On a method of Bownds for solving Volterra integral equations

An initial-value method of Bownds for solving Volterra integral equations is reexamined using a variable-step integrator to solve the differential equations. It is shown that such equations may be easily solved to an accuracy ofO(10^–8), the error depending essentially on that incurred in truncating expansions of the kernel to a degenerate one.This work was sponsored by a University of Nevada at Las Vegas Research Grant.     

Introduction to normative multiagent systems

This article introduces the research issues related to and definition of normative multiagent systems. It also describes the papers selected from NorMAS05 that are part of this double special issue and relates the papers to each other. Guido Boella received the PhD degree at the University of Torino in 2000.He is currently professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Torino. His research interests include multi-agent systems, in particular, normative systems, institutions and roles using qualitative decision theory.He is the co-chair of the firstworkshops on normative multi-agent systems (NorMas05), on coordination and organization (CoOrg05), and the AAAI Fall Symposium on roles (Roles05). Leendert van der Torre received the Ph.D. degree in computer science fromErasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in 1997. He is currently a Full Professor at the University of Luxembourg. He has developed the so-called input/output logics and the BOID agent architecture. His current research interests include deontic logic, qualitative game theory, and security and coordination in normative multiagent systems. Harko Verhagen received his Ph.D. degree in computer and systems sciences from Stockholm University (Sweden) in 2000 and is currently an associate professor at the department. His research has focussed on simulation of organizational behaviour, simulation as a scientific method, the use of sociological theories in multiagent systems research and more in particular theories on norms and autonomy.     

Stable Outcomes for Two-Sided Contract Choice Problems

In this paper we study the cooperative theory of stable outcomes for the room-mates problem modeled as a contract choice problem. We show, that a simple generalization of the Deferred Acceptance Procedure with firms proposing due to Gale and Shapley (1962), yields outcomes for a two-sided contract choice problem, which necessarily belong to the core and are Weakly Pareto Optimal for firms. Under the additional assumptions: (a) given any two distinct workers, the set of yields achievable by a firm with the first worker is disjoint from the set of yields achievable by it with the second, and (b) the contract choice problem is pair-wise efficient, we prove that there is no stable outcome at which a firm can get more than what it gets at the unique outcome of our procedure.Somdeb Lahiri is a Professor of Microeconomic Theory at the School of Economic and Business Sciences, University of Witwatersrand at Johannesburg since May 2001. He received his Ph.D in Economic Theory from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1986. Subsequently he has been on the faculty of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (January to May 1987) and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (May 1987 to May 2001). He has held visiting positions at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, the Indian Statistical Institutes at Delhi and Kolkata, INSEE Paris, Mc Master University and Mc Gill University. His research interests are in Social Choice theory, Cooperative Game theory and Axiomatic Economic Allocation theory.     

Optimization approach to the design of frequency sampling filters

Many digital signal processing applications require linear phase filtering. For applications that require narrow-band linear phase filtering, frequency sampling filters can implement linear phase filters more efficiently than the commonly used direct convolution filter. In this paper, a technique is developed for designing linear phase frequency sampling filters. A frequency sampling filter approximates a desired frequency response by interpolating a frequency response through a set of frequency samples taken from the desired frequency response. Although the frequency response of a frequency sampling filter passes through the frequency samples, the frequency response may not be well behaved between the specific samples. Linear programming is commonly used to control the interpolation errors between frequency samples. The design method developed in this paper controls the interpolation errors between frequency samples by minimizing the mean square error between the desired and actual frequency responses in the stopband and passband. This design method describes the frequency sampling filter design problem as a constrained optimization problem which is solved using the Lagrange multiplier optimization method. This results in a set of linear equations which when solved determine the filter's coefficients.This work was partially funded by The National Supercomputing Center for Energy and the Environment, University of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada and by NSF Grant MIP-9200581.     

Constrained LQR problems in elliptic distributed control systems with point observations—convergence results

In this paper constrained LQR problems in distributed control systems governed by the elliptic equation with point observations are studied. A variational inequality approach coupled with potential theory in a Banach space setting is adopted. First the admissible control set is extended to be bounded by two functions, and feedback characterization of the optimal control in terms of the optimal state is derived; then two numerical algorithms proposed in [5] are modified, and the strong convergence and uniform convergence in Banach space are proved. This verifies that the numerical algorithm is insensitive to the partition number of the boundary. Since our control variables are truncated below and above by two functions inL ^p and in our numerical computation only the layer density not the control variable is assumed to be piecewise smooth, uniform convergence guarantees a better convergence. Finally numerical computation for an example is carried out and confirms the analysis. This research was supported in part by NSF Grant DMS-9404380 and by an IRI Award of Texas A&M University. The current address of the first author is the Department of Mathematical Science, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Las Vegas, NV 89154, USA.     

Simulating the effect of nepotism on political risk taking and social unrest

Nepotism has been the primary influence on political behavior throughout human history. Despite the spread of democracy in the 20th century, nepotistic regimes have hardly disappeared. Nepotism heavily influences political activity throughout the developing world, Middle East, and central Asia where family ties are essential for gaining access to power, state resources, and privileges. Rebelling against such nepotistic regimes is difficult and risky. RiskTaker is an agent-based model we developed for testing the influences of various social forces on risk taking behavior, including the formulation of rebellious coalitions. We use RiskTaker to examine the influence of nepotism on the distribution of wealth and social status. Nepotism heavily skews the distribution of wealth and status, leading to the formation of opposing coalitions and exacerbating social unrest.This paper was tied for Best Paper, NAACSOS (North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science) Annual Conference 2005, June 26–28, Notre Dame. Robert Sedlmeyer, Department of Computer Science, Indiana University – Purdue University, Fort Wayne provided programming for the RiskTaker model. Lawrence A. Kuznar is a professor of anthropology and director of the Decision Sciences and Theory Institute at Indiana University—Purdue University, Fort Wayne. He has conducted fieldwork among Aymara Indians in Andean Peru and the Navajo of the American southwest. His research interests include computer modeling, theories of risk taking and conflict, terrorism, social evolution, and scientific epistemology. He has authored articles in Ecological Economics (with W. Frederick), Current Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Mathematical Anthropology and Culture Theory and Journal of Anthropological Research, and published two books (Awatimarka Harcourt Brace, 1995 and Reclaiming a Scientific Anthropology Altamira Press, 1997) and two edited volumes. William Frederick has served as a faculty member in the departments of mathematical sciences and the department of computer sciences at Indiana University—Purdue University, Fort Wayne since 1979. His primary interests include mathematical modeling, game theory, and genetic algorithms.     

Initial value methods in the theory of Fredholm integral equations

This paper deals with the problem of establishing the equivalence of a family of integral equations of Fredholm type with kernels that depend on a parameter and a related Cauchy system of integrodifferential equations. We also show how the Cauchy problem can be given an abstract formulation as an initial value problem in a complex Banach space.This research was supported by the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Research Grant No. 4503.     

An agent-based investigation into the new product development capability

The capability to bring products to market which comply with quality, cost and development time goals is vital to the survival of firms in a competitve environment. New product development comprises knowledge creation and search and can be organized in different ways. In this paper, we study the performance of several alternative organizational models for new product development using a model of distributed, self-adapting (learning) agents. The agents (a marketing and a production agent) are modelled via neural networks. The artificial new product development process analyzed starts with learning on the basis of an initial set of production and marketing data about possible products and their evaluation. Subsequently, in each step of the process, the agents search for a better product with their current models of the environment and, then, refine their representations based on additional prototypes generated (new learning data). Within this framework, we investigate the influence of different types of new product search methods and generating prototypes/learning according to the performance of individual agents and the organization as a whole. In particular, sequential, team-based Trial & Error and House of Quality guided search are combined with prototype sampling methods of different intensity and breadth; also, the complexity of the agents (number of hidden units) is varied. It turns out that both the knowledge base and the search procedure have a significant impact on the agents' generalization ability and success in new product development. Andreas Mild was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1973. He studied business administration in Vienna, in 2000 he received his Ph.D. from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU). Since 2003 he is associated professor at the WU. He has been guest professor in Frankfurt, Germany, Sydney, Australia and Bangkok, Thailand. Previous research appeared in Journals such as MIS Quarterly, Management Science and Marketing Science. His research interests currently include agent-based models, new product development and recommender systems. Alfred Taudes was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1959. He studied business administration and management information systems (MIS) in Vienna (doctorate 1984), in 1991 he received his Ph.D. from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration (WU). He was assistant professor at the WU (1986–1991) and professor for MIS at the German Universities of Augsburg (1991), Münster (1991/92) and Essen (1992/93). Since 1993, he has been professor for MIS at the WU and Head of the Department for Production Management. Since 2000, Dr. Taudes has been speaker for the Special Research Area SFB # 010 (Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science). His research interests currently include agent-based models of industry structures, management of innovation, technology management and business strategy.     

Social Network Discovery by Mining Spatio-Temporal Events

Knowing patterns of relationship in a social network is very useful for law enforcement agencies to investigate collaborations among criminals, for businesses to exploit relationships to sell products, or for individuals who wish to network with others. After all, it is not just what you know, but also whom you know, that matters. However, finding out who is related to whom on a large scale is a complex problem. Asking every single individual would be impractical, given the huge number of individuals and the changing dynamics of relationships. Recent advancement in technology has allowed more data about activities of individuals to be collected. Such data may be mined to reveal associations between these individuals. Specifically, we focus on data having space and time elements, such as logs of people's movement over various locations or of their Internet activities at various cyber locations. Reasoning that individuals who are frequently found together are likely to be associated with each other, we mine from the data instances where several actors co-occur in space and time, presumably due to an underlying interaction. We call these spatio-temporal co-occurrences events, which we use to establish relationships between pairs of individuals. In this paper, we propose a model for constructing a social network from events, and provide an algorithm that mines these events from the data. Experiments on a real-life data tracking people's accesses to cyber locations have also yielded encouraging results. Hady W. Lauw is a graduate student at the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests include spatio-temporal data mining, social network discovery, and link analyisis. He has a BEng in computer engineering from Nanyang Technological University. Ee-Peng Lim is an Associate Professor with the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1994 and B.Sc. in Computer Science from National University of Singapore. Ee-Peng's research interests include information integration, data/text/web mining, digital libraries, and wireless intelligence. He is currently an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), International Journal of Digital Libraries (IJDL) and International Journal of Data Warehousing and Mining (IJDWM). He was the Program Co-Chair of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2004), and Conference/Program Co-Chairs of International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL 2004). He has also served in the program committee of numerous international conferences. Dr Lim is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Member of ACM. HweeHwa Pang received the B.Sc.—with first class honors—and M.S. degrees from the National University of Singapore in 1989 and 1991, respectively, and the PhD degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1994, all in Computer Science. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Singapore Management University. His research interests include database management systems, data security and quality, operating systems, and multimedia servers. He has many years of hands-on experience in system implementation and project management. He has also participated in transferring some of his research results to industry. Teck-Tim Tan is an IT Manager (Operations) at the Centre for IT Services, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He administers and oversees NTU's campus-wide wireless LAN infrastructure which facilitates access to the University's vast IT resources and services practically anywhere on campus.     

寡头竞争模型在旅游联盟协议中的应用

博弈论中的寡头竞争模型在经济、政治、军事等社会科学中得到了广泛的应用.针对旅游联盟的机会主义行为,以库诺特(Cournot)寡头竞争模型为基础建立了旅游联盟博弈模型,来分析旅游联盟建立正式协议的必要性,并探讨了联盟协议的主要内容,包括:联盟的战略目标和合作范围;投入资源评价与利益分配;交流渠道;联盟解散条款.最后指出了建立协议的协商原则和灵活性原则.