How Do Legal Differences and Learning Affect Financial Contracts?

We analyze venture capital (VC) investments in twenty-three non-U.S. countries and compare them to U.S. VC investments. We describe how the contracts allocate cash flow, board, liquidation, and other control rights. In univariate analyses, contracts differ across legal regimes. However, more experienced VCs implement U.S.-style contracts regardless of legal regime. In most specifications, legal regime becomes insignificant controlling for VC sophistication. VCs who use U.S.-style contracts fail significantly less often. The results suggest that U.S.-style contracts are efficient across a wide range of legal regimes. The evolution of contracts is consistent with financial contracting theories and costly learning.Venture capital; Financial contracting; Law and finance; Corporate governance

Motivational principles for visual know-how development

What dynamics can enable a robot to continuously develop new visual know-how? We present a first experimental investigation where an AIBO robot develops visual competences from scratch driven only by internal motivations. The motivational principles used by the robot are independent of any particular task. As a consequence, they can constitute the basis for a general approach to sensory-motor development

What is Intrinsic Motivation? A Typology of Computational Approaches

Intrinsic motivation, centrally involved in spontaneous exploration and curiosity, is a crucial concept in developmental psychology. It has been argued to be a crucial mechanism for open-ended cognitive development in humans, and as such has gathered a growing interest from developmental roboticists in the recent years. The goal of this paper is threefold. First, it provides a synthesis of the different approaches of intrinsic motivation in psychology. Second, by interpreting these approaches in a computational reinforcement learning framework, we argue that they are not operational and even sometimes inconsistent. Third, we set the ground for a systematic operational study of intrinsic motivation by presenting a formal typology of possible computational approaches. This typology is partly based on existing computational models, but also presents new ways of conceptualizing intrinsic motivation. We argue that this kind of computational typology might be useful for opening new avenues for research both in psychology and developmental robotics

In Search of the Neural Circuits of Intrinsic Motivation

Children seem to acquire new know-how in a continuous and open-ended manner. In this paper, we hypothesize that an intrinsic motivation to progress in learning is at the origins of the remarkable structure of children's developmental trajectories. In this view, children engage in exploratory and playful activities for their own sake, not as steps toward other extrinsic goals. The central hypothesis of this paper is that intrinsically motivating activities correspond to expected decrease in prediction error. This motivation system pushes the infant to avoid both predictable and unpredictable situations in order to focus on the ones that are expected to maximize progress in learning. Based on a computational model and a series of robotic experiments, we show how this principle can lead to organized sequences of behavior of increasing complexity characteristic of several behavioral and developmental patterns observed in humans. We then discuss the putative circuitry underlying such an intrinsic motivation system in the brain and formulate two novel hypotheses. The first one is that tonic dopamine acts as a learning progress signal. The second is that this progress signal is directly computed through a hierarchy of microcortical circuits that act both as prediction and metaprediction systems

The Advent of the 4D Mirror World

The 4D Mirror World is considered to be the next planetary-scale information platform. This commentary gives an overview of the history of the converging trends that have progressively shaped this concept. It retraces how large-scale photographic surveys served to build the first 3D models of buildings, cities, and territories, how these models got shaped into physical and virtual globes, and how eventually the temporal dimension was introduced as an additional way for navigating not only through space but also through time. The underlying assumption of the early large-scale photographic campaign was that image archives had deeper depths of latent knowledge still to be mined. The technology that currently permits the advent of the 4D World through new articulations of dense photographic material combining aerial imagery, historic photo archives, huge video libraries, and crowd-sourced photo documentation precisely exploits this latent potential. Through the automatic recognition of “homologous points,” the photographic material gets connected in time and space, enabling the geometrical computation of hypothetical reconstructions accounting for a perpetually evolving reality. The 4D world emerges as a series of sparse spatiotemporal zones that are progressively connected, forming a denser fabric of representations. On this 4D skeleton, information of cadastral maps, BIM data, or any other specific layers of a geographical information system can be easily articulated. Most of our future planning activities will use it as a way not only to have smooth access to the past but also to plan collectively shared scenarios for the future

Language Evolution as a Darwinian Process: Computational Studies

This paper presents computational experiments that illustrate how one can precisely conceptualize language evolution as a Darwinian process. We show that there is potentially a wide diversity of replicating units and replication mechanisms involved in language evolution. Computational experiments allow us to study systemic properties coming out of populations of linguistic replicators: linguistic replicators can adapt to specific external environments; they evolve under the pressure of the cognitive constraints of their hosts, as well as under the functional pressure of communication for which they are used; one can observe neutral drift; coalitions of replicators may appear, forming higher level groups which can themselves become subject to competion and selection

On the Importance of Spatial Configuration of Information

The spatial layout of information influences collaborative interactions. We compared two awareness tools which give information on the status of participants in a collaborative work, one displaying it on a single screen and the other distributing it in the room