Learning Not to Spoof

As intelligent trading agents based on reinforcement learning (RL) gain prevalence, it becomes more important to ensure that RL agents obey laws, regulations, and human behavioral expectations. There is substantial literature concerning the aversion of obvious catastrophes like crashing a helicopter or bankrupting a trading account, but little around the avoidance of subtle non-normative behavior for which there are examples, but no programmable definition. Such behavior may violate legal or regulatory, rather than physical or monetary, constraints. In this article, I consider a series of experiments in which an intelligent stock trading agent maximizes profit but may also inadvertently learn to spoof the market in which it participates. I first inject a hand-coded spoofing agent to a multi-agent market simulation and learn to recognize spoofing activity sequences. Then I replace the hand-coded spoofing trader with a simple profit-maximizing RL agent and observe that it independently discovers spoofing as the optimal strategy. Finally, I introduce a method to incorporate the recognizer as normative guide, shaping the agent's perceived rewards and altering its selected actions. The agent remains profitable while avoiding spoofing behaviors that would result in even higher profit. After presenting the empirical results, I conclude with some recommendations. The method should generalize to the reduction of any unwanted behavior for which a recognizer can be learned

Utilizing the history of accounting to improve communication skills

During recent years, many comments have been made regarding the lack of good written and oral communication skills of entry level accountants. Accounting academicians realize that there is a weakness in the communications area. Many professors do not feel, however, that they have sufficient time to address the area of communication skills in the present undergraduate accounting courses because it is difficult just having time to cover technical accounting material. To increase accounting knowledge and at the same time improve communications skills were the objectives of an intersession course for accounting students which was offered between semesters as a one hour elective. The course met 3 hours a day for 5 days and was aimed at accounting juniors and seniors

Tube Current Modulated Computed Tomography Effective Dose and Size Specific Organ Dose Estimates with ImPACT: Total Scan versus Slice by Slice Parameters for Urogram Protocols

Purpose: One of the predominant computed tomography (CT) dosimetry estimation programs, ImPACT, was not designed to estimate organ absorbed dose or effective dose for modern tube current modulated-CT (TCM-CT). ImPACT also only estimates organ doses for a standard adult hermaphrodite mathematical phantom, not for a specific patient. Two methods for calculating size specific TCM-CT organ absorbed dose and non-size dependent TCM-CT effective dose were developed and compared with conventional dose estimation methods. Methods: A sample of 48 TCM-CT urogram procedures was obtained. Patient specific dose was calculated for each data set by two methods. The first method was a summation of slice by slice (localized) parameter estimates. Parameters from each slice were input separately in ImPACT the output organ dose and effective dose were recorded. The organ dose was then multiplied by a size dependent conversion factor to acquire a size specific organ dose. Then the size specific organ doses and the slice effective doses were summed over all slices to calculate the total organ doses and effective dose. The second method estimated doses based on global scan parameters. The effective dose was calculated with global average scan parameters in ImPACT. The output organ doses were multiplied by the average size dependent conversion factor to get the size dependent organ doses. The organ doses were then compared with a non-size adjusted method and the effective doses with a conventional k-factor method. Results: The two size dependent organ dose estimation methods fell within acceptable difference criteria when compared directly with each other. The three effective dose estimation methods also fell within the criteria. Conclusion: These results suggested that using the global parameter method is acceptable for calculating effective dose and patient specific organ doses for TCM-CT urogram protocols