Mass customization, as a means to meet individual consumer’s need on a large scale, has recently attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners. However, as customers and their needs grow increasingly diverse, meeting every consumer’s need has become a surefire way to add unnecessary cost and complexity to operations. Furthermore, consumers are not all really ready for mass custo...

The priority problem of incomplete preference relations is investigated. Using the transformation relation between multiplicative preference relation and fuzzy preference relation, we develop a least-square model to obtain the collective priority vector of the incomplete preference relations presented by multiple decision makers, with the existence condition of the solution being developed. Mea...

We consider the challenge of preference elicitation in systems that help users discover the most desirable item(s) within a given database. Past work on preference elicitation focused on structured models that provide a factored representation of users’ preferences. Such models require less information to construct and support efficient reasoning algorithms. This paper makes two substantial con...

In this game, agents will face-off against each other in the ultra-competitive real estate market. Each competitor will act as a real estate agent, working on behalf of clients who need to move into new homes. These clients need to buy a new home as well as sell their current home. The game will test competitors’ technology in two main research areas: preference elicitation and multi-issue nego...

The paper introduces a new approach to preference structure, where from a weak preference relation derive the following relations:strict preference, indifference and incomparability, which by aggregations and negations are created and examined. We decomposing a preference relation into a strict preference, anindifference, and an incomparability relation.This approach allows one to quantify diff...

Phycobiliproteins carry linear tetrapyrrole chromophores (bilins) thioether-linked to specific cysteine residues. The process of bilin attachment to apoprotein in vivo has been characterized for only one bilin attachment site on one phycobiliprotein, that on the alpha subunit of phycocyanin (alpha PC). In the cyanobacterium Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002, the addition of phycocyanobilin to apo-alph...

During natural speech perception, listeners rely on a wide range of cues to support comprehension, from semantic context to prosodic information. There is a general consensus that prosody plays a role in syntactic parsing, but most studies focusing on ambiguous relative clauses (RC) show that prosodic cues, alone, are insufficient to reverse the preferred interpretation of sentence. These findi...

The continuous circulation of the highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus has been a cause of great concern. The possibility of this virus acquiring specificity for the human influenza A virus receptor, alpha2,6-linked sialic acids (SA), and being able to transmit efficiently among humans is a constant threat to human health. Different studies have described amino acid substitutions...

BACKGROUND The most commonly used instruments for assessing adult attachment have shown differing combinations of items and divergences in the resulting sub-scales. METHOD This study presents the Scale of Preferences and Expectations in Close Interpersonal Relationships ( Escala de Preferencias y Expectativas en las Relaciones Interpersonales Cercanas, EPERIC), made up of 22 items, and based ...

BACKGROUND Oxytocin (OXT) modulates several aspects of social behavior. Intranasal OXT is a leading candidate for treating social deficits in patients with autism spectrum disorder, and common genetic variants in the human OXTR gene are associated with emotion recognition, relationship quality, and autism spectrum disorder. Animal models have revealed that individual differences in Oxtr express...