Preface - LNCS Volume 10616

No abstract availabl

Implementation of Primary and Secondary Prevention Measures in Patients Following Acute Coronary Syndromes

Despite primary and secondary methods for the prevention of acute coronary syndromes, there is still poor patient and physician understanding of the importance of smoking cessation. Cardiovascular risk decreases significantly after smoking cessation, however, there is a paucity of counseling programs regarding this issue after hospitalization. Such programs have proved to be cost effective and should be provided as standard care

Strategies for repeated games with subsystem takeovers implementable by deterministic and self-stabilising automata

Systems of selfish-computers are subject to transient faults due to temporal malfunctions; just as the society is subjected to human mistakes. Game theory uses punishment for deterring improper behaviour. Due to faults, selfish-computers may punish well-behaved ones. This is one of the key motivations for forgiveness that follows any effective and credible punishment. Therefore, unplanned punishments must provably cease in order to avoid infinite cycles of unsynchronised behaviour of \u27tit for tat\u27. We investigate another aspect of these systems. We consider the possibility of subsystem takeover. The takeover may lead to joint deviations coordinated by an arbitrary selfish-computer that controls an unknown group of subordinate computers. We present strategies that deter the coordinator from deviating in infinitely repeated games. We construct deterministic automata that implement these strategies with optimal complexity. Moreover, we prove that all unplanned punishments eventually cease by showing that the automata can recover from transient faults

Game Authority for Robust and Scalable Distributed Selfish Computer Systems

Game theory analyzes social structures of agents that have freedomof choice within a moral code. The society allows freedom andselfishness within the moral code, which social structures enforce,i.e., legislative, executive, and judicial. Social rules encourage individualprofit from which the entire society gains. Distributed computersystems can improve their scalability and robustness by usingexplicit social structures. We propose using a game authority middlewarefor enforcing the moral code on selfish agents.The power of game theory is in predicting the game outcome forspecific assumptions. The prediction holds as long as the playerscannot tamper with the social structure, or change the rules of thegame, i.e., the prisoner cannot escape from prison in the classicalprisoner dilemma. Therefore, we cannot predict the game outcomewithout suitable assumptions on failures and honest selfishness

Game authority for robust and scalable distributed selfish-computer systems

Distributed algorithm designers often assume that system processes execute the same predefined software. Alternatively, when they do not assume that, designers turn to noncooperative games and seek an outcome that corresponds to a rough consensus when no coordination is allowed. We argue that both assumptions are inapplicable in many real distributed systems, e.g., the Internet, and propose designing self-stabilizing and Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed game authorities. Once established, the game authority can secure the execution of any complete information game. As a result, we reduce costs that are due to the processes\u27 freedom of choice. Namely, we reduce the price of malice. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved