University Challenge

Date:     Wednesday 16 Mar 2011
Time:     18:30 – Buffet 6:00pm for 6:30 start
Speaker:     Students from Coventry and Warwick Universities –
Location:     AS124, Coventry University
Abstract:
Pen-Choug Sun
‘Extended Core Model’ for E-market
This research concerns coalitions of traders in e-markets. A new model, called extended core model, for group trading in e-markets is proposed. This new model is based on the core, which is an concept from economic, but unlike the core, it is developed into a distributed system to deal with large coalitions in e-markets. This model involves joint selling of multiple commodities in e-marketplaces, offering amount discount for group buying. Several providers are involved in transactions of bundle selling, and on the other side, many different buyers form coalitions for the amount discount. A comparison between the core and the extended core was made. The superiority of the new model in incentive compatibility, distributed computing, and less computational complexity demonstrated the high potential of the model. At the end of the report, the contributions, limitations and future works of the research are discussed.

Adam Grzywaczewski
synopsis here when received!

Maryam Ghaffari Saadat
Distributed Allocation Mechanisms for Multi-Player Graphical Resource Sharing Games
This project investigates the properties a social system must embed in order to fundamentally manage resource dilemmas which are the conflicts between personal and collective interests in the context of resource sharing. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this category of problems and the existing gaps between relevant research communities, often the proposed solutions to resource dilemmas do not fully capture the important dimensions of the problem. This project is interdisciplinary and will draw on resources from psychology, economics, social network theory, and computer science. The thesis of this project is that distributed mechanisms suitable for governing common-pool resources can be developed on the basis of Collaborative Consumption (CC) which is an emerging economic model of sharing and trade based on reputation as a social currency. The project is divided into two parts, the first is to construct a valid model of resource sharing problem by incorporating more realistic assumptions into a combination of the existing models such as Graphical Games and Cake-Cutting Games. The second part involves analyzing the reliability of different distributed allocation mechanisms based on the structural support they provide for cooperation and their insusceptibility to strategic behavior. One implication of this project will be the development of a self-organizing resource allocation mechanism that requires minimum interventions from central authorities. This will result in optimization of the monitoring costs and more importantly will lead to a sustainable development

Huseyin Kusetogullari
Transmission of Multimedia Information
The transmission of multimedia information over communication channels/paths has become a challenging problem with the increased usage of multimedia services in networks. In multimedia communication, multi-path selection is desirable because even if one packet is lost over a path, the lost packet may be received via another path. This has been a strong motivation to find the maximum number of optimal routings with available bandwidth in networks.
The project is focused on two different network problems which are peer-to-peer and multicast. In peer-to-peer networks, the major problem is to obtain the optimal multi-paths efficiently and quickly, hence, two meta-heuristic optimization algorithms, namely Genetic Algorithms (GAs) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) are applied. Thereafter, images are transmitted through the optimized networks to analyze and understand the performance of the algorithms implemented, which find the optimal routings effectively and maximize the received multimedia information. In multicast problems, network coding is an efficient technique to increase the information flow through the network. However, there is “unachievable” multimedia information at the clients and this is a significant problem. To offer a solution to this difficulty, a novel encoding/decoding method that increases the received information at the clients even in lossy networks is examined and developed.

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