A comparison of three interactive television AD formats

This study explores the effects of interacting with three current interactive television (iTV) ad formats, using an Australian audience panel. Interaction with iTV ads has positive effects on awareness and net positive thoughts, which increase purchase intentions compared with the influence of regular ads. The telescopic format represents the best format, likely because it makes the most of the entertaining possibilities of iTV by offering additional long-form video; its superior performance cannot be explained readily by self-selection effects. The results suggest that the effectiveness of iTV ads should be measured by their interaction rate rather than the much smaller response rate, and iTV advertisers should consider ways to maximize interaction and response rates

Country differences in technology experience: The effect of teletext on iTV adoption in the United Kingdom

This study found that participant’s previous teletext experience and previous iTV experience influenced their openness towards using interactive television in planning independent longhaul holidays. The study surveyed participants for their previous interactive media experience (internet, iTV and teletext) before viewing a linear or interactive television destination promotion. Two ad models (impulse and telescopic) were tested from two program formats (travel program segment and ad break in a lifestyle program). These were aired on a video-on-demand network in London (UK) with 164 people out of a total of 375 participating all the way to the final steps of the study. Participants were most experienced with the Internet (mean 6.29 on 1-7scale) and 50% had had experience with an interactive television provider other than the VOD network. 70% had experience with teletext. Overall, participants felt positively towards interactive television as an information source for holiday planning. Those with teletext experience or iTV experience were more open to iTV than those without such experience. Furthermore, actual interaction with the treatment seemed to moderate the previous experience – iTV attractiveness link. This demonstrated that although previous technology experiences can transfer to new media, the actual experience of using the new media is also a powerful factor

The Importance of Impasse Resolution Procedures to Recent Revisions of Wisconsin Public Sector Labor Law

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

A Response to "The Promise of ADR"

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Surface modes and breathers in finite arrays of nonlinear waveguides

We present the complete set of symmetric and antisymmetric (edge and corner) surface modes in finite one-- and two--dimensional arrays of waveguides. We provide classification of the modes based on the anti-continuum limit, study their stability and bifurcations, and discuss relation between surface and bulk modes. We put forward existence of surface breathers, which represent two-frequency modes localized about the array edges.Comment: Accepted for publication in Physical Review

The invariant imbedding equation for the dissipation function of a homogeneous finite slab

Differential-integral equation for dissipation function and derivation of conservation relationship connecting reflection, transmission and dissipation functions of finite sla

Bootstrapping Monte Carlo Tree Search with an Imperfect Heuristic

We consider the problem of using a heuristic policy to improve the value approximation by the Upper Confidence Bound applied in Trees (UCT) algorithm in non-adversarial settings such as planning with large-state space Markov Decision Processes. Current improvements to UCT focus on either changing the action selection formula at the internal nodes or the rollout policy at the leaf nodes of the search tree. In this work, we propose to add an auxiliary arm to each of the internal nodes, and always use the heuristic policy to roll out simulations at the auxiliary arms. The method aims to get fast convergence to optimal values at states where the heuristic policy is optimal, while retaining similar approximation as the original UCT in other states. We show that bootstrapping with the proposed method in the new algorithm, UCT-Aux, performs better compared to the original UCT algorithm and its variants in two benchmark experiment settings. We also examine conditions under which UCT-Aux works well.Comment: 16 pages, accepted for presentation at ECML'1

A linear theory for control of non-linear stochastic systems

We address the role of noise and the issue of efficient computation in stochastic optimal control problems. We consider a class of non-linear control problems that can be formulated as a path integral and where the noise plays the role of temperature. The path integral displays symmetry breaking and there exist a critical noise value that separates regimes where optimal control yields qualitatively different solutions. The path integral can be computed efficiently by Monte Carlo integration or by Laplace approximation, and can therefore be used to solve high dimensional stochastic control problems.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Accepted to PR