Currently a new version of the distance education platform WeLearn [3] to be combined with an agent system ([1], also developed locally) for providing advanced services [2] is under development. In a previous stage of the project software was created to automatically derive keywords from documents, either from the different versions of metadata already contained (various Microsoft file formats,...

As our ability to store information increases, the mechanisms we employ to access that information become ever more important. In this paper, we present Archosum, a prototype of an organizational system that attempts to encapsulate the benefits of both hierarchical and keyword systems. By introducing abstract entities, Archosum provides a simple interface with which users can build and maintain...

Classical Bayesian mechanism design is “centralized”, that is, the designer is assumed to know thedistribution D from which the players’ type profile has been drawn. We instead investigate a very “de-centralized” Bayesian model, where the designer has no knowledge at all, and each player only has someprobabilistic information about D.For this decentralized model and many con...

Mechanism Design is the algorithmic component of Game Theory, the synthesis of protocols for selfish parties to achieve certain properties. A protocol is a me thod to aggregate the preferences of the parties in order to decide on some "social choice," where typical examples include: deciding whether a community should build a bridge, how to route packets in a network and deciding who wins an au...