METEOR : exposure data classification, metadata population and confidence assessment. Report M3.2/P

This report describes a specific piece of work conducted by ImageCat as part of the METEOR (Modelling Exposure Through Earth Observation Routines) project, led by British Geological Survey (BGS) with collaborative partners Oxford Policy Management Limited (OPM), SSBN Limited, The Disaster Management Department, Office of the Prime Minister – Tanzania (DMD), The Global Earthquake Model Foundation (GEM), The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), ImageCat and the National Society for Earthquake Technology (NSET) – Nepal. The 3-year project was funded by UK Space Agency through their International Partnership Programme, details of which can be located in the Foreword, and was completed in 2021. The project aimed to provide an innovative solution to disaster risk reduction, through development of an innovative methodology of creating exposure data from Earth Observation (EO) imagery to identify development patterns throughout a country and provide detailed information when combined with population information. Level 1 exposure was developed for all 47 least developed countries on the OECD DAC list, referred to as ODA least-developed countries in the METEOR documentation, with open access to data and protocols for their development. New national detailed exposure and hazard datasets were also generated for the focus countries of Nepal and Tanzania and the impact of multiple hazards assessed for the countries. Training on product development and potential use for Disaster Risk Reduction was performed within these countries with all data made openly available on data platforms for wider use both within country and worldwide. This report (M3.2/P) is the second report generated by ImageCat for the work package EO data for exposure development (WP3) led by ImageCat. The other 7 METEOR work packages included, Project Management (WP1 – led by BGS), Monitoring and Evaluation (WP2 – led by OPM), Inputs and Validation (WP4 – led by HOT), Vulnerability and Uncertainty (WP5 - led by GEM), Multiple hazard impact (WP6 – led by BGS), Knowledge sharing (WP7 – led by GEM) and Sustainability and capacity building (WP8 – led by ImageCat)

Dialogue based interfaces for universal access.

Conversation provides an excellent means of communication for almost all people. Consequently, a conversational interface is an excellent mechanism for allowing people to interact with systems. Conversational systems are an active research area, but a wide range of systems can be developed with current technology. More sophisticated interfaces can take considerable effort, but simple interfaces can be developed quite rapidly. This paper gives an introduction to the current state of the art of conversational systems and interfaces. It describes a methodology for developing conversational interfaces and gives an example of an interface for a state benefits web site. The paper discusses how this interface could improve access for a wide range of people, and how further development of this interface would allow a larger range of people to use the system and give them more functionality

Volatile Decision Dynamics: Experiments, Stochastic Description, Intermittency Control, and Traffic Optimization

The coordinated and efficient distribution of limited resources by individual decisions is a fundamental, unsolved problem. When individuals compete for road capacities, time, space, money, goods, etc., they normally make decisions based on aggregate rather than complete information, such as TV news or stock market indices. In related experiments, we have observed a volatile decision dynamics and far-from-optimal payoff distributions. We have also identified ways of information presentation that can considerably improve the overall performance of the system. In order to determine optimal strategies of decision guidance by means of user-specific recommendations, a stochastic behavioural description is developed. These strategies manage to increase the adaptibility to changing conditions and to reduce the deviation from the time-dependent user equilibrium, thereby enhancing the average and individual payoffs. Hence, our guidance strategies can increase the performance of all users by reducing overreaction and stabilizing the decision dynamics. These results are highly significant for predicting decision behaviour, for reaching optimal behavioural distributions by decision support systems, and for information service providers. One of the promising fields of application is traffic optimization.Comment: For related work see http://www.helbing.or

It is Hobbes, not Rousseau:an experiment on voting and redistribution

We perform an experiment which provides a laboratory replica of some important features of the welfare state. In the experiment, all individuals in a group decide whether to make a costly effort, which produces a random (independent) outcome for each one of them. The group members then vote on whether to redistribute the resulting and commonly known total sum of earnings equally amongst themselves. This game has two equilibria, if played once. In one of them, all players make effort and there is little redistribution. In the other one, there is no effort and nothingWe thank Iris Bohnet, Tim Cason, David Cooper, John Duffy, Maia Guell, John Van Huyck and Robin Mason for helpful conversations and encouragement. The comments of the Editor and two referees helped improve the paper. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation under grants CONSOLIDER INGENIO 2010 CSD2006-0016 (all authors), ECO2009-10531 (Cabrales), ECO2008-01768 (Nagel) and the Comunidad de Madrid under grant Excelecon (Cabrales), the Generalitat de Catalunya and the CREA program (Nagel), and project SEJ2007-64340 of Spain’s Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Rodríguez Mora).Publicad

Occasional errors can benefit coordination

The chances solving a problem that involves coordination between people are increased by introducing robotic players that sometimes make mistakes. This finding has implications for real-world coordination problems

Geometric representations for minimalist grammars

We reformulate minimalist grammars as partial functions on term algebras for strings and trees. Using filler/role bindings and tensor product representations, we construct homomorphisms for these data structures into geometric vector spaces. We prove that the structure-building functions as well as simple processors for minimalist languages can be realized by piecewise linear operators in representation space. We also propose harmony, i.e. the distance of an intermediate processing step from the final well-formed state in representation space, as a measure of processing complexity. Finally, we illustrate our findings by means of two particular arithmetic and fractal representations.Comment: 43 pages, 4 figure

Test MaxEnt in Social Strategy Transitions with Experimental Two-Person Constant Sum 2×\times2 Games

By using laboratory experimental data, we test the uncertainty of social strategy transitions in various competing environments of fixed paired two-person constant sum $2 \times 2$ games. It firstly shows that, the distributions of social strategy transitions are not erratic but obey the principle of the maximum entropy (MaxEnt). This finding indicates that human subject social systems and natural systems could have wider common backgrounds.Comment: Keyward: game theory, experimental economics, MaxEnt, mixed strategy Nash Equilibrium, social dynamics, evolution, social state transition, evolutionary game theory, cycles; Result in Physics 201

The limit to behavioral inertia and the power of default in voluntary contribution games

It is well documented that people are reluctant to switch from a default option. We experimentally test the robustness of this behavioral inertia in a collective decision-making setting by varying the default option type and the decision-making environment. We examine the impacts of automatic-participation and no-participation default options on subjects’ participation in a public goods provision and their contributions. Two variants of public goods game are employed: the linear and the threshold public goods games. The study shows the evidence of partial stickiness rather than complete stickiness of default options as indicated in empirical studies. Our experimental results square with the evidence of behavioral inertia only when the automatic-participation default is used. This default boosts contributions in the linear public goods game but not in the threshold public goods game. The evidence of partial stickiness is robust to the variation of the game employed, but the effect on contribution is sensitive to it