Ensuring Trust in One Time Exchanges: Solving the QoS Problem

We describe a pricing structure for the provision of IT services that ensures trust without requiring repeated interactions between service providers and users. It does so by offering a pricing structure that elicits truthful reporting of quality of service (QoS) by providers while making them profitable. This mechanism also induces truth-telling on the part of users reserving the service

Goal-recognition-based adaptive brain-computer interface for navigating immersive robotic systems

© 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd. Objective. This work proposes principled strategies for self-adaptations in EEG-based Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) as a way out of the bandwidth bottleneck resulting from the considerable mismatch between the low-bandwidth interface and the bandwidth-hungry application, and a way to enable fluent and intuitive interaction in embodiment systems. The main focus is laid upon inferring the hidden target goals of users while navigating in a remote environment as a basis for possible adaptations. Approach. To reason about possible user goals, a general user-agnostic Bayesian update rule is devised to be recursively applied upon the arrival of evidences, i.e. user input and user gaze. Experiments were conducted with healthy subjects within robotic embodiment settings to evaluate the proposed method. These experiments varied along three factors: the type of the robot/environment (simulated and physical), the type of the interface (keyboard or BCI), and the way goal recognition (GR) is used to guide a simple shared control (SC) driving scheme. Main results. Our results show that the proposed GR algorithm is able to track and infer the hidden user goals with relatively high precision and recall. Further, the realized SC driving scheme benefits from the output of the GR system and is able to reduce the user effort needed to accomplish the assigned tasks. Despite the fact that the BCI requires higher effort compared to the keyboard conditions, most subjects were able to complete the assigned tasks, and the proposed GR system is additionally shown able to handle the uncertainty in user input during SSVEP-based interaction. The SC application of the belief vector indicates that the benefits of the GR module are more pronounced for BCIs, compared to the keyboard interface. Significance. Being based on intuitive heuristics that model the behavior of the general population during the execution of navigation tasks, the proposed GR method can be used without prior tuning for the individual users. The proposed methods can be easily integrated in devising more advanced SC schemes and/or strategies for automatic BCI self-adaptations

Children Base Their Investment on Calculated Pay-Off

To investigate the rise of economic abilities during development we studied children aged between 3 and 10 in an exchange situation requiring them to calculate their investment based on different offers. One experimenter gave back a reward twice the amount given by the children, and a second always gave back the same quantity regardless of the amount received. To maximize pay-offs children had to invest a maximal amount with the first, and a minimal amount with the second. About one third of the 5-year-olds and most 7- and 10-year-olds were able to adjust their investment according to the partner, while all 3-year-olds failed. Such performances should be related to the rise of cognitive and social skills after 4 years

Situation Calculus and Graph Based Defensive Modeling of Simultaneous Attacks

International audienceRecent attacks are better coordinated, difficult to discover, and inflict severe damages to networks. However, existing response systems handle the case of a single ongoing attack. This limitation is due to the lack of an appropriate model that describes coordinated attacks. In this paper, we address this limitation by presenting a new formal description of individual, coordinated, and concurrent attacks. Afterwards, we combine Graph Theory and our attack description in order to model attack graphs that cover the three attacks types. Finally, we show how to automatically generate these attack graphs using a logical approach based on Situation Calculus

Infrastructure Contracts: Trust and Institutional Updating

Contracts, Infrastructure, Institutions, Regulation, Trust, D02, C78, L14, L51, L78, L97,