other anonymous hacker communities. Second, the journalistic accounts of BitCoin markets are subject to sensationalism, hype and inaccuracy, even more so than in the earlier hype cycle for SecondLife, exacerbated by the first issue of anonymity. Third, the virtual currency area is subject to slowly emerging regulation by financial authorities and police forces, which appears to be driving much of the early adopter community ‘underground’. Thus, the community in 2016 may not bear much resemblance to that in 2012. Fourth, there has been relatively little academic empirical study of the community, or indeed of virtual currencies in general, until relatively recently. Fifth, the dynamism of the virtual currency environment in the face of the deepening mistrust of the financial system after the 2008 crisis is such that any research conclusions must by their nature be provisional and transient. All these challenges, particularly the final three, also raise the motivation for research – an alternative financial system which is separated from the real-world sovereign and which can use code regulation with limited enforcement from offline policing, both returns the study to the libertarian self-regulated environment of early 1990s MUDs, and offers a tantalising prospect of a tool to evade the perils of ‘private profit, socialized risk’ which existing large financial institutions created in the 2008-12 disaster. The need for further research into virtual currencies based on blockchain mining, and for their usage by virtual communities, is thus pressing and should motivate researchers to solve the many problems in methodology for exploring such an environment

Spartan Daily, March 10, 1959

Volume 46, Issue 87https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/3866/thumbnail.jp

PUBLIC OPINION ANALYSIS BASED ON PROBABILISTIC TOPIC MODELING AND DEEP LEARNING

With the rapid development of Internet, especially the social media technologies, the public have gradually published their perception of social events online through social media. In Web2.0 era, with the concept of extensive participation of public in social-event-related information sharing, the effective content analysis and better results presentation for these media published online thus possesses significant importance for public opinion analysis and monitoring. In view of this, this paper proposes a novel method for public opinion analysis on social media website. First, the probabilistic topic model of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is adopted to extract the public ideas about the distinct topics of certain event, and then the deep learning model named word2vec is used to calculate the emotional intensity for each text. Next, the underlying themes in the whole as well as the events of emotional intensity are investigated, and the variation trend of public’s emotion intensities is tracked based on time series analysis. Finally, the rationality and effectiveness of the method are verified with the analysis of a real case

The WTO: A Train Wreck in Progress?

This article argues that the WTO entrenches an asymmetrical, non-reciprocal trading system that benefits multi-national corporations especially, at the expense of industrial workers, farmers, and a wide range of business enterprises. It argues that the WTO doesn\u27t deserve to survive in its present, unbalanced, and unsustainable form, and that it is doubtful that its voting regime, accumulated asymmetries, and overall rigidity can be overhauled. The author posits that bilateral and regional trade bargaining will become increasingly important and that world market forces are likely to bypass, and perhaps overwhelm, the WTO