Steven Kimbrough

University of Pennsylvania | UP · Operations and Information Management Department

The general conclusion of climate change studies is the necessity of eliminating net CO2 emissions in general and from the electric power systems in particular by 2050. The share of renewable energy is increasing worldwide, but due to the intermittent nature of wind and solar power, a lack of system flexibility is already hampering the further inte...

The apportionment process that precedes redistricting is generally a staid American political ritual. Recent debates about who should be included in the apportionment basis, however, have raised new questions about representation in the apportionment process. To estimate the effects of excluding non-citizens and children from apportionment, we desc...

Mendelian genetics, with its model of particulate, discrete genes, has been a power tool of analysis, as well as an attractive one that has drawn many researchers in cultural evolution. Many forms of cultural evolution, however, involve continuous variation over a space that is not easily quantized. In this paper, we look at continuous variation di...

A socialoid (our term) is an integrated collection of data and models about a society. As such, and accepting that it can never be complete, it is a computational model of a society. We are in the early stages of building a socialoid for Philadelphia, PA. We call it the Philadelphioid. The Philadelphioid is a diachronic (temporal), mashed, geograph...

Political redistricting is the redrawing of electoral district boundaries. It is normally undertaken to reflect population changes. The process can be abused, in what is called gerrymandering, to favor one party or interest group over another, resulting thereby in broadly undemocratic outcomes that misrepresent the views of the voters. Gerrymanderi...

We independently implemented and studied the nest-site selection model described in Passino, K. M., and Seeley, T. D., “Modeling and analysis of nest-site selection by honeybee swarms,” 2006, focusing on the default parameter values they obtained by field calibration. We focus on aspects of the model pertaining both to imitation and social learning...

Building the Foundation for Risk Management and Human Error Analysis for Recreational Boating Safety (2001.) PB2005-100215. (Development of fundamental structure in both areas. The proposals advanced in the “risk” portion were submitted to the Coast Guard and approved in concept as the basis of a multi-party boating risk management system.) The int...

This paper addresses what we call the investment question: Under what plausible circumstances, if any, can variablerenewable energy (VRE, and solar photovoltaic (PV) in partic-ular) be a good investment? Although VRE has been growingrapidly world-wide, it is generally subsidized. Under what costand market conditions can solar PV flourish without su...

Organizational ambidexterity, defined as the pursuit of both exploitation and exploration, has become an important topic in the study of organizations, especially in innovation management theory. Previous literature has not focused on the strategic (game-theoretic) aspects of organizational ambidexterity or on its decision-making aspects. Little is...

This paper investigates how high-quality, vocabulary-based classifiers, useful for competitive intelligence, can be found for relatively small corpora of publicly available documents. Two corpora of recent annual reports are examined and compared, one in English and one in Chinese. The paper tests whether vocabularies can predict whether firms are...

With the surge of obesity in the United States, improving urban food environ-ments has gained in importance. Research on food deserts focuses mainly on assessing the food environment but lacks methods of generating good solutions for the placement of food stores. This work uses a maximum covering location problem in combination with census block gr...

Past work on tournaments in iterated prisoner’s dilemma and the evolution of cooperation spawned by Axelrod has contributed insights about achieving cooperation in social dilemmas, as well as a framework for strategic analysis in such settings. We present a broader, more extensive framework for strategic analysis in general games, which we illustra...

The City of Philadelphia recently redesigned districts for its council members based upon the 2010 census. The districting process evinced considerable public interest and engagement because council districts from the prior census had significant shortcomings. During the 2010 redistricting process, several public interest groups came together to or...

The allocation of resources between providers to consumers is a well-known problem and has received significant attention, typically using notions of monetary exchanges. In this paper, we study resource matching in settings without monetary transactions by using a two-sided matching approach, e.g., in social and collaborative environments where use...

We model a market in which suppliers bid step-function offer curves using agent-based modeling. Our model is an abstraction of electricity markets where step-function offer curves are given to an independent system operator that manages the auctions in electricity markets. Positing an elementary and computationally accessible learning model, Probe...

Service design is transformative when it has a measurable, even optimizing, positive affect on human well-being. Any prospect for such felicitous outcomes, however, requires accurate assessment or measurement of well-being in and for target populations. Such assessment raises two immediate issues: conceptualization (How should well-being be concept...

The importance of innovation for companies to gain competitive advantage is widely acknowledged. Realizing service innovations has shown to provide some particular challenges to organizations. Consequently, in recent years, several frameworks of capabilities for service innovation have been published; however, often not yet validated. Conventional...

There is an overriding interest in measuring the well-being of communities and institutions: healthy (flourishing) individuals and groups perform “better” than those that are not. Capturing the facets of well-being is, however, not straightforward: it contains personal information with sometimes uncomfortable self-realizations associated to it. Yet...

This article examines strategic behavior of e-Service suppliers that offer electronic services in complex Service Value Networks (SVNs). In SVNs, consumers request a bundle of e-Services, and the SVN acts as an aggregator of single service instances, automatically configuring services from different e-Service suppliers into a complex service bundle...

We describe a novel use of evolutionary computation to discover good districting plans for the Philadelphia City Council. We were able to discover 116 distinct, high quality, legally valid plans. These constitute a rich resource on which stakeholders may base deliberation. The exercise raised the issue of how to deal with large numbers of plans, es...

Rules, regulations and policy statements quite frequently contain nested sequences of normative modalities as in, for example: The database manager is obliged to permit the deputy-manager to authorise access for senior departmental staff. Parking on highways ought to be forbidden. [24] Accordingly, a knowledge-representation language for such sente...

This paper presents and explores the idea of deriving numerical indicators from texts, that is, converting text data to numerical data that has predictive or diagnostic value. One application of such a general capability is to the provisional identification of networks, or rather, of associations within networks. Conversely, given a network structu...

This document is meant to serve as a repository for work product related to ongoing investigations of interdependent security (IDS) games, focusing broadly on computational modeling of strategic interactions. IDS games are multi-agent games where each agent must decide whether or not to invest in risk-mitigating measures. Each agent knows that even...

We propose and explore, in the context of benchmark problems for flowshop scheduling, a risk-based concept of robustness for optimization problems. This risk-based concept is in distinction to, and complements, the uncertainty-based concept employed in the field known as robust optimization. Implementation of our concept requires problem solution m...

This paper presents a new proposal for understanding the establishment and maintenance of cooperation: the cooperation afforder with framing hypothesis, producing what can be called cooperation from afforder-framing. Three key moves are present. First, a special variety of the Stag Hunt game, the Cooperation Afforder game, will reliably produce mut...

We introduce a type of genetic crossover operation between an arbitrary feasible solution and any infeasible solution to a constrained optimization model (COModel). This crossover operator produces a feasible-infeasible pair on the boundary, that is, the individuals in the resulting pair of solutions are minimally different.

This paper introduces the Deliberation Decision Support System (DDSS). The DDSS obtains heuristically (using a genetic algorithm) solutions of interest for constrained optimization models. This is illustrated, without loss of generality, by generalized assignment problems. The DDSS also provides users with graphical tools that support post-solution...

This paper introduces the SoI problem, that of finding non-optimal solutions of interest for constrained optimization models. SoI problems subsume finding FoIs (feasible solutions of interest), and IoIs (infeasible solutions of interest). In all cases, the interest addressed is post-solution analysis in one form or another. Post-solution analysis o...

The stable marriage problem is prototypical of two-sided matching problems, widely encountered in practice, in which agents having preferences, interests and capacities for action of their own are paired up or matched. Standardly, variants of the well-known Gale-Shapley deferred acceptance algorithm (GS/DAA) are used to find stable matches. Using e...

This paper introduces the SoI problem, that of finding non-optimal solutions of interest for constrained optimization models. SoI problems subsume finding FoIs (feasible solutions of interest), and IoIs (infeasible solutions of interest). In all cases, the interest addressed is post-solution analysis in one form or another. Post-solution analysis o...

A two-population Genetic Algorithm for constrained opti-mization is exercised and analyzed. One population consists of feasible candidate solutions evolving toward optimality. Their most promising in-feasible offspring are transferred to a second, infeasible population. Four challenge problems from the literature illustrate two-population evolu-tio...

Classical oligopoly theory has strong analytical foundations but is weak in capturing the operating environment of oligopolists and the available knowledge they have for making decisions, areas in which the management literature is relevant. We use agent-based models to simulate the impact on firm profitability of policies that oligopolists can pur...

The advent of XML has been widely seized upon as an opportunity to develop document representation standards that lend themselves to automated processing. This is a welcome development and much good has come of it. That said, present standardization efforts may be criticized on a number of counts. We explore two issues associated with document XML...

We introduce our framework for logic-based composi-tional e-commerce interaction. We aim to provide open-source software which adds a light-weight formal messag-ing layer to business communications, to increase the ac-cessibility of e-commerce infrastructure to smaller business players. In the process we hope to develop a comprehensive theory of bu...

We explore data-driven methods for gaining insight into the dynamics of a two-population genetic algorithm (GA), which has been effective in tests on constrained optimization problems. We track and compare one population of feasible solutions and another population of infeasible solutions. Feasible solutions are selected and bred to improve their o...

The paper outlines an approach to the formal representation of signalling conventions, emphasising the prominent role played therein by a particular type of normative modality. It is then argued that, in terms of inferencing related to this modality, a solution can be given to the task J.L. Austin set but failed to resolve: finding a criterion for...

New results on a class of distributed two-sided matching algorithms are described. In particular, these algorithms can dominate the matches produced by the Gale-Shapley algorithm in terms of both average social welfare and fairness. However, stability is not guaranteed and therefore a natural trade- off arises between stability and social welfare....

A new genetic operator is proposed in the context of genetic algorithms that are applied to constrained optimization problems with binary decision variables. A solution is said to be feasible if it satisfies the constraints, and infeasible otherwise. Provided the two inputs of the operator are of differing feasibility, the operator outputs a infeas...

This paper introduces a method for clustering complex and linearly non-separable datasets, without any prior knowledge of the number of naturally occurring clusters. The proposed method is based on an improved variant of the Particle Swarm Optimization ...

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The paper outlines an approach to the formal representation of signalling conventions, emphasising the prominent role played therein by a particular type of normative modality. It is then argued that, in terms of inferencing related to this modality, a solution can be given to the task J. L. Austin set but failed to resolve: finding a criterion for...

Due to the vast amount of user data tracked online, the use of data-based analytical methods is becoming increasingly common for e-businesses. Recently the term analytical eCRM has been used to refer to the use of such methods in the online world. A characteristic of most of the current approaches in eCRM is that they use data collected about users...

This paper is an integrative essay on the activities and intellectual concerns of the FMEC community. The paper frames these concerns around three ‘non-standard’ formalisms (logic, graphs, and procedures), three themes or general problems (representation, inference, and learning), and seven more specific topics (electronic data interchange, electro...

Post-evaluation analysis of the model of a constrained opti-mization problem is conducted after obtaining preliminary optimal or heuristically good solutions. The primary goal of post-evaluation analysis is to reconsider assumptions made in the model in the light of information generated while finding the good solutions as well as information not p...

A local civic organization, Greater Philadelphia First, engaged us to study the knowledge economy of the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania region and make recommendations on ways to improve its rate of growth. To structure our thinking and the interviews with local entrepreneurs, civic leaders, and others, using soft operations research techniques, we dev...

Trust presents a number of problems and paradoxes, because existing theory is not fully adequate for understanding why there is so much of it, why it occurs, and so forth. These problems and paradoxes of trust are vitally important, for trust is thought to be the essential glue that holds societies together. This paper explores the generation of tr...

Repeated play in games by simple adaptive agents is investigated. The agents use Q-learning, a special form of reinforcement learning, to direct learning of behavioral strategies in a number of 2×2 games. The agents are able effectively to maximize the total wealth extracted. This often leads to Pareto optimal outcomes. When the rewards signals are...

Quotation and subsequent disquotation of propositional con- tent sentences has been proposed for, and has some attrac- tive features for, representing content sentences embedded in complex sentences by subordinating clauses. The mean- ing of and proper semantics for such representations, how- ever, remain obscure, amid lurking worries that any such...

We examine learning by artificial agents in repeated play of Cournot duopoly games. Our learning model is simple and cognitively realistic. The model departs from standard reinforcement learning models, as applied to agents in games, in that it credits the agent with a form of conceptual ascent, whereby the agent is able to learn from a considerati...

This paper presents a fully formal integration of Jones’s logical theory of speech acts as signalling conventions with Kimbrough’s Formal Language for Business Communication (FLBC). The work is part of a larger programme of logicism in the context of electronic commerce. Speech acts are an especially apt subject for this programme because of their...

Standard (that is, long-standing and currently much in use) EDI protocols (including the X12 and EDIFACT series) have repeatedly been criticized for poor design, confusing or absent semantics, and much else. Most of these criticisms are indeed on the mark. The main conclusions that the critics have drawn are also correct: business-to-business e-com...

SeaSpeak is “English for maritime communications.” It is a restricted, specially-designed dialect of English used in merchant shipping and accepted as an international standard. This paper discusses, in the context of SeaSpeak, two key problems in the formalization of any such restricted, specially-designed language, viz., representing the illocuti...

We report on a series of computational experiments with artificial agents learning in the context of games. Two kinds of learning are investigated: (1) a simple form of associative learning, called Q-learning, which occurs in state space, and (2) a simple form of learning, which we introduce here, that occurs in policy space. We compare the two met...

A two-population Genetic Algorithm for constrained optimization is exercised and analyzed. One population consists of feasible candidate solutions evolving toward optimality. Their infeasible but promising offspring are transferred to a second, infeasible population. Four striking features are illustrated by executing challenge problems from the li...

We explore data-driven methods for gaining insight into the dynamics of the FI-2Pop GA (explained below), which has been e#ective for constrained optimization problems. We track and compare one population of feasible solutions and another population of infeasible solutions.

This paper describes a successful application of evolutionary computation to a difficult and commercially significant constrained optimization problem. The financial product model, for optimizing mortgage refinancing packages, is introduced. It is a realistic, and very challenging optimization problem, for which standard solvers leave much to be de...

The received concept of strategic (game-theoretic) rationality is attended by a formidable list of para-doxes, anomalies, and empirical failures. This paper reviews three well-known and problematic decision contexts and diagnoses as a common source of difficulty the failure in the received view of rationality to adequately recognize risk-return tra...

Coalition formation is a type of mixed-motive game in which n players strategically negotiate to secure posi- tions in advantageous contracts. In this study, we flnd that systems of agents which learn by a simple lin- ear updating rule successfully can model the outcomes of human players across flve coalition formation games studied experimentally...

This paper extends previous work on FLBC (formal language for business communication) done with event semantics and disquotation theory. The paper focuses on the development of a tabular user interface for FLBC mes- sages, emphasizing the Language-Action Perspective via speech act theory. We argue that the tabular representations are (a) expressive...

In a two-market genetic algorithm applied to a constrained optimization problem, two 'markets' are maintained. One market estab- lishes fitness in terms of the objective function only; the other market measures fitness in terms of the problem constraints only. Previous work on knapsack problems has shown promise for the two-market approach. In this...

This position paper advocates a vision in the development of automated legal reasoning and presents evidence supporting the plausibility of that vision. The paper observes that original creation of documents of legal import in either fully formal or semistructured form o#ers the prospect of greatly reducing the cost and expanding the scope of knowl...

DNA is used to implement a simplified version of poker.

he literature on web-usage mining is replete with data preprocessing techniques, which correspond to many closely related problem formulations. We survey data- preprocessing techniques for session-level pattern discovery and compare three of these techniques in the context of understanding session-level purchase behavior on the web. Using real data...

The ordinary genetic algorithm may be thought of as conducting a single market in which solutions compete for success, as measured by the fitness funtion. We introduce a two-market genetic algorithm, consisting of two phases, each of which is an ordinary single-market genetic algorithm. The twomarket genetic algorithm has a natural interpretation a...

As technology and society continue to evolve, the size of the corpus of government policies and procedures continues to more than keep pace. The U.S. Federal Tax Code today consumes over 2.8 million words or 6000 pages. There are more than 20,000 cross-references both within the code itself and to external regulations. Navigating the sea of informa...

We study the emergence of trust behavior at both the individual and the population levels. At the individual level, in contrast to prior research that views trust as fixed traits, we model the emergence of trust or cooperation as a result of trial and error learning by a computer algorithm borrowed from the field of artificial intelligence (Watkins...

We explore computational approaches for artificial agents to play the ultimatum game. We compare our agents' behavior with that predicted by classical game theory, as well as behavior found in experimental (or behavioral) economics investigations. In particular, we study the following questions: How do artificial agents perform in playing the ultim...

Computational explanations appeal to computational models, in contrast to equations or axioms, to explain their target systems. These models are typically inspired by natural phenomena and the term natural computation has been used in the literature. Darwinian or evolutionary models and explanations are a prominent form. This paper presents and rev...

1 Brief Description "Agents, Games & Evolution" (OPIM 325) is about recent and developing re-sults in our fundamental understanding of strategic behavior. We will focus on the design and behavior of artificial agents in strategic (or game-theoretic) sit-uations. We will be especially concerned with strategic contexts of commercial import, such as b...

DNA is used to implement a simplified version of poker. Strategies are evolved that mix bluffing with telling the truth. The essential features are (1) to wait your turn, (2) to default to the most conservative course, (3) to probabilistically override the default in some cases, and (4) to learn from payoffs. Two players each use an independent pop...

Standard deontic logics are about what obtains in deontically ideal worlds. Deontic reasoning from the perspective of event semantics and the disquotation (ESD) theory, which we describe briefly, is about individual obligations, permissions, etc. in this, admittedly non-ideal world. Standard deontic logics are beset with a number of puzzling parado...

Considerable diversity is exhibited by current definitions of the concept of trust. This paper argues that there may nevertheless be an identifiable core to the concept. On the basis of an analysis of five scenarios in which some agent x trusts ...

We model an electronic supply chain managed by artificial agents. We investigate whether artificial agents do better than humans when playing the MIT Beer Game. Can the artificial agents discover good and effective business strategies in supply chains both in stationary and non-stationary environments? Can the artificial agents discover policies th...

ossibly unique violation, V (x). Specifically, assume that for every statement # 1. 2. F# # #x(# # (I assume that x does not occur freely in #.) Let us now revisit the paradox argument (above), substituting consequents for their antecedents. 2. (From F#, it is forbidden that #.) (From if #, then i #; if #, then [pick your favorite version] it is ob...

Documents are generally represented for retrieval by either extracting index terms from them or by creating and selecting from an external set of candidate terms. There are many procedures for doing this, but while work continues along these dimensions, there have been relatively few attempts to change this basic process. Of particular importance i...

We investigate the "Mad Mex trust game," a game of trust which cannot easily be represented in a strategic form. We investigate such questions as: Will cooperative behavior emerge and under what conditions? What are some of the efficient and effective mechanisms for trust building in electronic markets? How will these mechanisms affect the emergenc...

The ordinary genetic algorithm may be thought of as conducting a single market in which solutions compete for success, as mea- sured by the fitness funtion. We introduce a two-market genetic algorithm, consisting of two phases, each of which is an ordinary single-market genetic algorithm. The two- market genetic algorithm has a natural inter- preta...

Computational explanations appeal to computational models, in contrast to equations or axioms, to explain their target systems. These models are typically inspired by natural phenomena and the term natural computation has been used in the literature. Darwinian or evolutionary models and explanations are a prominent form. This paper presents and rev...