- / -

For centuries, the horror genre has ensnared audiences across generations and genre lines: ballet, opera, literature, poetry, film, and, most recently, video games have all utilized the power of terror to shock, horrify, and, perhaps most disturbingly, attract. But what does fear sound like? This thesis will focus on that question as it explores both the twin worlds of Konami’s survival-horror title Silent Hill and the underwater-nightmare city of Rapture in 2KGames’ 2007 hit Bioshock. Offering a deeper understanding of the agency video game sound employs, this thesis will engage critical gender, race, and feminist theory, confront issues of social and cultural fears evoked through sound, and offer an in-depth analysis of each game’s soundscape in order to discuss the ways video game soundtracks can serve as vehicles for both signifying and unpacking complicated social and political topics that prevail in modern society.

No description available.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Jessica L. Heier Stamm / Humanitarian and public health logistics systems are often characterized by decentralized decision makers in the form of response agencies who establish supply chains and the beneficiaries who access them. While classical models assume there is a single decision maker with a global objective and authority, decentralized systems consist of multiple decision makers, each with accomplishing his own objective and scope of control. The literature demonstrates that decentralized systems often perform poorly when compared to their hypothetical centralized counterparts. However, there exist few models in the literature to quantify the impact of decentralization and mechanisms for its mitigation are deficient. This research advances knowledge of decentralized systems through new game theory and optimization models, solution methodologies and theoretical characterizations of system performance. First, the author presents a literature review that synthesizes research regarding the facets of humanitarian operations that can benefit from the application of game theory. The author finds that models of decentralized behavior lack realism, neglecting sources of uncertainty, dynamism and personal preferences that influence individuals' decisions. These findings motivate the remaining components of the thesis. Next, the author focuses on decentralization on the part of response agencies who open service facilities. Decentralization can adversely impact patient access and equity, both critical factors in humanitarian contexts. A dynamic, robust facility location model is introduced to enable a comparison between a given decentralized response and a hypothetical coordinated response using identical resources. The value of the model is demonstrated through a computational study of the response to a recent cholera epidemic. Finally, the author introduces game theory models that represent the decisions of beneficiaries seeking relief. The models account for distance, congestion, and the relative importance an individual places on the two. The author constructs an algorithm that computes a decentralized solution in polynomial time. The author quantifies decentralized system performance in comparison to centralized control, bounding the cost of decentralized decision making for the least and most costly outcomes. The author identifies coordination mechanisms encourage centrally optimal decisions within decentralized systems.

Altruism and cooperation have been troubling concepts for theorists. Where altruism towards kin is well-researched, altruism towards non-kin is an evolutionary puzzle. There have been advances in evolutionary psychology where theorists have explored the evolution of altruism through the lens of sexual selection theory, hypothesising that altruism leads to increased chances of being chosen as a mate, particularly as females value altruistic tendencies in a romantic partner. As a result, it was hypothesised males would be more cooperative and altruistic towards those they were attracted to. In study 1, it was found that females placed more importance on altruism and cooperativeness in a mate, far more than males. In addition, males placed more importance on physical attractiveness in a mate, far more than females. In study 2, it was found that people were altruistic and cooperative towards attractive members of the opposite sex when viewing images in response to moral scenarios. When I aimed to replicate this finding, using a game-theoretic framework in studies 3, 4 and 5, I found that people were fair, and altruistic when allocating stakes, and attractiveness did not predict altruism. This consistent fair behaviour led me to further investigate the role of fairness in mate attraction. In studies 6 and 7, it was found that third-parties found fairness to be more attractive than altruism, particularly female participants. In study 8, I further delved into the role of fairness in mate choice, where I found that fairness could be attractive because it increases relationship maintenance in the short-term, but it is altruism that increases relationship longevity in long-term relationships. Furthermore, it was found that people perceive short-term, fair couples to have less intention to cheat than long-term altruistic couples. This thesis opens a new and exciting door in the field of evolutionary psychology, providing evidence that fairness could play a role in mate choice.

abstract: While network problems have been addressed using a central administrative domain with a single objective, the devices in most networks are actually not owned by a single entity but by many individual entities. These entities make their decisions independently and selfishly, and maybe cooperate with a small group of other entities only when this form of coalition yields a better return. The interaction among multiple independent decision-makers necessitates the use of game theory, including economic notions related to markets and incentives. In this dissertation, we are interested in modeling, analyzing, addressing network problems caused by the selfish behavior of network entities. First, we study how the selfish behavior of network entities affects the system performance while users are competing for limited resource. For this resource allocation domain, we aim to study the selfish routing problem in networks with fair queuing on links, the relay assignment problem in cooperative networks, and the channel allocation problem in wireless networks. Another important aspect of this dissertation is the study of designing efficient mechanisms to incentivize network entities to achieve certain system objective. For this incentive mechanism domain, we aim to motivate wireless devices to serve as relays for cooperative communication, and to recruit smartphones for crowdsourcing. In addition, we apply different game theoretic approaches to problems in security and privacy domain. For this domain, we aim to analyze how a user could defend against a smart jammer, who can quickly learn about the user's transmission power. We also design mechanisms to encourage mobile phone users to participate in location privacy protection, in order to achieve k-anonymity. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Computer Science 2013

Os leilões na Internet têm ganhado muita popularidade, tornando-se uma das mais bem sucedidas formas de comércio eletrônico na atualidade. Apresento um modelo teórico para descrever um leilão ascendente, semelhante ao que ocorre na eBay, e verifico suas previsões comportamentais através de dois experimentos. Os resultados mostraram um distanciamento grande entre as previsões teóricas e o que foi observado na prática, no que se refere às estratégias utilizadas, mas acredito que isso se deva à falta de experiência dos participantes dos experimentos. Desenvolvo, então, programas que automatizam a coleta de dados de leilões de selos na eBay e analiso as variáveis que influenciam preços, número de compradores e lances iniciais (preços mínimos). Não houve surpresas em tal análise, no sentido de observar-se resultados contra-intuitivos, mas destaco a reputação dos vendedores como fator relevante para a determinação de preços finais e número de compradores participantes. Além disso, também destaco a ocorrência da submissão tardia de lances, fenômeno recorrente nos leilões na Internet. Proponho, por fim, um método simples que busca determinar o tipo de modelo de leilão, se de valor comum ou de valor privado, e aplico o método nos dados obtidos dos leilões de selos. O resultado foi o de que os leilões analisados estão enquadrados no modelo de valor comum. / Online auctions are one of the most popular and successful types of electronic commerce nowadays. I present a theoretical framework to address the kind of ascending auction implemented at eBay, and I check its predictions through two experiments. The results of the experiments did not confirm the theory, but I believe this is due to the bidders’ lack of previous experience. I also present an algorithm that automatically gathers data from auctions of stamps at eBay. These data is then used on an exploratory analysis that tries to shed some light on the determinants of final prices, minimum bids and the number of bidders. There were no surprises in this analysis, but I would highlight the measurable effect that seller’s reputation has on final prices and the number of bidders. Furthermore, it was possible to observe the occurrence of late bidding. At last, I propose a simple method that determines to which paradigm the on-line auction of stamps at eBay belongs: private value or common value. The result was that the auction of stamps at eBay belongs to the common value paradigm.

Stories engage a form of virtual play. Though they incorporate language and abstractions, stories engage many of the same biological systems and produce many of the same anatomical responses as simpler games. Like peek-a-boo or tickle play, stories stage dangerous or unpleasant scenarios in a controlled setting. In this way, they help develop cognitive strategies to tolerate, manage, and even enjoy uncertainty. One means is by inspiring confidence in difficult situations by tactical self-distraction. Another is to reframe negative or uncertain situations as learning opportunities, that is, to ascribe meaning to them. While both strategies are useful, each has limitations. In William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a king succumbs to the desire to make meaning where there is none, and nearly ruins himself in a self-composed tragedy. His friend restores his confidence and enables a happy ending—but only by deceiving him. This deception is benign, but the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is nearly ruined by her abductor’s confidence game. Her “happy ending” is made possible only by reframing her rape and death as redemptive transfiguration—which, as many of her readers suggest, is a dubious affair. The hero of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man spends the first half of the novel eliciting his companions’ confidence in order to swindle them, and the second half trying to inspire himself with the same confidence. The novel ends with an ominous impasse: one must trust, but one ought not to. For Samuel Beckett, this impasse is productive. In his middle novels, thought itself emerges from the interplay of spontaneous bouts of irrational confidence and distortive, after-the-fact impositions of spurious meaning. Stories create (illusory) identities, elicit (dubious) hopes, and reinforce (false) assumptions in order to help us cope with the agonies of anticipation and loss, and to transform misfortune, accident, and misery into reward, retribution, and meaning—that is, in a comedy of trauma.

General Stackelberg games (GSG) confront two contenders, each wanting to optimize their rewards. One of the players, referred to as the leader, can commit to a given action or strategy first, and the other player, referred to as the follower, then responds by selecting an action or strategy of his own. The objective of the game is for the leader to commit to a reward-maximizing strategy, anticipating that the follower will best respond.Finding an optimal mixed strategy for the leader in a GSG is NP-hard when the leader faces one out of a group of several followers and polynomial when there exists a single follower. Additionally, GSGs in which the strategies of the leader consist in covering a subset of at most $m$ targets and the strategies of the followers consist in attacking some target, are called Stackelberg security games (SSG) and involve an exponential number of pure strategies for the leader.The goal of this thesis is to provide efficient algorithms to solve GSGs and SSGs. These algorithms must not only be able to produce optimal solutions quickly, but also be able to solve real life, and thus large scale, problems efficiently. To that end, the main contributions of this thesis are divided into three parts:First, a comparative study of existing mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulations is carried out for GSGs, where the formulations are ranked according to the tightness of their linear programming (LP) relaxations. A formal theoretical link is established between GSG and SSG formulations through projections of variables and this link is exploited to extend the comparative study to SSG formulations. A new strong SSG MILP formulation is developed whose LP relaxation is shown to be the tightest among SSG formulations. When restricted to a single attacker type, the new SSG formulation is ideal, i.e. the constraints of its LP relaxation coincide with its convex hull of feasible solutions. Computational experiments show that the tightest formulations in each setting are the fastest. Notably, the new SSG formulation proposed is competitive with respect to solution time, and due to the tightness of its LP relaxation, it is better suited to tackle large instances than competing formulations.Second, the bottleneck encountered when solving the formulations studied in the first part of the thesis is addressed: The tightest formulations in each setting have heavy LP relaxations which can be time-consuming to solve and thus limit the effectiveness of the formulations to tackle instances. To address this issue, in both the general and the security case, Benders cuts from the LP relaxation of the tightest MILP formulations are embedded into a Cut and Branch scheme on a sparse equivalent formulation in each setting. By combining the tightness of the bound provided by the strong formulations with the resolution speed of the formulations, the proposed algorithm efficiently solves large GSG and SSG instances which were out of the scope of previous methods.Third, a special type of SSG, defined on a network, is studied, where the leader has to commit to two coverage distributions, one over the edges of the network and one over the targets, which are contained inside the nodes. A particular case of this SSG is used to tackle a real life border patrol problem proposed by the Carabineros de Chile in which the use of their limited security resources is optimized while taking into account both global and local planning considerations. A methodology is provided to adequately generate the game's parameters. Computational experiments show the good performance of the approach and a software application developed for Carabineros to schedule their border resources is described. / Doctorat en Sciences / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

M.Tech. / Threats to information assets have increased significantly since the adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Gone are the days when organisations could just secure the perimeter of their applications. The study adopted a threat vulnerability control framework and game theory as a theoretical lens. It investigated the various facets behind decision making under uncertainty in SOA and the perceived industry best practices. Game theory is a way to model complex SOA security interactions under uncertainty. Intelligent attackers require intelligent analysis. Game theory helps us implement strategies that take into account the attackers’ intentions since it can be applied in situations of uncertainty. The data was collected primarily through semi structured interviews at a Top I.T company based in Sandton. Grounded theory techniques were employed as a chief methodology for data analysis...