On Applicability of Automated Planning for Incident Management

Incident management aims to save human lives, mitigate the effect of accidents, prevent damages, to mention a few of their benefits. Efficient coordination of rescue team members, allocation of available resources, and appropriate responses to the realtime unfolding of events is critical for managing incidents successfully. Coordination involves a series of decisions and event monitoring, usually made by human coordinators, for instance task definition, task assignment, risk assessment, etc. Each elementary decision can be described by a named action (e.g. boarding an ambulance, assigning a task). Taken as a whole, the team coordinating an incident response can be seen as a decision-making system. In this paper, we discuss how invaluable assistance can be brought to such a system using automated planning. In consultation with experts we have derived a set of requirements from which we provide a formal specification of the domain. Following the specification, we have developed a prototype domain model and evaluated it empirically. Here we present the results of this evaluation, along with several challenges (e.g uncertainty) that we have identifie

The queue GI/G/1: Finite moments of the cycle variables and uniform rates of convergence

AbstractWe study the classical single server queue and establish finite geometric moments and ϕ moments of the cycle variables. Here ϕ(x) = xnϕ0(x) where n is integer and ϕ0 is concave. More generally, we consider systems with different initial conditions and prove moment and stochastic domination results for the delay variables. This, together with the general results of [5], yields ergodic results for the time and customer dependent processes

Invariant transports of stationary random measures and mass-stationarity

We introduce and study invariant (weighted) transport-kernels balancing stationary random measures on a locally compact Abelian group. The first main result is an associated fundamental invariance property of Palm measures, derived from a generalization of Neveu's exchange formula. The second main result is a simple sufficient and necessary criterion for the existence of balancing invariant transport-kernels. We then introduce (in a nonstationary setting) the concept of mass-stationarity with respect to a random measure, formalizing the intuitive idea that the origin is a typical location in the mass. The third main result of the paper is that a measure is a Palm measure if and only if it is mass-stationary.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOP420 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Sharing emotions and space - empathy as a basis for cooperative spatial interaction

Boukricha H, Nguyen N, Wachsmuth I. Sharing emotions and space - empathy as a basis for cooperative spatial interaction. In: Kopp S, Marsella S, Thorisson K, Vilhjalmsson HH, eds. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2011). LNAI. Vol 6895. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer; 2011: 350-362.Empathy is believed to play a major role as a basis for humans’ cooperative behavior. Recent research shows that humans empathize with each other to different degrees depending on several modulation factors including, among others, their social relationships, their mood, and the situational context. In human spatial interaction, partners share and sustain a space that is equally and exclusively reachable to them, the so-called interaction space. In a cooperative interaction scenario of relocating objects in interaction space, we introduce an approach for triggering and modulating a virtual humans cooperative spatial behavior by its degree of empathy with its interaction partner. That is, spatial distances like object distances as well as distances of arm and body movements while relocating objects in interaction space are modulated by the virtual human’s degree of empathy. In this scenario, the virtual human’s empathic emotion is generated as a hypothesis about the partner’s emotional state as related to the physical effort needed to perform a goal directed spatial behavior

Identity in research infrastructure and scientific communication: Report from the 1st IRISC workshop, Helsinki Sep 12-13, 2011

Motivation for the IRISC workshop came from the observation that identity and digital identification are increasingly important factors in modern scientific research, especially with the now near-ubiquitous use of the Internet as a global medium for dissemination and debate of scientific knowledge and data, and as a platform for scientific collaborations and large-scale e-science activities.

The 1 1/2 day IRISC2011 workshop sought to explore a series of interrelated topics under two main themes: i) unambiguously identifying authors/creators & attributing their scholarly works, and ii) individual identification and access management in the context of identity federations. Specific aims of the workshop included:

• Raising overall awareness of key technical and non-technical challenges, opportunities and developments.
• Facilitating a dialogue, cross-pollination of ideas, collaboration and coordination between diverse – and largely unconnected – communities.
• Identifying & discussing existing/emerging technologies, best practices and requirements for researcher identification.

This report provides background information on key identification-related concepts & projects, describes workshop proceedings and summarizes key workshop findings

Poisson trees, succession lines and coalescing random walks

We give a deterministic algorithm to construct a graph with no loops (a tree or a forest) whose vertices are the points of a d-dimensional stationary Poisson process S, subset of R^d. The algorithm is independent of the origin of coordinates. We show that (1) the graph has one topological end --that is, from any point there is exactly one infinite self-avoiding path; (2) the graph has a unique connected component if d=2 and d=3 (a tree) and it has infinitely many components if d\ge 4 (a forest); (3) in d=2 and d=3 we construct a bijection between the points of the Poisson process and Z using the preorder-traversal algorithm. To construct the graph we interpret each point in S as a space-time point (x,r)\in\R^{d-1}\times R. Then a (d-1) dimensional random walk in continuous time continuous space starts at site x at time r. The first jump of the walk is to point x', at time r'>r, (x',r')\in S, where r' is the minimal time after r such that |x-x'|<1. All the walks jumping to x' at time r' coalesce with the one starting at (x',r'). Calling (x',r') = \alpha(x,r), the graph has vertex set S and edges {(s,\alpha(s)), s\in S}. This enables us to shift the origin of S^o = S + \delta_0 (the Palm version of S) to another point in such a way that the distribution of S^o does not change (to any point if d = 2 and d = 3; point-stationarity).Comment: 15 pages. Second version with minor correction