Governmental Service Channel Positioning: History and Strategies for the Future

Governmental agencies have various service channels at their disposal for the service interactions with their citizens. The rise of the Internet as a service channel led many to believe the Internet would make all other service channels obsolete. Until now this expectation remains unfulfilled, as research discussed in this paper makes clear. All other channels still exist and the Internet in many cases did not lead to a decrease in the usage of other channels. Across the globe organizations are re-shaping their service channel mix, to find the optimal mix of service channels. This article reviews various historical phases in service channel positioning and discusses the strategies in use during the phases. The paper concludes with presenting a new multi-channel channel positioning strategy that combines private organization

Quantitative Results on Diophantine Equations in Many Variables

We consider a system of integer polynomials of the same degree with non-singular local zeros and in many variables. Generalising the work of Birch (1962) we find quantitative asymptotics (in terms of the maximum of the absolute value of the coefficients of these polynomials) for the number of integer zeros of this system within a growing box. Using a quantitative version of the Nullstellensatz, we obtain a quantitative strong approximation result, i.e. an upper bound on the smallest integer zero provided the system of polynomials is non-singular.Comment: Accepted for publication in Acta Arithmetica. Added a few pages so that familiarity with Birch's work is no longer assumed; 24 page

When is the Bloch-Okounkov q-bracket modular?

We obtain a condition describing when the quasimodular forms given by the Bloch-Okounkov theorem as $q$-brackets of certain functions on partitions are actually modular. This condition involves the kernel of an operator {\Delta}. We describe an explicit basis for this kernel, which is very similar to the space of classical harmonic polynomials.Comment: 12 pages; corrected typo

Channel Choice Determinants; an exploration of the factors that determine the choice of a service channel in citizen initiated contacts

Citizens have various service channels at their disposal to interact with governmental agencies. In this paper we explore citizens’ motives to choose a certain channel in a certain situation. We conducted a qualitative study to accumulate the most important behavioral determinants. Six groups of determinants were found; habit, channel characteristics, task characteristics, situational constraints, experiences and personal characteristics. People appear to generally follow two lines of decision making when choosing channels, the first is based on habits. When task complexity and ambiguity increase, people start reasoning and follow the second line; channel choice based on a thorough elaboration between task and channel characteristics

Postponing Branching Decisions

Solution techniques for Constraint Satisfaction and Optimisation Problems often make use of backtrack search methods, exploiting variable and value ordering heuristics. In this paper, we propose and analyse a very simple method to apply in case the value ordering heuristic produces ties: postponing the branching decision. To this end, we group together values in a tie, branch on this sub-domain, and defer the decision among them to lower levels of the search tree. We show theoretically and experimentally that this simple modification can dramatically improve the efficiency of the search strategy. Although in practise similar methods may have been applied already, to our knowledge, no empirical or theoretical study has been proposed in the literature to identify when and to what extent this strategy should be used.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

A New Approach to Probabilistic Programming Inference

We introduce and demonstrate a new approach to inference in expressive probabilistic programming languages based on particle Markov chain Monte Carlo. Our approach is simple to implement and easy to parallelize. It applies to Turing-complete probabilistic programming languages and supports accurate inference in models that make use of complex control flow, including stochastic recursion. It also includes primitives from Bayesian nonparametric statistics. Our experiments show that this approach can be more efficient than previously introduced single-site Metropolis-Hastings methods.Comment: Updated version of the 2014 AISTATS paper (to reflect changes in new language syntax). 10 pages, 3 figures. Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, JMLR Workshop and Conference Proceedings, Vol 33, 201