Hire the Experts: Combinatorial Auction Based Scheme for Experts Selection in E-Healthcare

During the last decade, scheduling the healthcare services (such as staffs and OTs) inside the hospitals have assumed a central role in healthcare. Recently, some works are addressed in the direction of hiring the expert consultants (mainly doctors) for the critical healthcare scenarios from outside of the medical unit, in both strategic and non-strategic settings under monetary and non-monetary perspectives. In this paper, we have tried to investigate the experts hiring problem with multiple patients and multiple experts; where each patient reports a preferred set of experts which is private information alongwith their private cost for consultancy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first step in the direction of modeling the experts hiring problem in the combinatorial domain. In this paper, the combinatorial auction based scheme is proposed for hiring experts from outside of the hospitals to have expertise by the preferred doctors set to the patients.Comment: 7 Page

A mechanism design framework for hiring experts in e-healthcare

We investigate the problem of hiring experts (motivated socially and monetarily) from outside of the hospital(s) in e-healthcare through the lens of mechanism design with and without money. This paper presents the mechanisms that handle the following scenarios: 1) Multiple patients and multiple experts with patients having zero budget, 2) Single or multiple patients and multiple experts with patient(s) having some positive budget. In this paper, for the first scenario, we have proposed algorithms based on the theory of mechanism design without money that satisfies several economic properties such as truthfulness, pareto optimality, and core allocation. Considering the second scenario, the truthful and budget feasible mechanisms are proposed. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate our proposed mechanismsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A budget feasible mechanism for hiring doctors in e-healthcare

(c) 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Throughout the past decade, there has been an extensive research on scheduling the hospital resources such as the operation theatre(s) (OTs) and the experts (such as nurses, doctors etc.) inside the hospitals. With the technological growth, mainly advancement in communication media (such as smart phones, video conferencing, smart watches etc.) one may think of taking the expertise by the doctors (distributed around the globe) from outside the in-house hospitals. Earlier this interesting situation of hiring doctors from outside the hospitals has been studied from monetary (with patient having infinite budget) and non-monetary perspectives in strategic setting. In this paper, the more realistic situation is studied in terms of hiring the doctors from outside the hospital when a patient is constrained by budget. Our proposed mechanisms follow the two pass mechanism design framework each consisting of allocation rule and payment rule. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate our proposed mechanisms.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A budget feasible mechanism for hiring doctors in e-healthcare

(c) 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.Throughout the past decade, there has been an extensive research on scheduling the hospital resources such as the operation theatre(s) (OTs) and the experts (such as nurses, doctors etc.) inside the hospitals. With the technological growth, mainly advancement in communication media (such as smart phones, video conferencing, smart watches etc.) one may think of taking the expertise by the doctors (distributed around the globe) from outside the in-house hospitals. Earlier this interesting situation of hiring doctors from outside the hospitals has been studied from monetary (with patient having infinite budget) and non-monetary perspectives in strategic setting. In this paper, the more realistic situation is studied in terms of hiring the doctors from outside the hospital when a patient is constrained by budget. Our proposed mechanisms follow the two pass mechanism design framework each consisting of allocation rule and payment rule. Through simulations, we evaluate the performance and validate our proposed mechanisms.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Game Theoretic Framework for Surplus Food Distribution in Smart Cities and Beyond

Food waste is a major challenge for the present world. It is the precursor to several socioeconomic problems that are plaguing the modern society. To counter the same and to, simultaneously, stand by the undernourished, surplus food redistribution has surfaced as a viable solution. Information and Communications Technology (ICT)-mediated food redistribution is a highly scalable approach and it percolates into the masses far better. Even if ICT is not brought into the picture, the presence of food surplus redistribution in developing countries like India is scarce and is limited to only a few of the major cities. The discussion of a surplus food redistribution framework under strategic settings is a less discussed topic around the globe. This paper aims at addressing a surplus food redistribution framework under strategic settings, thereby facilitating a smoother exchange of surplus food in the smart cities of developing countries, and beyond. As ICT is seamlessly available in smart cities, the paper aims to focus the framework in these cities. However, this can be extended beyond the smart cities to places with greater human involvement.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures, 5 table

An auction framework for DaaS in cloud computing and its evaluation

Data-as-a-service (DaaS) is the next emerging technology in cloud computing research. Small clouds operating as a group may exploit the DaaS efficiently to perform the substantial amount of work. In this paper, an auction framework is studied and evaluated when the small clouds are strategic in nature. We present the system model and formal definition of the problem and its experimental evaluation. Several auction DaaS-based mechanisms are proposed and their correctness and computational complexity is analysed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first and realistic attempt to study the DaaS in a strategic setting. We have evaluated the proposed approach under various simulation scenarios to judge on its usefulness and efficiencyPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Bayesian Inference in MANTID - An Update

In the context of neutron science, Bayesian inference methods have been recently implemented within the MANTID framework [Monserrat D et al. 2015 J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 663 012009 (2015)]. In this contribution, we highlight the advantages of this software package for robust data analysis and subsequent model selection. To this end, we use the celebrated Rosenbrock function to illustrate its merits and strengths relative to classical fitting algorithms. We also introduce the latest additions implemented in MANTID, with a view to increasing its user friendliness as well as stimulating wider use. These include simulated-annealing schemes to reduce the need for initial guesses, as well as new options for multidimensional fitting. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A budget feasible peer graded mechanism for iot-based crowdsourcing

We develop and extend a line of recent works on the design of mechanisms for heterogeneous tasks assignment problem in ’crowdsourcing’. The budgeted market we consider consists of multiple task requesters and multiple IoT devices as task executers. In this, each task requester is endowed with a single distinct task along with the publicly known budget. Also, each IoT device has valuations as the cost for executing the tasks and quality, which are private. Given such scenario, the objective is to select a subset of IoT devices for each task, such that the total payment made is within the allotted quota of the budget while attaining a threshold quality. For the purpose of determining the unknown quality of the IoT devices we have utilized the concept of peer grading. In this paper, we have carefully crafted a truthful budget feasible mechanism for the problem under investigation that also allows us to have the true information about the quality of the IoT devices. Further, we have extended the set-up considering the case where the tasks are divisible in nature and the IoT devices are working collaboratively, instead of, a single entity for executing each task. We have designed the budget feasible mechanisms for the extended versions. The simulations are performed in order to measure the efficacy of our proposed mechanismPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft