Incentives are frequently used by governments and employers to encourage cooperation. Here, we investigated the effect of centralized incentives on cooperation, firstly in a behavioral study and then replicated in a subsequent neuroimaging (fMRI) study. In both studies, participants completed a novel version of the Public Goods Game, including experimental conditions in which the administration of centralized incentives was probabilistic and incentives were either of a financial or social nature. Behavioral results showed that the prospect of potentially receiving financial and social incentives significantly increased cooperation, with financial incentives yielding the strongest effect. Neuroimaging results showed that activation in the bilateral lateral orbitofrontal cortex and precuneus increased when participants were informed that incentives would be absent versus when they were present. Furthermore, activation in the medial orbitofrontal cortex increased when participants would potentially receive a social versus a financial incentive. These results speak to the efficacy of different types of centralized incentives in increasing cooperative behavior, and they show that incentives directly impact the neural mechanisms underlying cooperation.
Sarah Banks (2012) describes ethics work mainly as the effort people put into developing themselves as good practitioners. She discerns six aspects of ethics work: identity work, framing work, reason work, emotion work, role work and performance work. Although ethics work focuses on the ethical development of individual practitioners within their profession, the concept and all its aspects can be transferred into an ethical guideline for the collective development of practitioners in interprofessional cooperation. As such the concept of collective interprofessional ethics work can also be used as a set of criteria for the ethical evaluation of interprofessional cooperation, as is shown on the basis of an experiment in Belgium
Key to reinforcement learning in multi-agent systems is the ability to exploit the fact that agents only directly influence only a small subset of the other agents. Such loose couplings are often modelled using a graphical model: a coordination graph. Finding an (approximately) optimal joint action for a given coordination graph is therefore a central subroutine in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Much research in MARL focuses on how to gradually update the parameters of the coordination graph, whilst leaving the solving of the coordination graph up to a known typically exact and generic subroutine. However, exact methods { e.g., Variable Elimination { do not scale well, and generic methods do not exploit the MARL setting of gradually updating a coordination graph and recomputing the joint action to select. In this paper, we examine what happens if we use a heuristic method, i.e., local search, to select joint actions in MARL, and whether we can use outcome of this local search from a previous time-step to speed up and improve local search. We show empirically that by using local search, we can scale up to many agents and complex coordination graphs, and that by reusing joint actions from the previous time-step to initialise local search, we can both improve the quality of the joint actions found and the speed with which these joint actions are found.
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The PANTOUR consortium builds on previous knowledge and tools produced by the Blueprint for Sectoral Skills project/NTG Alliance and will develop new tools and methodology to address strategic and sustainable approaches and cooperation between vocational education, training, higher education, enterprises of the tourism sector, looking to boost innovation in Europe (in tourism, leisure and hospitality).Societal IssueThe aim of this project is to map and bridge the existing skills gaps in Green, Social and Digital skills of workforce in tourism, leisure and hospitality.Benefit to societyMaking lifelong learning and mobility a reality, developing innovative learning solutions and promoting inclusiveness and access to education. Promoting active citizenship, building equal opportunities and addressing gender equality, diversity and inclusiveness in targeted actions.The consortium aims especially at designing innovative and cooperative solutions to address skills needs in the tourism ecosystem, with the development of outputs such as: the Sectoral Skills Intelligence Monitor, the Tourism Skills Lab, Resource Books for Trainers, the implementation of the National Skills Groups, a Skills Strategy Plan for 2026-2036, among others. With the exploitation of its outputs, PANTOUR seeks to benefit job seekers, unemployed and employed workers from the industry, employers, SMEs and micro entrepreneurs, dedicating a special attention in reskilling and upskilling the workforce on future skills needs in digital, green and social skills.The number of people benefiting from this proposal will be over 10 million that work across the tourism and leisure sector in Europe.The consortium is a multi-disciplinary partnership which comprises 13 European partners: Industry Partners and Tourism Sector Representatives, Universities and Transnational partners. Project lead is CEHAT (Spain). The other partners are GESTLABOR (Spain), Turismo de Portugal (Portugal), Zangador Research Institute (Bulgaria), Technological University Dublin (Ireland), Federturismo Confindustria (Italy), VIMOSZ (Hungary), European Tourism Association ETOA (Transnational), Satakunta University of Applied Sciences (Finland), Ruraltour (Transnational), Landurlaub (Germany), University of the Aegan (Greece).
PUBLIC PLAY SPACE promotes innovative and creative practices for the co-design of inclusive, cohesive and sustainable public spaces, through the use of games and digital technologies, in a transnational and European perspective, fostering the process of placemaking.Participation of citizens in the design of the public space is recognized as fundamental to build inclusive, cohesive and sustainable public space. As local governments grow more and more interested in civic participation, it becomes important to explore available methodologies addressing challenges related with participatory processes. Games have been proposed since the 1960s as a means of facilitating participatory processes by enabling cooperative environments to shape and support citizens’ interaction. The change led by Information and Communication technologies opens the debate on how advanced technologies, from video games to Virtual and Augmented Reality can help to open the process of co-creation to new audiences, enhancing citizen participation, both with respect to the design and space usage. PUBLIC PLAY SPACE aims to explore the process of development and use of innovative video-games for public space co-design through a wide range of actions targeted at education, knowledge production, debate rising and audience development; it will focus on the following actions:- On-line platform development;- State of the art book development;- 3 Creative & Capacity building workshops on advanced video-games co-development;- 3 Open-Game Events / Public space co-creation workshops with citizens (T: Neighbourhood associations, young people, citizens);- A Co-created touring exhibition on Games for placemaking, taking place in 6 cities;- 1 symposium on games for co-design;- Public Play Space experience book.
