Patent Application: US-97145108-A

Abstract:
an auction procedure intended to replace the known review process by an auction based approach is provided . the better a submitted work by an author , the more this author may bid to have it appear in some congresses or journals . if the assessment of quality represented by the bid is right , the author will be rewarded in some new sort of scientific currency , otherwise the author will suffer loses of the currency .

Description:
described below is an exemplary embodiment of the present invention . the included embodiment illustrates one way in which the present invention can be implemented . although the detailed embodiment refers to a contribution consisting in citations in a scientific environment the invention may be used for various other purposes as previously referred . in more detail , and as previously referred , this auction procedure advances the state of the art by : deploying the scholar agent [ 12 , 13 ] prototype architecture . developing a multi - agent auction - based marketplace for effectively marketing papers on the scholar agent prototype . devising a heuristic - based bidding strategy that can be used by the agents in the auction mechanism to improve the private value of scholar agents vs . the initial private value set up by scientists . w ={ w i } the wallets of all i agents in the universe u , measured in ¢ units ; b i , k a bid from an agent a i resulting from a proa of said agent a i with respect to a subject k ; such that b i , k & lt ; w i ; k i the particular contribution of agent i with respect to k ; and b k ={ b i , k } the bids of all i agents with respect to k . for every k that awaits the contributions and bids of the agents in a universe u for every agent a f = winner ( arena ( cm , b k ) with contribution k f , and bid b f , k w fin is the initial wallet of agent a f after paying a bid based on a proa for k ; w f δt is the wallet of agent a f after having been updated incrementally by δt intervals with the roa ( k f ); and roa ⁡ ( k ) ∞ = lim t → ∞ ⁢ roa ⁡ ( k ) , that is the verified roa of a contribution k in the infinite time or at the end of a given period . a given contribution method ( cm ) is used to select contributions that use said agreed currency in the arena . the proposed auction procedure is useful for a scientific management wherein said arena is a scientific context and in that said proa is a citation or citations that issuing a work will generate in some scientific community , involving a public act where an agent refers to a contribution of another agent . in such a scientific context every agent a i is allowed to cite another agent , but not himself , and an external ( different from authors cited or citing ) authority is allowed to verify the number of citations . this external authority is ordinary said authority that certificates results . in addition , according to the invention when an agent a i has no amount of the agreed currency at a given moment in a corresponding wallet w fin it is necessary to borrow an amount from another agent . the schematic diagram of fig1 allows understanding the elements involved in this auction procedure as well as the dynamic interaction ( see the arrows ) thereof . the authority that certificates the results includes an entity or bow acting as a bank that periodically performs at least following tasks : it verifies the roa and assigns them to agents ( authors ) to update their wallets wi ; it prevents fraud in terms of fraudulent generation of currency ; and it escrows transactions / agreements / loans among agents , etc , and keeps the related correspondence private . an example of bow could be the world bank of citations ( wbc ). the referred authority is in addition a monetary authority ( controlling among others the issue of currency ) to manage the community of agents and to encourage interdisciplinary contributions . as previously indicated said arena can be a commercial environment where said agents a i provide a sale strategy . following two examples in such a commercial environment will provide a better understanding of how the auction procedure previously detailed can be implemented into the corresponding field . a car dealer bids strongly for his fourth quarter sales and the manager finally decides to allocate him a new lot of cars delivered from the factory versus allocating them to another car dealer under his management . at the end of the fourth quarter , the manager see the sale reports and if the financial sale results are over dealer &# 39 ; s bid , then the manager will provide certain payoff to the car dealer &# 39 ; s wallet , otherwise the manager will subtract certain penalty from this wallet ( decreasing the car dealer ability to bid for the next car shipment successfully ). hence , in the next quarter the car dealer &# 39 ; s wallet will represent numerically his reputation status and the size of his wallet will decide if he will be able to successfully bid for the new cars against other dealers and for how many of them . a consultant moves from company to company accumulating not only amount of references ( as well as experience ) but also the amount of his / her wallet that measures how well his / her performance predictions measured up to real improvement that his / her advise brought . that is , company requests proposals ( bids ) for consulting contract in the form of the predictions what effect the consulting can make for the company . then the company will balance what are the predicted results in the proposal were with the actual results and to the outcome would result either in credits or debits to the consultant &# 39 ; s wallet . in the long run , the companies will be able to select a consultant based on the size of his / her bids and the strength of his wallet representing his solvency . to evaluate the bidding strategy described in the auction procedure of this invention on within a controlled environment , a simulation was developed . this is based on the same architecture as the deployed scholar agent instance , but it additionally supports the modeling of users in the audience . the former experiment performed was about the maximization of the exposure by means of guessing the public in cj sessions . in these experiments we examine the global behavior regarding 5 types of pv as initial value v0 ( aj ) of each scholar agent aj regarding a common auction strategy for all them . they are : optimistic : the pv of the scientist si regarding a paper p is higher than the consensus private value ( cpv ) that a group of peers would rate it after a peer - review process . in notation pv ( si , p )≧ cpv ( p ) random : pv ( si , p ) is assigned without any relation to cpv ( p ) precise but optimist : pv ( si , p )≈ cpv ( p )+ ε , being ε small compared to cpv ( p ) then every scholar agent on behalf of a scientist si is assigned the v0 ( aj )= pv ( si , p ) the results ( fig2 ) after 100 auctions simulation in this environment show how the optimist agent is doing better than pessimist , rather much better that the precise agent , but the pessimist agent performs better than the precise but optimist agent . random agent performs only better than precise agent . this is a surprising result , but it has a sense : the pv is estimated to create a bid , but the strategy for bids need to be improved , more sophisticated . however , there is lack of further pv estimation in terms of what cj quality and what are the public attending the cj sessions so that the pv of every scholar agents is different from the initial pv of the scientist , and this is solved in the following experiments . in a second experiment the scholar agent simulation modeled cj behavior in terms of their likelihood of arriving at , and subsequently remaining at , a scholar agent session given the currently presented invention . the attending scientists ( public ) model was defined with the following assumptions : the session presence of scientist is measured in discrete sample - intervals the duration of the communication of a paper is assumed to be equal to a whole number of sample - intervals ; a paper is considered as paper fully presentation to a scientist only when a scientist has been present for the whole duration of the paper presentation session ; scientists ( public ) can arrive at any point during an publishing cycle , whereby the probability that a researcher will arrive is parrive ; the probability a scientist may leave without observing the subsequent paper is pdepart . a scientist will automatically leave if it has fully seen the subsequent paper ; both pdepart and parrive assume a uniform distribution . two alternate selection methods were compared with the auction : round - robin selection and random selection . the former is a familiar mechanism used to repeatedly cycle through a number of papers ( in order ). given our scientist model , this approach represents the optimal selection mechanism when pdepart = 0 and parrive = 1 . the latter mechanism randomly selects a new paper to display at the beginning of each new publishing cycle , independently of what has been previously selected . this method was selected as a baseline against which the other worst - case methods can be compared . to simplify this analysis , each experiment consisted of ten papers of equal duration ( i . e . six samples which is equivalent to a 15 minute communication ), represented by ten scholar agents . in each experiment , papers are selected and presented until every scientist has fully seen all ten papers . to ensure statistical stability , the results of each experiment are averaged over 10 , 000 test runs , and the mean results are reported . where necessary , a student &# 39 ; s t - test is used to contra statistical noteworthiness at the 95 % trust level . the behavior of each selection mechanism was examined as the number of scientist &# 39 ; s present increases ( fig3 ). the number of scientists , nd , was varied between 1 and 100 , and the scientist behavior was defined using pdepart = 0 . 05 and parrive = 0 . 5 . the plots supports the hypothesis that paper selection using the scholar agent auction is statistically more significant than either round - robin or random ( assuming the modeling parameters defined above ). specifically , as nd increases , there is a corresponding exponential rise in the number of required communications . the mean number of communications required by the scholar agent auction is lower than the round - robin selection mechanism or the random selection mechanism for all numbers of scientists tested ; e . g . for nd = 50 , the auction method required a mean of 43 . 52 ± 0 . 16 publishing cycles to communicate all 10 papers to all the scientists , compared to round - robin ( 65 . 96 ± 0 . 19 ) or random ( 107 . 10 ± 0 . 38 ). this suggests that although each selection method can scale , a single scientist will be exposed to all the papers in typically 34 % fewer publishing cycles ( communications ) than the round robin approach . sander m . bohte , enrico gerding , and han la poutre , market - based recommendation : agents that compete for consumer attention , acm trans . on internet tech ., 4 ( 4 ), 420 - 448 , ( 2004 ). david a . vise , the google story , pan mac millan ed ., ( 2005 ) jeffrey hightower and gaetano borriella , location systems for ubiquitous computing , ieee computer , 34 ( 8 ), 57 - 66 , ( 2001 ). brendan kitts and benjamin leblanc , optimal bidding on keyword auctions , electronic market , 14 ( 3 ), 186 - 201 , ( 2004 ). joseph f . mccarthy , tony j . costa , and edy s . liongosari , unicast , outcast & amp ; 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lópez b ; de la rosa j . ll , a taxonomy of recommender agents on the internet , issn 0269 - 2821 , artificial intelligence review , vol : 19 , pp : 285 - 330 , kluwer academic publishers , berlin , 2003 while preferred embodiments of the invention have been shown and described herein , it will be understood that such embodiments are provided by way of example only . numerous variations , changes and substitutions will occur to those skilled in the art without departing from the spirit of the invention . accordingly , it is intended that the appended claims cover all such variations as fall within the spirit and scope of the invention .