Invited Speaker:
Alex Duffy
(Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Engineering. Professor of the Department of Design, Manufacture and Engineering Management of the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland)
Talk: Supporting distributed decision-making in a global economy
Cooperative research work with: Robert I. Whitfield and Iain Boyle
“Decision-making and its subsequent effects play a significant role in the lives of individuals as well as organizations. Not only can individuals and organizations be affected by their own decisions, but they are also open to impacts arising from the decisions of others. More precisely, it is the implementation of decisions that creates these effects. In today’s global economy the effects of local decisions can have a widespread impact throughout the world, as exhibited by the recent financial recession. Furthermore, the complexity of decision-making today is magnified due to the distributed and collaborative natures that typify the manner in which modern industry functions. Thus the need to provide effective support for decision-making activities becomes ever more critical given the increased impacts that decisions may have, together with the added complexity imbued in decision-making due to the distributed, collaborative trait that characterises modern industry.
This talk will describe and discuss our research focussed on providing support for distributed and collaborative decision-making, which has been successfully applied within the European maritime industry. This research has been directed towards the development of a virtual integration capability that allows designers to use their own techniques, tools and knowledge in a co-ordinated manner to generate effective decisions. Specifically, our focus is on supporting effective decision-making through facilitating the co-ordination of distributed agents’ behaviour during decision-making, providing consistent and neutral data representation for information sharing, enabling virtual interaction, maintaining data consistency within distributed and dynamic environments, co-ordinating resources and processes, and empowering multi-objective and multi-disciplinary optimisation.“
Special Talks:
Philip Powell
(Executive Dean, Professor of Management at the School of Business, Economics and Informatics at Birkbeck, University of London)
Talk: On-line game participation: Competition and Hedonism
Cooperative research work with: Thomas Weiss & Claudia Loebbecke
“This research seeks to understand participation in competitive on-line games by analyzing competitive and hedonistic decision elements. On-line gaming clearly has competitive and hedonistic components, yet there are no decision models in the literature that include both elements. Current research largely investigates co-operation and dependency among on-line game players and also assesses the role of experience.
This paper asks ‘which competitive and hedonistic decision elements drive play time in competitive on-line games?’ Time spent playing the game, in hours per day, is considered the dependent element and the research is driven by a uses and gratification model. This model surfaces five competitive (competition, achievement, challenge, reputation and rewards) and five hedonic (social relationships, escapism, self-fulfillment, fun, and virtual identity) potential decision elements. In order to address the research question, first, exploratory research involving 10 qualitative interviews was carried out with current games players. This refined the decision elements to five – competition (playing to compete), challenge (to oneself), social relationships (gaining social recognition), escapism (from real life) and fun. The latter three elements are hedonic and the first two competitive. Questionnaires were then developed measuring these items on 7 point Lickert scales and these were tested on 60 players in order to assess content validity. A pre-test of the questionnaire was then run. Questionnaires were made available to participants at the World Cyber Games. 360 usable responses were received which were analysed by PLS regression. The outcome demonstrates that competition and challenge are the main decision elements driving participation – i.e. competitive elements outweigh the hedonistic ones. This aligns with previous research that identifies the importance of competition in hedonic game participation and also the importance of striving for power. It also suggests that future work might usefully address issues of competition in social networks that are considered hedonic.”
Rita Ribeiro
(Founding member and Coordinator of the CA3 – Computational Intelligence Research Group at UNINOVA, Portugal)
Talk: Decision Making Challenges in Space Applications
“In many decision-making Space applications, dynamic changing inputs are essential factors to achieve good results. Obtaining partial or incorrect data, or even missing the occurrence of events that might imperil spacecrafts, are important aspects to be handled in Space missions.
Moreover, when tackling problems such as monitoring and/or classification or selection, to be able to deal with dynamically changing input data as well as imprecision in data, is of paramount importance.
In this talk, I will discuss topics related with decision support systems in dynamic and imprecise environments and then provide real illustrative cases developed for the Space domain (projects financed by the European Space Agency- ESA).”
