Common Agency with Moral Hazard and Asymmetrically Informed Principals

In this paper, we analyze the equilibrium incentive schemes offered to an agent by two principals who can only observe correlated noisy signals of the one-dimensional action taken by the agent. We look at both cases when the two principals can or cannot cooperate in setting the terms of their incentive schemes. We show that minimizing the risk imposed on the agent may result in negative incentives being attached to the signal with the higher variation. We also find that under some conditions, the equilibrium e¤ort level is a non- monotonic function of the correlation coec cient of the two signals. When com- paring the power of the incentive schemes o¤ered by the two principals, we show that the principal with the higher valuation of the agent's e¤ort or the one observing a signal with smaller variance o¤ers more powerful incentives to the agent. Finally, we give an example of overprovision of e¤ort in the equilibrium with non-cooperating principals compared to the case of cooperating principals. This comes at the price of higher risk and welfare in former case is lower.Common Agency, Moral Hazard

Utilizing Statistical Dialogue Act Processing in Verbmobil

In this paper, we present a statistical approach for dialogue act processing in the dialogue component of the speech-to-speech translation system \vm. Statistics in dialogue processing is used to predict follow-up dialogue acts. As an application example we show how it supports repair when unexpected dialogue states occur.Comment: 6 pages; compressed and uuencoded postscript file; to appear in ACL-9

A Robust and Efficient Three-Layered Dialogue Component for a Speech-to-Speech Translation System

We present the dialogue component of the speech-to-speech translation system VERBMOBIL. In contrast to conventional dialogue systems it mediates the dialogue while processing maximally 50% of the dialogue in depth. Special requirements like robustness and efficiency lead to a 3-layered hybrid architecture for the dialogue module, using statistics, an automaton and a planner. A dialogue memory is constructed incrementally.Comment: Postscript file, compressed and uuencoded, 15 pages, to appear in Proceedings of EACL-95, Dublin

Crystal Structure of Thermotoga maritima α-Glucosidase AglA Defines a New Clan of NAD+-dependent Glycosidases

Glycoside hydrolase family 4 represents an unusual group of glucosidases with a requirement for NAD(+), divalent metal cations, and reducing conditions. The family is also unique in its inclusion of both alpha- and beta-specific enzymes. The alpha-glucosidase A, AglA, from Thermotoga maritima is a typical glycoside hydrolase family 4 enzyme, requiring NAD(+) and Mn2+ as well as strongly reducing conditions for activity. Here we present the crystal structure of the protein complexed with NAD(+) and maltose, refined at a resolution of 1.9 Angstrom. The NAD(+) is bound to a typical Rossman fold NAD(+)-binding site, and the nicotinamide moiety is localized close to the maltose substrate. Within the active site the conserved Cys-174 and surrounding histidines are positioned to play a role in the hydrolysis reaction. The electron density maps indicate that Cys-174 is oxidized to a sulfinic acid. Most likely, the strongly reducing conditions are necessary to reduce the oxidized cysteine side chain. Notably, the canonical set of catalytic acidic residues common to other glucosidases is not present in the active site. This, combined with a high structural homology to NAD-dependent dehydrogenases, suggests an unusual and possibly unique mechanism of action for a glycoside-hydrolyzing enzyme

The Approach to the Thermodynamic Limit in Lattice QCD at \mu\neq0

The expectation value of the complex phase factor of the fermion determinant is computed to leading order in the $p$-expansion of the chiral Lagrangian. The computation is valid for $\mu<m_\pi/2$ and determines the dependence of the sign problem on the volume and on the geometric shape of the volume. In the thermodynamic limit with $L_i \to \infty$ at fixed temperature $1/L_0$, the average phase factor vanishes. In the low temperature limit where $L_i/L_0$ is fixed as $L_i$ becomes large the average phase factor approaches one. The results for a finite volume compare well with lattice results obtained by Allton {\it et al}.. After taking appropriate limits, we reproduce previously derived results for the $\epsilon$-regime and for 1-dimensional QCD. The distribution of the phase itself is also computed.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure

Cross-Modal Health State Estimation

Individuals create and consume more diverse data about themselves today than any time in history. Sources of this data include wearable devices, images, social media, geospatial information and more. A tremendous opportunity rests within cross-modal data analysis that leverages existing domain knowledge methods to understand and guide human health. Especially in chronic diseases, current medical practice uses a combination of sparse hospital based biological metrics (blood tests, expensive imaging, etc.) to understand the evolving health status of an individual. Future health systems must integrate data created at the individual level to better understand health status perpetually, especially in a cybernetic framework. In this work we fuse multiple user created and open source data streams along with established biomedical domain knowledge to give two types of quantitative state estimates of cardiovascular health. First, we use wearable devices to calculate cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), a known quantitative leading predictor of heart disease which is not routinely collected in clinical settings. Second, we estimate inherent genetic traits, living environmental risks, circadian rhythm, and biological metrics from a diverse dataset. Our experimental results on 24 subjects demonstrate how multi-modal data can provide personalized health insight. Understanding the dynamic nature of health status will pave the way for better health based recommendation engines, better clinical decision making and positive lifestyle changes.Comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2018 Conference - Brave New Ideas, Seoul, Korea, ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5665-7/18/1

Gas Chromatography and Analysis of Binding Media of Museum Objects: A Historical Perspective

This contribution covers the major historic milestones of the evolution of gas chromatography (GC) from its beginnings to its current status as one of the most powerful analytical separation techniques, and demonstrates simultaneously how this technique has enabled and continuously improved the analysis of organic binding media in objects of cultural heritage. After an introduction into the basics of chromatography, the development of GC is traced from its emergence in the late 1800s as a mere preparative technique through a period of relative stagnation into the mid of the 20th century. Then, the 1950s are covered by highlighting the major advances in theory and technology within this decade, all of which contributed to firmly consolidate the status of GC as a modern analytical separation technique. From there the maturing of GC is followed through the 1960s up to the present days, a period being marked by the transition from packed to capillary columns; the essential adaptation of injection and detection devices; the replacement of glass by fused silica as column material; major progresses in stationary phase chemistry; and, finally, the advent of the hyphenation of GC with mass spectrometric detection devices. Throughout this survey, examples of applications of contemporary GC techniques to binding media analysis are discussed to provide an illustrative historic record of the continuous improvements achieved. The account will be closed with critical reflections on GC’s current relevance to and future role in the analysis of binding media in objects of cultural heritage.

Нелокальная задача с интегральными условиями для нелинейного уравнения в частных производных третьего порядка

Методом интегральных уравнений и сжимающих отображений доказана однозначная разрешимость нелокальной задачи с интегральными условиями для нелинейного уравнения в частных производных третьего порядка

Treatment of incomplete dialogues in a speech-to-speech translation system

For the speech-to-speech translation system verbmobil the dialogue component has the task of providing contextual information for other verbmobil subcomponents and to follow the flow of the dialogue. Since verbmobil operates on demand, only parts of the dialogue are processed using syntactic and semantic knowledge. Therefore, robustness with respect to incomplete structures is a basic requirement. We show the performance of the statistic prediction module and the planning module under such conditions