137 research outputs found
Truthful Online Scheduling with Commitments
We study online mechanisms for preemptive scheduling with deadlines, with the
goal of maximizing the total value of completed jobs. This problem is
fundamental to deadline-aware cloud scheduling, but there are strong lower
bounds even for the algorithmic problem without incentive constraints. However,
these lower bounds can be circumvented under the natural assumption of deadline
slackness, i.e., that there is a guaranteed lower bound on the ratio
between a job's size and the time window in which it can be executed.
In this paper, we construct a truthful scheduling mechanism with a constant
competitive ratio, given slackness . Furthermore, we show that if is
large enough then we can construct a mechanism that also satisfies a commitment
property: it can be determined whether or not a job will finish, and the
requisite payment if so, well in advance of each job's deadline. This is
notable because, in practice, users with strict deadlines may find it
unacceptable to discover only very close to their deadline that their job has
been rejected
Scene Graph to Image Generation with Contextualized Object Layout Refinement
Generating images from scene graphs is a challenging task that attracted
substantial interest recently. Prior works have approached this task by
generating an intermediate layout description of the target image. However, the
representation of each object in the layout was generated independently, which
resulted in high overlap, low coverage, and an overall blurry layout. We
propose a novel method that alleviates these issues by generating the entire
layout description gradually to improve inter-object dependency. We empirically
show on the COCO-STUFF dataset that our approach improves the quality of both
the intermediate layout and the final image. Our approach improves the layout
coverage by almost 20 points and drops object overlap to negligible amounts.Comment: To appear at IEEE International Conference in Image Processing (ICIP)
202
Does Medical Risk Perception and Risk Taking Change with Age?
Across adulthood, people face increasingly more risky medical problems and decisions. However, little is known about changes in medical risk taking across adulthood. Therefore, the current crossāsectional study investigated ageārelated differences in medical risk taking with N = 317 adults aged 20ā77 years using newly developed scenarios to assess medical risk taking, and additional measures designed to evaluate riskātaking behavior in the medical domain. Greater expected benefits on the DomaināSpecific RiskāTaking ScaleāMedical (DOSPERTāM) predicted more active risk taking, whereas higher perceived risk predicted less active risk taking. Next, we examined differences in active and passive risk taking, where passive risk taking refers to risk taking that is associated with inaction. Age was associated with less passive risk taking, but not with active risk taking, risk perception, or expected benefits on the DOSPERTāM. Participants were overall more likely to opt for taking medical action than not, even more so for a scenario about a vaccine for a deadly flu than for a scenario about a chemotherapy treatment for cancer. Overall, participants were more likely to accept medication (vaccine or chemotherapy) for their child than for themselves. Increasing age was associated with a lower likelihood of accepting the treatment or vaccine for oneself. Taken together, our study provides important insights about changes in medical risk taking across adulthood when people face an increasing number of complex and risky medical decisions
Perception of Risk for Older Adults: Differences in Evaluations for Self versus Others and across Risk Domains
Background and Objectives: Proxy decision-making may be flawed by inaccurate perceptions of risk. This may be particularly true when older adults are the targets of the decisions, given the pervasive negative stereotypes about older adults. Methods: In study 1, individuals aged 18- to 87 years (as target persons) as well as one of their close social partners (as informants) reported on the risks they perceived for the target person in various life domains. Study 2 additionally explored potential differences in how people make risky decisions on behalf of younger and older adult targets. Younger (age 18ā35 years) and older (age 60ā81 years) adults (as target persons of the risk evaluations) as well as informants reported on risk perceptions and the likelihood of risk-taking for health, financial, and social scenarios concerning the target persons. Congruence between self-rated and informant-rated risk perceptions and risk-taking were computed on a dyadic as well as a group level. Results: Informantsā risk perceptions were positively associated with the risks their partners perceived for themselves. Informants and their partners agreed that social risks vary little across adulthood, but they disagreed in terms of recreational, financial, and health risks, and in terms of the decisions they would make. Conclusion: Family members, partners, and close friends are sensitive to vulnerabilities of their social partners, but in some domains and according to their partnersā age they perceive a greater (or smaller) risk than their partners perceive for themselves. In situations requiring surrogate decision-making, people may decide differently from how their social partners would decide for themselves
Investigation of the Microstructural and Thermoelectric Properties of the (GeTe)0.95(Bi2Te3)0.05 Composition for Thermoelectric Power Generation Applications
In the frame of the current research, the p-type Bi2Te3 doped (GeTe)(0.95)(Bi2Te3)(0.05) alloy composed of hot pressed consolidated submicron structured powder was investigated. The influence of the process parameters (i.e., powder particles size and hot pressing conditions) on both reduction of the lattice thermal conductivity and electronic optimization is described in detail. Very high maximal ZT values of up to similar to 1.6 were obtained and correlated to the microstructural characteristics. Based on the various involved mechanisms, a potential route for further enhancement of the ZT values of the investigated composition is proposed.EC, FP7 PowerDriver Projec
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