Fundamental frequency height as a resource for the management of overlap in talk-in-interaction.

Overlapping talk is common in talk-in-interaction. Much of the previous research on this topic agrees that speaker overlaps can be either turn competitive or noncompetitive. An investigation of the differences in prosodic design between these two classes of overlaps can offer insight into how speakers use and orient to prosody as a resource for turn competition. In this paper, we investigate the role of fundamental frequency (F0) as a resource for turn competition in overlapping speech. Our methodological approach combines detailed conversation analysis of overlap instances with acoustic measurements of F0 in the overlapping sequence and in its local context. The analyses are based on a collection of overlap instances drawn from the ICSI Meeting corpus. We found that overlappers mark an overlapping incoming as competitive by raising F0 above their norm for turn beginnings, and retaining this higher F0 until the point of overlap resolution. Overlappees may respond to these competitive incomings by returning competition, in which case they raise their F0 too. Our results thus provide instrumental support for earlier claims made on impressionistic evidence, namely that participants in talk-in-interaction systematically manipulate F0 height when competing for the turn

Organisational niche boundaries in the n-space

The paper investigates organizational boundary spanning from the point of view of neighborhood relations. Neighborhood is defined with the closeness of organizations' resource utilization patterns. The key resource is the clientele's demand for organizational outputs (products, party programs, membership, etc.). Demand is characterized qualitatively by n taste descriptors that span an n-dimensional resource space. Organizational niche boundaries may take different forms and size. To avoid niche overlap over boundaries, organizations can configure in the resource space in different clusterings. Which are the densest arrangements that allow for the coexistence of maximal number of organizations? How can these coexisting neighborhoods build up? How do competition, new entry and the number of immediate neighbors change around the niche boundary with space dimension? The paper applies results of the sphere packing problem in n-dimensional geometry to answer these questions.

Communication-efficient Distributed Multi-resource Allocation

In several smart city applications, multiple resources must be allocated among competing agents that are coupled through such shared resources and are constrained --- either through limitations of communication infrastructure or privacy considerations. We propose a distributed algorithm to solve such distributed multi-resource allocation problems with no direct inter-agent communication. We do so by extending a recently introduced additive-increase multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) algorithm, which only uses very little communication between the system and agents. Namely, a control unit broadcasts a one-bit signal to agents whenever one of the allocated resources exceeds capacity. Agents then respond to this signal in a probabilistic manner. In the proposed algorithm, each agent makes decision of its resource demand locally and an agent is unaware of the resource allocation of other agents. In empirical results, we observe that the average allocations converge over time to optimal allocations.Comment: To appear in IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2 2018), Kansas City, USA, September, 2018. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1711.0197