We model competing groups when players’ values for winning are private information, each group’s performance equals the best effort (“best shot”) of its members, and the group with the best performance wins the contest. At the symmetric equilibrium, the overall expected best shot unambiguously increases with the number of competing teams, though each team’s performance may increase or decrease....

We present a multi-agent collaboration algorithm to recruit an approximate number of individually simple robots with controllable variance. We propose a sigmoid response threshold function motivated by task allocation in social insects, and describe macro-level models backed by micro-level simulations to predict the resulting team sizes and their variance. We show that the slope of the response...

Software development has experienced remarkable progress in the past decade. However, due to the rising complexity and magnitude of the project the development productivity has not been consistently improved. By analyzing the latest ISBSG data repository with 4106 projects, we discovered that software development productivity has actually undergone irregular variations between the years 1995 an...

background in the past 10 years, 13 fatal earthquakes have occurred in iran and led to death of 30,000 people whom most of them were killed in the earlier hours of the disaster. disaster medical assistance teams are groups of trained medical and non-medical personnel with various combinations that on the optimal conditions are deployed just within 8 hours of notification and are able to work se...

SPQR + ISocRob is a joint team between two research groups: SPQR (Italy) and IsocRob (Portugal). SPQR (Soccer Player Quadruped Robots) is the group of the Faculty of Engineering at University of Rome “La Sapienza” in Italy, that is involved in RoboCup competitions since 1998 in different leagues (Middle-size 1998-2002, Four-legged since 2000, Real-rescue-robots since 2003, Virtual-rescue and @H...

background rapid response teams (rrts) assess patients during early phases of deterioration to reduce patient morbidity and mortality. objectives this study aimed to evaluate the ability of earlier medical intervention by a rrt prompted by clinical instability in patients to reduce the incidence of and mortality from unexpected cardiac arrest at our hospital. patients and methods a nonrandomize...