Generating and Adapting to Diverse Ad-Hoc Cooperation Agents in Hanabi

Hanabi is a cooperative game that brings the problem of modeling other players to the forefront. In this game, coordinated groups of players can leverage pre-established conventions to great effect, but playing in an ad-hoc setting requires agents to adapt to its partner's strategies with no previous coordination. Evaluating an agent in this setting requires a diverse population of potential partners, but so far, the behavioral diversity of agents has not been considered in a systematic way. This paper proposes Quality Diversity algorithms as a promising class of algorithms to generate diverse populations for this purpose, and generates a population of diverse Hanabi agents using MAP-Elites. We also postulate that agents can benefit from a diverse population during training and implement a simple "meta-strategy" for adapting to an agent's perceived behavioral niche. We show this meta-strategy can work better than generalist strategies even outside the population it was trained with if its partner's behavioral niche can be correctly inferred, but in practice a partner's behavior depends and interferes with the meta-agent's own behavior, suggesting an avenue for future research in characterizing another agent's behavior during gameplay.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1907.0384

Mobile Application Development for Senior Citizens

Aged care is a significant issue which concerns all governments. In order to provide assistance and provide quality of life to senior citizens, enormous resources are invested by the government each year. A significant proportion of the investment is used to provide a range of services for senior citizens who stay at home. Since providing quality aged care is an ongoing and complex process, there is a desperate need to develop innovative solutions, which will benefit society at large. Although modern information technology products are changing the lifestyle of younger generations, they have much less impact on old people. This research therefore undertakes a novel study into the question of: What mobile applications can be developed on smartphone devices to improve senior citizens’ quality of lives. By using a requirement framework developed from the literature, this study also explored the availability and suitability of current mobile applications which are available from IPhone Application shops, Nokia OVI stores and other sources in order to identify possible directions for future mobile application development for aged care purposes

Mobile Information Systems In Australian Utility Companies

This research has investigated a broad range of issues associated with the use of mobile information systems in Australian utility companies. In particular, special consideration has been given to the existing infrastructure, business processes and information systems used in the participating organisations to support its field workers. This research has used a Technology, Organisation & People (TOP) multi-perspective model to conduct five case studies obtaining various technical, organisational and personal issues associated with the adoption of mobile information systems. These findings will help other large organisations to better manage their geographically distributed assets and workforce

Assessing data quality issues in the Emergency Department through data and process mapping

Data and information quality is a well-established research topic and gradually appears on the decision-makers\u27 top concern lists. Many studies have been conducted on how to investigate the generic data/information quality issues and factors by providing a high-level abstract framework or model. Based on these previous studies, this study tries to discuss the actual data quality issues with the operation-level and middle-level managers emerged during the emergency department data collection and reporting processes. By conduct data quality issues and business processes mapping, possible data quality issues are summarised under the well-known TOP model and the recommendations of data quality improvement are suggested.

Review of Individual differences in language learning: A complex systems theory perspective; Authors: Carol Griffiths, Adem Soruç; Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; ISBN: 978-3-030-52900-0; Pages: 220

Book Review: Individual differences in language learning: A complex systems theory perspective. Authors: Carol Griffiths, Adem Soruç. Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ISBN: 978-3-030-52900-0. Pages: 220

Shortest Path and Distance Queries on Road Networks: An Experimental Evaluation

Computing the shortest path between two given locations in a road network is an important problem that finds applications in various map services and commercial navigation products. The state-of-the-art solutions for the problem can be divided into two categories: spatial-coherence-based methods and vertex-importance-based approaches. The two categories of techniques, however, have not been compared systematically under the same experimental framework, as they were developed from two independent lines of research that do not refer to each other. This renders it difficult for a practitioner to decide which technique should be adopted for a specific application. Furthermore, the experimental evaluation of the existing techniques, as presented in previous work, falls short in several aspects. Some methods were tested only on small road networks with up to one hundred thousand vertices; some approaches were evaluated using distance queries (instead of shortest path queries), namely, queries that ask only for the length of the shortest path; a state-of-the-art technique was examined based on a faulty implementation that led to incorrect query results. To address the above issues, this paper presents a comprehensive comparison of the most advanced spatial-coherence-based and vertex-importance-based approaches. Using a variety of real road networks with up to twenty million vertices, we evaluated each technique in terms of its preprocessing time, space consumption, and query efficiency (for both shortest path and distance queries). Our experimental results reveal the characteristics of different techniques, based on which we provide guidelines on selecting appropriate methods for various scenarios.Comment: VLDB201

Validating a Data Quality Framework in Engineering Asset Management

Data Quality (DQ) has been an acknowledged issue for a long time. Several researchers have indicated that maintaining the quality of data is often acknowledged as problematic, but is also seen as critical to effective decision-making in engineering asset management (AM). The study presents an AM specific DQ framework, which aims to provide a comprehensive structure for understanding, identifying AM DQ problems in an organised way. The framework was examined in a preliminary case study of two large Australian engineering organisations. The empirical findings from the research were used to validate the proposed AM DQ framework. As AM data and informational needs are very different to a typical business environment, a gap exists in the availability of DQ solutions for engineering asset management. Thus there is a need for the development of DQ solutions for engineering asset management

Enterprise Metadata Management: Identifying Success Factors For Implementing Managed Metadata Environments

Managed metadata environments (MME) are being employed in organisations that need to assure a consistent and efficient capture, integration and delivery of enterprise metadata. Initiatives to implement a MME in an organisation may be a daunting endeavour and various information systems have evolved over time to support such environments. The expert study at hand used a multi-round Delphi research method in order to identify critical success factors of these initiatives. Out of the ten critical success factors nominated through the early rounds, nine factors were found to be very-toextremely important and one factor moderately important. The identified success factors can be used as a basis for implementation frameworks in metadata management initiatives. An effective and efficient metadata management system is one of the key components of data and information management, and can greatly aid organisations‟ efforts toward improved information quality and governanc

Towards A Process View on Critical Success Factors in Big Data Analytics Projects

The research tries to identify factors that are critical for a Big Data project’s success. In total 27 success factors could be identified throughout the analysis of these published case studies. Subsequently, to the identification the success factors were categorized according to their importance for the project’s success. During the categorization process 6 out of the 27 success factors were declared mission critical._x000D_ Besides this identification of success factors, this thesis provides a process model, as a suggested way to approach Big Data projects. The process model is divided into separate phases. In addition to a description of the tasks to fulfil, the identified success factors are assigned to the individual phases of the analysis process. _x000D_ Finally, this thesis provides a process model for Big Data projects and also assigns success factors to individual process stages, which are categorized according to their importance for the success of the entire project