FLUID: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Flexible Sequential Data

Modern ML methods excel when training data is IID, large-scale, and well labeled. Learning in less ideal conditions remains an open challenge. The sub-fields of few-shot, continual, transfer, and representation learning have made substantial strides in learning under adverse conditions; each affording distinct advantages through methods and insights. These methods address different challenges such as data arriving sequentially or scarce training examples, however often the difficult conditions an ML system will face over its lifetime cannot be anticipated prior to deployment. Therefore, general ML systems which can handle the many challenges of learning in practical settings are needed. To foster research towards the goal of general ML methods, we introduce a new unified evaluation framework - FLUID (Flexible Sequential Data). FLUID integrates the objectives of few-shot, continual, transfer, and representation learning while enabling comparison and integration of techniques across these subfields. In FLUID, a learner faces a stream of data and must make sequential predictions while choosing how to update itself, adapt quickly to novel classes, and deal with changing data distributions; while accounting for the total amount of compute. We conduct experiments on a broad set of methods which shed new insight on the advantages and limitations of current solutions and indicate new research problems to solve. As a starting point towards more general methods, we present two new baselines which outperform other evaluated methods on FLUID. Project page: https://raivn.cs.washington.edu/projects/FLUID/.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figures. Project page: https://raivn.cs.washington.edu/projects/FLUID

Ookura-ryuu tsukurimono hiroku

All service providers seek to provide a comprehensive experience for their customers, with the goal of cementing customer loyalty and encouraging future purchases. In most services, we can identify core aspects (e.g., a good night’s sleep at a hotel) and supplementary aspects (e.g., concierge and valet services). For professional sports, the core service is the sporting contest itself, but many other supplementary services may also be included. We use a comprehensive dataset of over 7,000 patrons of a major professional sport in the United States to determine how customers’ satisfaction with core and supplementary services influence their intent to repeat a ticket purchase. We find that satisfaction with both core and supplementary services are important for loyal customers, but first-time customers tend to focus only on core service satisfaction when considering whether to purchase another ticket. One implication of this study is that firms should focus on their customers’ full experience. Firms must first focus on their core services and then augment them appropriately with supplementary services.Walsman_202014_20It_s_20more_20than_20just_20a_20game.pdf: 3040 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020

The Impact of LEED Certification on Hotel Performance

The LEED certification standard for green buildings has gained considerable acceptance since its launch in 2000. However the question as to whether LEED certification provides business benefits has remained largely unanswered, particularly for the hotel industry. On the one hand, many scholars and practitioners claim that organizations pursing LEED certification realize costs savings and increase revenues. On the other hand several scholars have returned results that are inconclusive. This study contributes evidence to this debate by calculating a differential revenue for LEED certified hotels, compared to those that are not certified. This comparison of the performance 93 LEED-certified hotels (representing the population of such hotels in 2012) to that of 514 comparable competitors finds that the certified hotels obtained superior financial performance as compared to their non-certified competitors, for at least the first two years after certification. Unfortunately, most hotels’ certification is so recent that there is insufficient data at this time to gauge whether the revenue advantage continues after two years

Examining the Characteristics and Managerial Challenges of Professional Services: An Empirical Study of Management Consultancy in the Travel, Tourism, and Hospitality Sector

This paper finds that OM's 'one-size-fits-all' characterization of professional services, namely high levels of customer engagement, extensive customization, knowledge intensity, and low levels of capital intensity, does not hold when carrying out a 'deep dive' (to the best of our knowledge, a first in this area of OM) into consultancy in the US travel, tourism, and hospitality sector. We analyse mixed-method data (semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and a best—worst choice experimental survey) and observe that consultancy can actually be quite remote and passive and that any periods of face-to-face 'engagement' will typically be time limited and focused on specific project phases. Moreover, and further confirming the value of a study that allowed us to investigate professional service operations in a specific market context, our data suggest this may often be at the behest of the client. The significant variation observed in levels of customization we interpret as confirming Maister's (1993) notion of a portfolio of brains, grey hair, and procedural work. We also observed relatively high levels of capital intensity; reflecting perhaps the vintage of most OM characterizations and the dramatic ICT-related changes that have occurred in all business operations in the last 20 years. The work also demonstrates the necessity of a more contingent perspective on PSOM. We assess the impact of both firm (scale, specialization) and individual level (leverage) characteristics to demonstrate significant variation within what might be expected to be a relatively homogenous group of professional service operations. For example, investigating the effects of specialization (via a typology of consulting operations: super-specialists, generalists, deep knowledge traders, deep market knowledge traders) revealed that relative degree of interaction may be dependent upon degree of expertise, such that it was the super-specialists in our sample that spent less time with clients and the more generalist firms who were complementing their limited expert status with high levels of interaction (networking, etc.).Verma95_Examining.pdf: 139 downloads, before Aug. 1, 2020