Mechanism design for distributed task and resource allocation among self-interested agents in virtual organizations

The aggregate power of all resources on the Internet is enormous. The Internet can be viewed as a massive virtual organization that holds tremendous amounts of information and resources with different ownerships. However, little is known about how to run this organization efficiently. This dissertation studies the problems of distributed task and resource allocation among self-interested agents in virtual organizations. The developed solutions are not allocation mechanisms that can be imposed by a centralized designer, but decentralized interaction mechanisms that provide incentives to self-interested agents to behave cooperatively. These mechanisms also take computational tractability into consideration due to the inherent complexity of distributed task and resource allocation problems. Targeted allocation mechanisms can achieve global task allocation efficiency in a virtual organization and establish stable resource-sharing communities based on agentsâÃÂàown decisions about whether or not to behave cooperatively. This high level goal requires solving the following problems: synthetic task allocation, decentralized coalition formation and automated multiparty negotiation. For synthetic task allocation, in which each task needs to be accomplished by a virtual team composed of self-interested agents from different real organizations, my approach is to formalize the synthetic task allocation problem as an algorithmic mechanism design optimization problem. I have developed two approximation mechanisms that I prove are incentive compatible for a synthetic task allocation problem. This dissertation also develops a decentralized coalition formation mechanism, which is based on explicit negotiation among self-interested agents. Each agent makes its own decisions about whether or not to join a candidate coalition. The resulting coalitions are stable in the core in terms of coalition rationality. I have applied this mechanism to form resource sharing coalitions in computational grids and buyer coalitions in electronic markets. The developed negotiation mechanism in the decentralized coalition formation mechanism realizes automated multilateral negotiation among self-interested agents who have symmetric authority (i.e., no mediator exists and agents are peers). In combination, the decentralized allocation mechanisms presented in this dissertation lay a foundation for realizing automated resource management in open and scalable virtual organizations

Time, space and being: towards the production of an architecture of representation (with a case-study design project in Chinatown San Francisco)

Archeo-Tec\u27s rediscovery of a historical ship in San Francisco provided a good starting for this project and its theoretical exploration. The found ship opens up and orients this discussion on architectural space, historical concern, and philosophical speculation of time, space and being. The encounter of time, space and being inspires the theoretic construction in this thesis from the start and pervades its presentation. In the course of inspecting their encounters, we are forced to face the most primary and basic problems of human existence and its most palpable production, architecture. These primordial concepts are themselves privileged to differentiate the theoretical categories of architectural historiography. The subsequent result is an examination and re-classification of the role that these primordial concepts play in a selected course of theory, from classicism, through functionalism, to post-functionalism. The exploration of such primordial notions, however, are not the end, but a process to be used to condition further discussion on representation which can be defined as the means of describing and reflecting the human world in verbal notational system, and production which refers to the postulation that the interactive world is capable of producing and reproducing itself in a non-verbal language. The notion of production throughout the thesis deals with the violation of the limit of subject and object, rather than their interaction. To enforce the ground of such theoretical exploration, three case-study projects are made in accordance with the gradation of categorized beings. These three cases are designed to cover the dialectical relationship between representation and production at different levels, which involve the perceptual world, historicity and architecture as totality respectively. The gradual unfolding of dialectical representation and production leads to the production of an architecture of representation, the final product in this thesis. This project broadens the prior discussions to the vision of architecture in context of discussions on biological perception, historical phenomenon, cultural identity, urban pattern and life, and linguistic analogy. The validity of this proposition is based on its broad investigation and navigation of the sea of contemporary theoretical discourse, in hopes of understanding the functionality and value of tradition

How Does the Overall Perceived Platform Quality Affect Consumers\u27 Willingness to Pay for Online Health Platform? A Perspective of Updated IS Success Model

How to motivate patients to purchase paid online health platform is important to the profitability of a platform operator. Based on updated IS success model, this paper establishes a research model to investigate the effects of perceived platform quality (including platform service quality, information quality and system quality) and consultation service quality (including consultation service benefit and consultation service risk) on consumers\u27 willingness to pay (WTP). Using SPSS and Smart PLS, we analyzed 409 data from an online health service platform in China. The results showed that perceived platform quality and consultation service benefit were positively correlated with consumers\u27 WTP. Conversely, consultation service risk affected consumers\u27 WTP negatively. Our study promotes the research from consumers\u27 using intention to consumers\u27 willingness to pay, as well as provides a guideline to help operators of online health platforms improve user payment rates

Electrochemical properties of a polylactide/polypyrrole composite and electrochemical synthesis of a free-standing polypyrrole membrane

Les polymères conducteurs sont fréquemment utilisés en génie biomédical pour la transmission de signaux électriques. Les objectifs de ce mémoire étaient d'évaluer l'électroactivité d'un composite de polymère conducteur, et d'explorer une nouvelle technique de synthèse d'une membrane mince à partir de ce polymère conducteur. L'effet de l'héparine comme dopant polyanionique sur l'électroactivité du composite a été évaluée par voltammétrie cyclique (CV) et comparée à l'effet des anions de chlore. Le composite dopé par héparine a été trouvé électriquement actif avec une stabilité améliorée de façon significative. Ces résultats confirment le potentiel de l'utilisation de ces composites conducteurs pour des applications biomédicales à long terme. Les membranes minces des polymères conducteurs sont généralement synthétisées par polymérisation électrochimique à la surface de l'électrode. Des membranes souples et autoportants de polypyrrole (PPy) et le copolymère de pyrrole et 1 -(2-carboxyéthyl)pyrrole (PPy/PPyCOOH) par électropolymérisation à l'interface air/liquide (electrolyte) ont été produites dans le cadre de ce mémoire. Ces membranes ont démontré une électroactivité stable pour un minimum de 200 balayages de CV. La membrane PPy/PPyCOOH a également démontré une importante activité d'oxydoréduction. Ces membranes peuvent être utilisées dans des biosenseurs ou des piles souples

Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation with Enhanced Decoder Input

Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models, which remove the dependence on previous target tokens from the inputs of the decoder, achieve significantly inference speedup but at the cost of inferior accuracy compared to autoregressive translation (AT) models. Previous work shows that the quality of the inputs of the decoder is important and largely impacts the model accuracy. In this paper, we propose two methods to enhance the decoder inputs so as to improve NAT models. The first one directly leverages a phrase table generated by conventional SMT approaches to translate source tokens to target tokens, which are then fed into the decoder as inputs. The second one transforms source-side word embeddings to target-side word embeddings through sentence-level alignment and word-level adversary learning, and then feeds the transformed word embeddings into the decoder as inputs. Experimental results show our method largely outperforms the NAT baseline~\citep{gu2017non} by $5.11$ BLEU scores on WMT14 English-German task and $4.72$ BLEU scores on WMT16 English-Romanian task.Comment: AAAI 201