This paper describes a French Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) named NASTIA (Negotiating Appointment SeTting InterfAce). Appointment scheduling is a hybrid task halfway between slot-filling and negotiation. NASTIA implements three different negotiation strategies. These strategies were tested on 1734 dialogues with 385 users who interacted at most 5 times with the SDS and gave a rating on a scale o...

Few first-rate biologists start their careers with only one ‘A-level’ (High School qualification) and a job in a copper wire factory. Fewer still go on to command a research budget of £250 million a year. But then Mike Dexter, who takes over this summer as director of the UK’s Wellcome Trust, the world’s biggest medical research charity, has always done things his own way. Dexter joins the Trus...

Methods Patients participated in unstructured, home interviews before their first appointment and approximately 2 weeks after the appointment. They were asked to explain how they had arrived at their current situation. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using constant comparison methods. Validity of findings was checked in second interviews (after the first appointment), and through 8 add...

SunAmerica is a major financial services company that primarily sells fixed and variable annuity products. Its assets (owned or under management) currently total approximately 11 billion dollars. SunAmerica was confronted with the industrywide problem that all agents, broker-dealers, and corporations must be appointed to the State Board of Insurance in each state for each product line to be sol...

Appointment schedules aim at achieving a proper balance between the conflicting interests of the service provider and her clients: a primary objective of the service provider is to fully utilize her available time, whereas clients want to avoid excessive waiting times. Setting up schedules that strike a good balance is severely complicated by the fact that the clients’ service times are random....

NAN LIU: Appointment Scheduling in Health Care (Under the direction of Professor Vidyadhar G. Kulkarni and Professor Serhan Ziya) We propose two complementary approaches to the scheduling of outpatient appointments. The first approach is to dynamically assign appointment times depending on the continuously updated patient schedule. The second approach is to statically design the system by eithe...

A receiver in an action is impartial person appointed by the court to collect and receive, pending proceedings, rents, issues, profits of land or personal estate that it does not seem reasonable either party should enable same be distributed among persons entitled. The appointment a any way affect right property over which he appointed. takes possession its receiver, his all parties according t...

Abstract In response to the mixed views about appointment-based connectedness between CEO and subordinate C-level executives, we systematically analyze net effect of top management team (TMT) in context real corporate investment activities. We document a robust negative association TMT investments, driven by reduction R&D spending acquisitions. Further tests show inefficiency firms with closely...