Interview with James Kaiulo

James Kaiulo is a Papua New Guinean who studied at Macquarie University in 1985-1990. He studied on an Australian International Development Assistance Bureau (AIDAB) Scholarship and completed a PhD in Biological Sciences. The interview was conducted in English on 12 February 2015 by Dr. Jonathan Ritchie of Deakin University. This set comprises: an interview recording, and a timed summary.

Interview with Simon Bambang Widjawarko

Simon Bambang Widjawarko is an Indonesian who studied in Australia on two occasions; at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 1980-1983, and at the University of Newcastle in 1985-1989. He studied on scholarships provided by the respective universities in both of his periods of study in Australia, and he completed a Masters of Food Science while at UNSW and a PhD in the same field while at the University of Newcastle. The interview was conducted in English on 21 October 2014 by Dr. Jemma Purdey of Deakin University. This set comprises: an interview recording, a timed summary, and a photograph.

Unrelated helpers neither signal contributions nor suffer retribution in chestnut-crowed babblers

Alloparental care by distant/nonkin that accrue few kin-selected benefits requires direct fitness benefits to evolve. The pay-to-stay hypothesis, under which helpers contribute to alloparental care to avoid being expelled from the group by dominant individuals, offers one such explanation. Here, we investigated 2 key predictions derived from the pay-to-stay hypothesis using the chestnut-crowed babbler, Pomatostomus ruficeps, a cooperatively breeding bird where helping by distant/nonkin is common (18% of nonbreeding helpers). First, we found no indication that distant or nonkin male helpers advertised their contributions toward the primary male breeder. Helpers unrelated to both breeders were unresponsive to provisioning rates of the dominant male, whereas helpers that were related to either the breeding male or to both members of the pair were responsive. In addition, unrelated male helpers did not advertise their contributions to provisioning by disproportionately synchronizing their provisioning events with those of the primary male breeder or by provisioning nestlings immediately after him. Second, no helper, irrespective of its relatedness to the dominant breeders, received aggression when released back into the group following temporary removal for 1-2 days. We therefore find no compelling support for the hypothesis that pay-to-stay mechanisms account for the cooperative behavior of unrelated males in chestnut-crowned babblers.

Unifying approaches to consensus across different preference representations

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Consensus measures can be useful in group decision making problems both to guide users toward more reasonable judgments and to give an overall indication of the support for the final decision. The level of consensus between decision makers can be measured in contexts where preferences over alternatives are expressed either as evaluations or scores, pairwise preferences, and weak orders, however these different representations often call for different approaches to consensus measurements. In this paper, we look at the distance metrics used to construct consensus measures in each of these settings and how consistent these are for preference profiles when they are converted from one representation to another. We develop some methods for consistent approaches across decision making settings and provide an example to help investigate differences between some of the commonly used distances.

Biased experts and similarity based weights in preferences aggregation

In a group decision making setting, we consider the potential impact an expert can have on the overall ranking by providing a biased assessment of the alternatives that differs substantially from the majority opinion. In the framework of similarity based averaging functions, we show that some alternative approaches to weighting the experts' inputs during the aggregation process can minimize the influence the biased expert is able to exert.

Construction and aggregation of preference relations based on fuzzy partial orders

In group decision-making problems it is common to elicit preferences from human experts in the form of pairwise preference relations. When this is extended to a fuzzy setting, entries in the pairwise preference matrix are interpreted to denote strength of preference, however once logical properties such as consistency and transitivity are enforced, the resulting preference relation requires almost as much information as providing raw scores or a complete order over the alternatives. Here we instead interpret fuzzy degrees of preference to only apply where the preference over two alternatives is genuinely fuzzy and then suggest an aggregation procedure that minimizes a generalized Kemeny distance to the nearest complete or partial order. By focusing on the fuzzy partial order, the method is less affected by differences in the natural scale over which an expert expresses their preference, and can also limit the influence of extreme scores.