Coarse correlation and coordination in a game:an experiment

In a coarse correlated equilibrium (Moulin and Vial 1978), each player finds it optimal to commit ex ante to the future outcome from a probabilistic correlation device instead of playing any strategy of their own. In this paper, we consider a specific two-person game with unique pure Nash and correlated equilibrium and test the concept of coarse correlated equilibrium with a device which is an equally weighted lottery over three symmetric outcomes in the game including the Nash equilibrium, with higher expected payoff than the Nash payoff (as in Moulin and Vial 1978). We also test an individual choice between a lottery over the same payoffs with equal probabilities and the sure payoff as in the Nash equilibrium of the game. Subjects choose the individual lottery, however, they do not commit to the device in the game and instead coordinate to play the Nash equilibrium. We explain this behaviour as an equilibrium in the game

Equilibrium Design by Coarse Correlation in Quadratic Games

In a public good provision or a public bad abatement situation, the non-cooperative interplay of the participants typically results in low levels of provision or abatement. In the familiar class of n-person quadratic games, we show that Coarse Correlated equilibria (CCEs) - simple mediated communication devices that do not alter the strategic structure of the game - can significantly outperform the Nash equilibrium in terms of the policy objective above

Nash versus coarse correlation

We run a laboratory experiment to test the concept of coarse correlated equilibrium (Moulin and Vial in Int J Game Theory 7:201-221, 1978), with a two-person game with unique pure Nash equilibrium which is also the solution of iterative elimination of strictly dominated strategies. The subjects are asked to commit to a device that randomly picks one of three symmetric outcomes (including the Nash point) with higher ex-ante expected payoff than the Nash equilibrium payoff. We find that the subjects do not accept this lottery (which is a coarse correlated equilibrium); instead, they choose to play the game and coordinate on the Nash equilibrium. However, given an individual choice between a lottery with equal probabilities of the same outcomes and the sure payoff as in the Nash point, the lottery is chosen by the subjects. This result is robust against a few variations. We explain our result as selecting risk-dominance over payoff dominance in equilibrium

XRFID: Design of an XML Based Efficient Middleware for RFID Systems

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology can automatically and inexpensively track items as they are moved through the supply chain. This can automate the whole updating and management system, thereby making the system work with a much smaller workforce and reducing the error that can occur because of interference by human beings. One of the major advantages RFID provides is that it does not require direct physical contact with the objects and also does not require the object to be placed in its ‘Line‐of‐ Sight’. This has given it an edge over other auto‐ identification systems, like bar‐codes. The recent proliferation of RFID tags and readers would require dedicated and very efficient middleware solutions that manage readers and process the vast amount of captured data according to the need of various applications. RFID middleware is the software sitting in between various RFID readers and the enterprise applications. Extracting meaningful information out of huge amount of scan data is a challenging task. In this paper we like to analyze the requirements and propose a design for such an RFID middleware. This paper demonstrates how to enable the middleware to handle a large amount of RFID scan data and execute business rules in real‐time. The conventional existing middleware solutions show dramatic degradation in their performance when the number of simultaneously working readers increases. Our proposed solution tries to recover from that situation also.  One of the major issues for large scale deployment of RFID systems is the design of a robust and flexible middleware system to interface various applications to the RFID readers. Most of the existing RFID middleware systems are costly, bulky, non‐portable and heavily dependent on the support software. Our work also provides flexibility for easy addition and removal of applications and hardware

Coarse correlated equilibria in an abatement game

We consider the well-analyzed abatement game (Barrett 1994) and prove that correlation among the players (nations) can strictly improve upon the Nash equilibrium payoffs. As these games are potential games, correlated equilibrium — CE — (Aumann 1974, 1987) cannot improve upon Nash; however we prove that coarse correlated equilibria — CCE — (Moulin and Vial 1978) may do so. We compute the largest feasible total utility and hence the efficiency gain in any CCE in those games: it is achieved by a lottery over only two pure strategy profiles

dmapply: A functional primitive to express distributed machine learning algorithms in R

ABSTRACT Due to R's popularity as a data-mining tool, many distributed systems expose an R-based API to users who need to build a distributed application in R. As a result, data scientists have to learn to use different interfaces such as RHadoop, SparkR, Revolution R's ScaleR, and HPE's Distributed R. Unfortunately, these interfaces are custom, nonstandard, and difficult to learn. Not surprisingly, R applications written in one framework do not work in another, and each backend infrastructure has spent redundant effort in implementing distributed machine learning algorithms. Working with the members of R-core, we have created ddR (Distributed Data structures in R), a unified system that works across different distributed frameworks. In ddR, we introduce a novel programming primitive called dmapply that executes functions on distributed data structures. The dmapply primitive encapsulates different computation patterns: from function and data broadcast to pair-wise communication. We show that dmapply is powerful enough to express algorithms that fit the statistical query model, which includes many popular machine learning algorithms, as well as applications written in MapReduce. We have integrated ddR with many backends, such as R's single-node parallel framework, multi-node SNOW framework, Spark, and HPE Distributed R, with few or no modifications to any of these systems. We have also implemented multiple machine learning algorithms which are not only portable across different distributed systems, but also have performance comparable to the "native" implementations on the backends. We believe that ddR will standardize distributed computing in R, just like the SQL interface has standardized how relational data is manipulated

Manpower Governance in Health Services in India by Developing Information Technology Infrastructure in Health

ABSTRACT Management of Knowledge workers in healthcare is KEYWORDS Attrition, Knowledge workforce, e-health, retention strategies ABBREVIATIONS Healthcare Information Technology (HIT ), Electronic Medical Record (EMR ), Health Information System (HIS) , Electronic Data Capture (EDC), Continuing Medical Education ( CME), Hospital Management Information Systems ( HMIS) Unique Health Identification Number (UHID) DESCRIPTION This manuscript describes the work done by the Healthcare Attrition Tracking Survey (HATS) conducted to evaluate the rate of attrition among Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics and healthcare administrators. About 2000 healthcare professionals were approached for the survey. Out of this, after elimination based on certain eligibility criteria, questionnaire was filled by 807 respondents. 40 hospitals including both private and public sectors in the rural and urban areas were included for this survey. Additionally, Focused Group Discussions (FGD) were also carried out to find out factors contributing to attrition. Next, plausible retention strategies were analyzed for knowledge workforce in healthcare. Data was analysed by means of Factor Analysis on Rotated Factor Matrix using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) in SPSS 16.0 package to determine the relationships between factors influencing attrition. Six factors of attrition namely Compensation and perks, Work Life Balance, Sense of Accomplishment, Work load leading to exhaustion,Need for automation and technology improvement, Break Monotony of Work have been identified with a data reliability of 0.809%. Simplification of processes using Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) tools is a suggested as a significant strategy to reduce stress at work, time spent on administrative work and focus on core competence by knowledge workers in healthcare thereby reducing rate of attrition. INTRODUCTION Health care industry relies a lot on advanced medical technology, but it is also a labor-intensive industry. Health care providers play a vital role in the health care system. As the Indian healthcare industry experiences phenomenal growth, hospitals are moving forward towards excellence rather than survival and gearing up to fulfill the gaps in three key areas of people, process and technology. In this paper, the terms "health care providers", "health care professionals", "health care knowledge workers " and "human resources for health" are used interchangeably, although "human resources for health" may comprise people other than those who have been trained in health-related field, such as health policy analysts, health planners, medical statisticians or ambulance drivers. Previous studies in the area of attrition have been carried out amongst physicians, nurses and pharmacists [1], 4. METHODOLOGY 4.1. DATA SOURCE Data for this study came from the second round of the Healthcare Attrition Tracking Survey (HATS). HATS is a part of the multi-level study of the ongoing research program conducted to address these issues regarding attrition among healthcare professionals and to determine if implementation of Health Information Technology in hospitals and healthcare centers can work as an effective retention strategy in India. HATS was conducted among skilled healthcare professionals such as doctors, paramedics, administrative and managerial staff in public as well as private hospitals covering rural and urban regions of Northern India. informatics ( IAMI) in Hyderabad, India (Nov. 2009). This was followed by a pre-test study conducted on 30 respondents in a leading 100 bedded Private Hospital in New Delhi, India. The second round of data collection led to the present paper using a complex sampling design of 40 Hospitals randomly selected to yield a non-biased representative sample of healthcare workforce both in rural and urban areas. Out of about over 2000 respondents surveyed, 807 finally respondents filled the questionnaire. The questionnaire tool was developed by the authors, reviewed by the experts in the field and then utilized for the HATS. The major challenge faced was to take permission from the HR authorities to conduct the survey due to issues of transparency of the system and its HR policies. STUDY DESIGN RESULTS An overall response rate of 40% was achieved in this study with a total of 1000 questionnaires distributed and 807 responses. The following illustrates the descriptive statistics of the various parameters considered for the HATS. Table III Comparison of the six factors of attrition DISCUSSION Results show a significant difference in attitudes towards factors affecting attrition. These attitudes together with nature of work and income are associated with an increased propensity for migration to another job. These findings support earlier such findings, that a broader set of both push and pull factors should be taken into consideration while considering attrition in healthcare [5]. The factors that have been identified through statistical analyses provide a deeper understanding of the relationships between forces that influence attrition rate. The results also provide evidence to demonstrate that economic motivation as a factor for changing jobs is not an independent, stand-alone factor in itself, but rather a component of broader factors that takes into consideration the yearning to improvise both developments in both professional and personal front. This finding is a departure from previous studies that indicate the intention of healthcare professionals to frequently change jobs and migration to foreign countries are mainly dependent on remuneration. This may be partly because those studies did not take into account the deeper analysis of relationships between factors [24]

Improving Abatement Levels and Welfare by Coarse Correlation in an Environmental Game

Coarse correlated equilibria (CCE, Moulin and Vial, 1978) can be used to substantially improve upon the Nash equilibrium solution of the well-analysed abatement game (Barrett, 1994). We show this by computing successively the CCE with the largest total utility, the one with the highest possible abatement levels and finally, the one with maximal abatement level while maintaining at least the level of utility from the Nash outcome

High-Performance Computing for SKA Transient Search: Use of FPGA based Accelerators -- a brief review

This paper presents the High-Performance computing efforts with FPGA for the accelerated pulsar/transient search for the SKA. Case studies are presented from within SKA and pathfinder telescopes highlighting future opportunities. It reviews the scenario that has shifted from offline processing of the radio telescope data to digitizing several hundreds/thousands of antenna outputs over huge bandwidths, forming several 100s of beams, and processing the data in the SKA real-time pulsar search pipelines. A brief account of the different architectures of the accelerators, primarily the new generation Field Programmable Gate Array-based accelerators, showing their critical roles to achieve high-performance computing and in handling the enormous data volume problems of the SKA is presented here. It also presents the power-performance efficiency of this emerging technology and presents potential future scenarios.Comment: Accepted for JoAA, SKA Special issue on SKA (2022