This paper describes the architecture and progress in the development of the UvA soccer simulation team. The UvA-team uses a three layer model to separate simulator details, basic soccer skills and the overall control from each other. In the previous year we focused on getting the system up-and-running. The current effort is in the use of learning mechanisms for optimizing the parameters of the...

One source of productivity loss due to illness is the reduced "quantity" or "quality" of labor input while working, often referred to as presenteeism. Illness-related presenteeism has been found to be potentially more costly than absenteeism. To value presenteeism, existing methods use wages as a proxy for marginal productivity at the firm level. However, wage may not equal marginal productivit...

This paper considers the effect of team structure on a team’s engagement in learning and continuous improvement. We begin by noting the uncertain conceptual status of the structure concept in the small groups literature and propose a conceptualization of team structure that is grounded in the long tradition of work on formal structure in the sociology and organization theory literatures. We the...

The Melbourne team was a collaboration between academic and industry groups. The team participated in both the learning and the interactive tasks of this year’s Legal Track. The baseline run for the learning track employed true-relevance feedback, achieving respectable outcomes; the experimental runs added additional features and employed an SVM classifier, with poor results. The techniques dev...

Determining the productivity of individual workers engaged in team production is difficult. Monitoring expenses may be high, or the observable output of the entire team may be some single product. One way to collect information about individual productivity is to observe how total output changes when the composition of the team changes. While some employers may explicitly shift workers from tea...

The Product Quality Research Institute, in conjunction with the Food and Drug Administration, conducted an anonymous, electronic survey of the biological products manufacturing industry inspected by Team Biologics, with emphasis in obtaining industry input on inspection and compliance aspects of program operations. Representatives from all of the product-specific manufacturing industries inspec...

OBJECTIVE Building surgical teams is one attempt to ensure the health-care system becomes more efficient, but how is 'efficiency' understood or interpreted? The aim was to study how organized surgical team members and their leaders understood operating room efficiency. DESIGN Qualitative study. SETTING A 1100-bed Swedish university hospital. PARTICIPANTS Eleven participants, nine team mem...