A Formal Separation Between Strategic and Nonstrategic Behavior

It is common in multiagent systems to make a distinction between "strategic" behavior and other forms of intentional but "nonstrategic" behavior: typically, that strategic agents model other agents while nonstrategic agents do not. However, a crisp boundary between these concepts has proven elusive. This problem is pervasive throughout the game theoretic literature on bounded rationality and particularly critical in parts of the behavioral game theory literature that make an explicit distinction between the behavior of "nonstrategic" level-0 agents and "strategic" higher-level agents (e.g., the level-k and cognitive hierarchy models). Overall, work discussing bounded rationality rarely gives clear guidance on how the rationality of nonstrategic agents must be bounded, instead typically just singling out specific decision rules and informally asserting them to be nonstrategic (e.g., truthfully revealing private information; randomizing uniformly). In this work, we propose a new, formal characterization of nonstrategic behavior. Our main contribution is to show that it satisfies two properties: (1) it is general enough to capture all purportedly "nonstrategic" decision rules of which we are aware in the behavioral game theory literature; (2) behavior that obeys our characterization is distinct from strategic behavior in a precise sense

Kevin R. Brown in a Senior Tenor Recital

This is the program for the Senior tenor recital of Kevin R. Brown. Mr. Brown was accompanied on the piano by Cindy Fuller. This recital took place on October 5, 2001, in the McBeth Recital Hall in the Mabee Fine Arts Center

Green investment strategies: a positive force in cities

Deterioration of urban neighborhoods is known to induce out migration, but how well do public investments to reverse decline actually work? To evaluate Philadelphia’s greening investment, researchers measured property buyers’ willingness to pay more—and found that greening works.Community development

Unequal evolutionary conservation of human protein interactions in interologous networks

The conservation of protein-protein interaction networks can be examined by mapping human proteins to yeast and other model organisms, revealing that protein complexes are preferentially conserved, and that such conservation can yield biological insights

Paper Session II-B - National Spaceport Testbed

The U.S. space industry continues to struggle to turn space business into successful business. Sensing this, both NASA and the state of Florida are exploring ideas for engaging their technological and economic resources in solving this grand challenge. This paper proposes just such an idea: a revolutionary new facility called the National Spaceport Testbed that would be dedicated to testing new space transportation technology. The one-of-a-kind testbed would allow space entrepreneurs to carry out ground and flight tests at reduced costs; allow NASA to apply resources to technical risk reduction; and allow Florida to attract and retain new space business

Snow depth measurement via time lapse photography and automated image recognition

January 2019.Includes bibliographical references.Seasonal snow is a crucial component of water supply in Colorado and the western United States. Measurement of snow accumulation through the winter and spring allows water managers to forecast water supply for the growing season and take actions to ease flooding and drought. The Natural Resources Conservation Service’s (NRCS) snow telemetry (SNOTEL) network provides real-time data at a high cost per station and at single points. An evaluation of existing field measurements of snow depth taken in 2009 and 2010 was undertaken to determine if fine resolution depth measurements are justified. Fassnacht et al. (in press) showed that the snow depth variability can be substantial even at fine resolution. However, these data required extensive labor to collect and only represented one measurement in time. A low-cost method to measure snow variability around these stations or in underrepresented areas could improve snow forecasts by quantifying the representativeness of data from the current network. To this end, we trialed a method combining time lapse photography and computer vision techniques to find snow depth at five sites in Colorado during water year 2018. Different site configurations were trialed, and a best operating procedure was determined. The data gathered were not more accurate than current ultrasonic or laser snow depth measurement technologies. However, the low cost and versatility of this method may make it more applicable in certain situations