The social impact from the World Wide Web cannot be underestimated, but technologies used to build the Web are also revolutionizing the sharing of business and government information within intranets. In many ways the lessons learned from the Internet carry over directly to intranets, but others do not apply. In particular, the social forces that guide the development of intranets are quite di#erent, and the determination of a "good answer" for intranet search is quite di#erent than on the Internet. In this paper we study the problem of intranet search. Our approach focuses on the use of rank aggregation, and allows us to examine the e#ects of di#erent heuristics on ranking of search results.

Abstract. Watching television tends to be a social activity. So, adaptive television needs to adapt to groups of users rather than to individual users. In this paper, we discuss different strategies for combining individual user models to adapt to groups, some of which are inspired by Social Choice Theory. In a first experiment, we explore how humans select a sequence of items for a group to watch, based on data about the individuals’ preferences. The results show that humans use some of the strategies such as the Average Strategy (a.k.a. Additive Utilitarian), the Average Without Misery Strategy and the Least Misery Strategy, and care about fairness and avoiding individual misery. In a second experiment, we investigate how satisfied people believe they would be with sequences chosen by different strategies, and how their satisfaction corresponds with that predicted by a number of satisfaction functions. The results show that subjects use normalization, deduct misery, and use the ratings in a non-linear way. One of the satisfaction functions produced reasonable, though not completely correct predictions. According to our subjects, the sequences produced by five strategies give satisfaction to all individuals in the group. The results also show that subjects put more emphasis than expected on showing the best rated item to each individual (at a cost of misery for another individual), and that the ratings of the first and last items in the sequence are especially important. In a final experiment, we explore the influence viewing an item can have on the ratings of other items. This is important for deciding the order in which to present items. The results show an effect of both mood and topical relatedness.

We consider, in this paper, the problem of knowledge base merging with integrity constraints. We propose a logical characterization of those operators and give a representation theorem in terms of preorders on interpretations. We show the close connection between belief revision and merging operators and we show that our proposal extends the pure merging case (i.e. without integrity constraints) we study in a previous work. Finally we show that Liberatore and Schaerf commutative revision operators can be seen as a special case of merging.

We investigate the logical properties of knowledge base combination operators proposed in the literature. These operators are based on the selection of some maximal subsets of the union of the knowledge bases. We argue that they are not fully satisfactory to merge knowledge bases, since the source of information is lost in the combination process. We show that it is the reason why those operators do not satisfy a lot of logical properties. Then we propose to use more rened selection mechanisms in order to take the distribution of information into account in the combination process. That allows to dene merging operators with a more subtle behaviour. 1 INTRODUCTION In the elds of articial intelligence and databases, one is often faced with conicting information coming from several sources. Thus, an important problem in such cases is how to reach a coherent piece of information from these contradictory ones. For example, if one wants to build an expert system from a ...

The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem states that every non-trivial voting method between at least 3 alternatives can be strategically manipulated. We prove a quantitative version of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem: a random manipulation by a single random voter will succeed with non-negligible probability for every neutral voting method between 3 alternatives that is far from being a dictatorship.

This paper lays part of the groundwork for a domain theory of negotiation, that is, a way of classifying interactions so that it is clear, given a domain, which negotiation mechanisms and strategies are appropriate. We define State Oriented Domains, a general category of interaction. Necessary and sufficient conditions for cooperation are outlined. We use the notion of worth in an altered definition of utility, thus enabling agreements in a wider class of joint-goal reachable situations. An approach is offered for conflict resolution, and it is shown that even in a conflict situation, partial cooperative steps can be taken by interacting agents (that is, agents in fundamental conflict might still agree to cooperate up to a certain point). A Unified Negotiation Protocol (UNP) is developed that can be used in all types of encounters. It is shown that in certain borderline cooperative situations, a partial cooperative agreement (i.e., one that does not achieve all agents' goals) might be ...

The aim of this paper is to study the integration of multiplicative preference relation as a preference representation structure in fuzzy multipurpose decision making problems. Assuming fuzzy multipurpose decision making problems under different preference representation structures (ordering, utilities and fuzzy preference relations) and using the fuzzy preference relations as uniform representation element, the multiplicative preference relations are incorporated in the decision problem by means of a transformation function between multiplicative and fuzzy preference relations. A consistency study of this transformation function, which demonstrates that it does not change the informative content of multiplicative preference relation, is shown. As a consequence, a selection process based on fuzzy majority for multipurpose decision making problems under multiplicative preference relations is presented. To design it, an aggregation operator of information, called ordered weighted geometr...

Despite the success of many pattern recognition systems in constrained domains, problems that involve noisy input and many classes remain difficult. A promising direction is to use several classifiers simultaneously, such that they can complement each other in correctness. This thesis is concerned with decision combination in a multiple classifier system that is critical to its success. A multiple classifier system consists of a set of classifiers and a decision combination function. It is a preferred solution to a complex recognition problem because it allows simultaneous use of feature descriptors of many types, corresponding measures of similarity, and many classification procedures. It also allows dynamic selection, so that classifiers adapted to inputs of a particular type may be applied only when those inputs are encountered. Decisions by the classifiers are represented as rankings of the class set that are derivable from the results of feature matching. Rank scores contain more ...

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We analyse scenarios in which self-interested agents negotiate with each other in order to agree on deals to exchange resources. We consider two variants of the framework, one where agents can use money to compensate other agents for disadvantageous deals, and one where this is not possible. In both cases, we analyse what types of deals are necessary and sufficient to guarantee an optimal outcome of negotiation. To assess whether a given allocation of resources should be considered optimal we borrow two concepts from welfare economics: maximal social welfare in the case of the framework with money and Pareto optimality in the case of the framework without money. We also show how conditions for optimal outcomes can change depending on properties of the utility functions used by agents to represent the values they ascribe to certain sets of resources.