Leadership in collective action

We extend the model of collective action in which groups compete for a budged by endogenizing the group platform, namely the specific mixture of public/private good and the distribution of the private good to group members which can be uniform or performance-based. While the group-optimal platform contains a degree of publicness that increases in group size and divides the private benefits uniformly, a success-maximizing leader uses incentives and distorts the platform towards more private benefits - a distortion that increases with group size. In both settings we obtain the anti-Olson type result that win probability increases with group size.

Leadership and overcoming coordination failure with asymmetric costs

We study how the heterogeneity of agents affects the extent to which changes in financial incentives can pull a group out of a situation of coordination failure. We focus on the connections between cost asymmetries and leadership. Experimental subjects interact in groups of four in a series of weak-link games. The treatment variable is the distribution of high and low effort cost across subjects. We present data for one, two and three low-cost subjects as well as control sessions with symmetric costs. The overall pattern of coordination improvement is common across treatments. Early coordination improvements depend on the distribution of high and low effort costs across subjects, but these differences disappear with time. We find that initial leadership in overcoming coordination failure is not driven by low-cost subjects but by subjects with the most frequent cost. This conformity effect can be due to a kind of group identity or to the cognitive simplicity of acting with identical others.

Adaptive intelligent agent approach to guide the web navigation on the PLAN-G distance learning platform

Hypermedia systems based on the Web for open distance education are becoming increasinglypopular as tools for user-driven access learning information. Adaptive hypermedia is a new direction in research within the area of user-adaptive systems, to increase its functionality by making it personalized [Eklu 961. This paper sketches a general agents architecture to include navigationaladaptability and user-friendly processes which would guide and accompany the student during hislher learning on the PLAN-G hypermedia system (New Generation Telematics Platform to Support Open and Distance Learning), with the aid of computer networks and specifically WWW technology [Marz 98-1] [Marz 98-2]. The PLAN-G actual prototype is successfully used with some informatics courses (the current version has no agents yet). The propased multi-agent system, contains two different types of adaptive autonomous software agents: Personal Digital Agents {Interface), to interacl directly with the student when necessary; and Information Agents (Intermediaries), to filtrate and discover information to learn and to adapt navigation space to a specific student

Experimental Modeling and Control Strategies on an Open Mobile Robot Platform PRIM

This research work deals with the problem of modeling and design of low level speed controller for the mobile robot PRIM. The main objective is to develop an effective educational tool. On one hand, the interests in using the open mobile platform PRIM consist in integrating several highly related subjects to the automatic control theory in an educational context, by embracing the subjects of communications, signal processing, sensor fusion and hardware design, amongst others. On the other hand, the idea is to implement useful navigation strategies such that the robot can be served as a mobile multimedia information point. It is in this context, when navigation strategies are oriented to goal achievement, that a local model predictive control is attained. Hence, such studies are presented as a very interesting control strategy in order to develop the future capabilities of the system

PRIM an Open Mobile Robot Platform. Motivation, Present and Future Trends

This paper is focused on the robot mobile platform PRIM (platform robot information multimedia). This robot has been made in order to cover two main needs of our group, on one hand the need for a full open mobile robotic platform that is very useful in fulfilling the teaching and research activity of our school community, and on the other hand with the idea of introducing an ethical product which would be useful as mobile multimedia information point as a service tool. This paper introduces exactly how the system is made up and explains just what the philosophy is behind this work. The navigation strategies and sensor fusion, where machine vision system is the most important one, are oriented towards goal achievement and are the key to the behaviour of the robot

Exploring Cross-layer power management for PGAS applications on the SCC platform

Technological limitations and power constraints are resulting in high-performance parallel computing architectures that are based on large numbers of high-core-count processors. Commercially available processors are now at 8 and 16 cores and experimental platforms, such as the many-core Intel Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) platform, provide much higher core counts. These trends are presenting new sets of challenges to HPC applications including programming complexity and the need for extreme energy efficiency.In this work, we first investigate the power behavior of scientific PGAS application kernels on the SCC platform, and explore opportunities and challenges for power management within the PGAS framework. Results obtained via empirical evaluation of Unified Parallel C (UPC) applications on the SCC platform under different constraints, show that, for specific operations, the potential for energy savings in PGAS is large; and power/performance trade-offs can be effectively managed using a cross-layerapproach. We investigate cross-layer power management using PGAS language extensions and runtime mechanisms that manipulate power/performance tradeoffs. Specifically, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of such a middleware for application-aware cross-layer power management of UPC applications on the SCC platform. Finally, based on our observations, we provide a set of recommendations and insights that can be used to support similar power management for PGAS applications on other many-core platforms.

An electronic voting platform with elliptic curve cryptography

The future of elections seems to be electronic voting systems du to its advantatges over the traditional voting. Nowadays, there are some different paradigms to ensure the security and reliability of e-voting. This document is part of a wider project which presents an e-Voting platform based on elliptic curve cryptography. It uses an hybrid combination of two of the main e-Voting paradigms to guarantee privacy and security in the counting phase, these are precisely, the mixnets and the homomorphic protocols. This document is focused in the description of the system and the maths and programming needed to solve the homomorphic part of it. In later chapters, there is a comparison between a simple mixing system and our system proposal.

Assessment and reuse of contents in the competence-based educational platform InterMediActor

This paper describes a failure alert system and a methodology for content reuse in a new instructional design system called InterMediActor (IMA). IMA provides an environment for instructional content design, production and reuse, and for students’ evaluation based in content specification through a hierarchical structure of competences. The student assessment process and information extraction process for content reuse are explained.

The migration towards Digital Terrestrial Television: challenges for public policy and public broadcasters

This paper initially identifies the main transformations of the television system that are caused by digitalization. Its development in several broadcasting platforms is analyzed as well as the particular obstacles and requirements that are detected for each of them. Due to its technical characteristics and its historical link to the public services, the terrestrial network requires migration strategies different from those strictly commercial, and public intervention might be needed. The paper focuses on such migration strategies towards DTT and identifies the main issues for public intervention in the areas of the digital scenario: technology, business and market transformation and the reception field. Moreover, it describes and classifies the challenges that public broadcasters should confront due to digitalization. This paper finally concludes that the leadership of the public broadcasters during the migration towards DTT is an interesting tool for public policy. The need for foster the digitalization of the terrestrial platform and to achieve certain social and public goal besides the market interest brings an opportunity for public institutions and public broadcasters to work together. That leading role could also be positive for the public service to face its necessary redefinition and reallocation within the digital context.

Platform for Automatic, Normalized Annotation and Cost-Effective Acquisition of Language Resources for Human Language Technologies: PANACEA

El objetivo de PANACEA es engranar diferentes herramientas avanzadas para construir una fábrica de Recursos Lingüísticos (RL), una línea de producción que automatice los pasos implicados en la adquisición, producción, actualización y mantenimiento de los RL que la Traducción Automática y otras tecnologías lingüísticas, necesitan.

PANACEA (Platform for Automatic, Normalised Annotation and Cost-Effective Acquisition of Language Resources for Human Language Technologies)

The objective of PANACEA is to build a factory of LRs that automates the stages involved in the acquisition, production, updating and maintenance of LRs required by MT systems and by other applications based on language technologies, and simplifies eventual issues regarding intellectual property rights. This automation will cut down the cost, time and human effort significantly. These reductions of costs and time are the only way to guarantee the continuous supply of LRs that MT and other language technologies will be demanding in the multilingual Europe.

Mining and exploiting domain-specific corpora in the PANACEA platform

The objective of the PANACEA ICT-2007.2.2 EU project is to build a platform that automates the stages involved in the acquisition,production, updating and maintenance of the large language resources required by, among others, MT systems. The development of a Corpus Acquisition Component (CAC) for extracting monolingual and bilingual data from the web is one of the most innovative building blocks of PANACEA. The CAC, which is the first stage in the PANACEA pipeline for building Language Resources, adopts an efficient and distributed methodology to crawl for web documents with rich textual content in specific languages and predefined domains. The CAC includes modules that can acquire parallel data from sites with in-domain content available in more than one language. In order to extrinsically evaluate the CAC methodology, we have conducted several experiments that used crawled parallel corpora for the identification and extraction of parallel sentences using sentence alignment. The corpora were then successfully used for domain adaptation of Machine Translation Systems.