David Wolpert | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Gaining a competitive edge: e-philanthropy and hospital development.

E-philanthropy offers tremendous potential for hospital development. Using the Internet, a hospital can efficiently communicate with current and prospective donors, reach donors that it otherwise would not reach, and build stronger relationships with the next generation of major and planned givers. Developing a strategic online program will help hospitals and their associated foundations achieve greater success and more effectively fulfill their missions well into the future.

Economic Competition↗

PubMed2004

Improving search algorithms by using intelligent coordinates.

We consider algorithms that maximize a global function G in a distributed manner, using a different adaptive computational agent to set each variable of the underlying space. Each agent eta is self-interested; it sets its variable to maximize its own function g(eta). Three factors govern such a distributed algorithm's performance, related to exploration/exploitation, game theory, and machine learning. We demonstrate how to exploit all three factors by modifying a search algorithm's exploration stage: rather than random exploration, each coordinate of the search space is now controlled by a separate machine-learning-based "player" engaged in a noncooperative game. Experiments demonstrate that this modification improves simulated annealing (SA) by up to an order of magnitude for bin packing and for a model of an economic process run over an underlying network. These experiments also reveal interesting small-world phenomena.

Journal Article↗