Web search engines are usually designed to serve all users, without considering the interests of individual users. Personalized web search incorporates an individual user's interests when deciding relevant results to return. We propose to learn a user profile, called a user interest hierarchy (UIH), from web pages that are of interest to the user. The user’s interest in web pages will be determ...

Group living often entails a balance between individual selfinterest and benefits to the group as a whole. Situations in which an individual’s vested interests conflict with collective interests are known as social dilemmas (Kollock 1998). More formally, a theoretical game becomes a social dilemma when an equilibrium of dominant strategies leads to worse outcomes for all players compared to a m...

Consent ought to be required to withhold treatment that is in a patient's best interests to receive. Do not resuscitate (DNR) orders are examples of best interests assessments at the end of life. Such assessments represent value judgments that cannot be validly ascertained without patient input. If patient input results in that patient dissenting to the DNR order then individual physicians are ...

In the current industrial context, strategies intended to bring about continuous improvement have to include the multi-criteria performance expression aspects. In complex systems, many actions may be envisaged to achieve the required levels of performance. A fuzzy representation is used to model the relationships between objectives and actions. Mostly, the potential improvement actions are dist...

The divide between medical innovation and routine clinical practice is a grey zone. Clinicians are often torn between their dual roles as healers and investigators, between the need to cure and the desire to improve existing practice. While medical research involves “experimentation” on human subjects to identify novel treatments, one is often tempted to use newer techniques to improve the outc...