Samuel Bendahan

Multi-issue actor analysis: tools and models for assessing technology environments

In strategic prospective, scenario thinking and negotiation processes, analysis of the actor game plays an important role. Such an analysis endeavours to rank the positions of stakeholders on many strategic issues, to assess potential convergences and divergences, and to anticipate coalitions and conflicts. Many models and tools that have been proposed and used for these purposes rest on matrix analysis, game theory and simulation. The present paper examines two of them: Mactor, a model of scenario planning, and a negotiation model derived from a political decision model based on game theory. This paper detects the flaws, similarities and differences of these approaches. Based on this comparison, a new model is proposed, with the advantages of both, but without their detected flaws. The model has been applied to an assessment of the public WLAN landscape. The paper sketches the first results which now should be integrated into a more sophisticated scenario analysis.

Negotiation in Technology Landscapes: An Actor-Issue Analysis

In large-scale negotiation problems and in assessments of complex and uncertain environments, it is vital to analyze the different stakeholders involved and to evaluate their positions in the negotiations. This paper extends a model, which merges previous multi-issue and actor-focused methods, based on power relationships between stakeholders and their ability to bargain in order to increase their utility. The model has already used for assessing a public WLAN landscape. The paper emphasizes the dynamic application of the model we developed for experimenting the negotiation evolution, shifting positions on some issues, and exchanging positions between actors. We also claim that such forecasting analyses of negotiation landscapes can be significantly improved using more appropriate visualization support. We propose new visualization tools for analyzing negotiation outcomes, representing negotiation landscapes, and applying what-if simulations, using passive influence, expected outcome and dissatisfaction, power distribution, proximity, and negotiation maps.

Acute stress alters individual risk taking in a time-dependent manner and leads to anti-social risk.

Decision‐making processes can be modulated by stress, and the time elapsed from stress induction seems to be a crucial factor in determining the direction of the effects. Although current approaches consider the first post‐stress hour a uniform period, the dynamic pattern of activation of the physiological stress systems (i.e., the sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal axis) suggests that its neurobehavioural impact might be heterogeneous. Here, we evaluate economic risk preferences on the gain domain (i.e., risk aversion) at three time points following exposure to psychosocial stress (immediately after, and 20 and 45 min from onset). Using lottery games, we examine decisions at both the individual and social levels. We find that risk aversion shows a time‐dependent change across the first post‐stress hour, evolving from less risk aversion shortly after stress to more risk averse behaviour at the last testing time. When risk implied an antisocial outcome to a third party, stressed individuals showed less regard for this person in their decisions. Participants’ cortisol levels explained their behaviour in the risk, but not the antisocial, game. Our findings reveal differential stress effects in self‐ and other‐regarding decision‐making and highlight the multidimensional nature of the immediate aftermath of stress for cognition.

Structural and functional alterations in the prefrontal cortex after post-weaning social isolation: relationship with species-typical and deviant aggression

Although the inhibitory control of aggression by the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the cornerstone of current theories of aggression control, a number of human and laboratory studies showed that the execution of aggression increases PFC activity; moreover, enhanced activation was observed in aggression-related psychopathologies and laboratory models of abnormal aggression. Here, we investigated these apparently contradictory findings in the post-weaning social isolation paradigm (PWSI), an established laboratory model of abnormal aggression. When studied in the resident-intruder test as adults, rats submitted to PWSI showed increased attack counts, increased share of bites directed towards vulnerable body parts of opponents (head, throat, and belly) and reduced social signaling of attacks. These deviations from species-typical behavioral characteristics were associated with a specific reduction in the thickness of the right medial PFC (mPFC), a bilateral decrease in dendritic and glial density, and reduced vascularization on the right-hand side of the mPFC. Thus, the early stressor interfered with mPFC development. Despite these structural deficits, aggressive encounters enhanced the activation of the mPFC in PWSI rats as compared to controls. A voxel-like functional analysis revealed that overactivation was restricted to a circumscribed sub-region, which contributed to the activation of hypothalamic centers involved in the initiation of biting attacks as shown by structural equation modeling. These findings demonstrate that structural alterations and functional hyperactivity can coexist in the mPFC of rats exposed to early stressors, and suggest that the role of the mPFC in aggression control is more complex than suggested by the inhibitory control theory.

Decision and visualization for negotiation

We present a new strategic model for solving large scale problems involving numerous actors and issues. It merges previous multi-issues and actors methods based on power relationship between stakeholders and their ability to bargain in order to increase their utility. We apply new visualization techniques to analyse its outputs: dissatisfaction analysis, proximity map, passive influences and power repartition on issues. We simultaneously describe the implemented system on an assessment in the wireless Internet service provider scenario.

Fostering Knowledge Sharing in NGOs

Non-Governmental Organizations in the humanitarian field are particularly knowledge intensive structures. However, they often fail to manage this knowledge efficiently and thus waste resources repeating avoidable mistakes. Providing adequate incentives for knowledge sharing is a central issue in any knowledge management system and is still largely unresolved. In this position paper, we advocate for advances on the topic and lay out a research agenda to address the issue.

Rule of thumb: effect of social button icons on interaction

Social buttons are now widespread in social media apps. They are used to assign weight to user content and trigger user engagement. They come in different shapes (e.g., thumb in Facebook, arrows in Reddit or StackOverflow, plus one in Google+) but very little is known about the influence of the shape on user behaviour. This paper, addresses this issue by presenting results of a controlled randomized experiment with 173 users. The results suggest that thumbs up / thumbs down icons are significantly more engaging than the plus one / minus one icons. At the same time the result shows that type of the icon used has no significant influence on the direction of the vote.

Towards Mobile Blended Interaction Fostering Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is a fundamental skill that all citizens should have. Unfortunately, while beliefs in unfounded claims are pervasive, teaching critical skill is a strenuous task. Digital mobile interaction could potentially support face-to-face teaching to foster critical thinking skills. In this paper, we present a preliminary version of the BaloneyMeter, a mobile app that provides support for teaching critical thinking skills. We report on a case study in a class of 150 students and present an open research question that we plan to address in subsequent work.

Gamifying Knowledge Sharing in the Humanitarian Context

Knowledge management is particularly important in humanitarian organization operating in situations of emergency. One of the challenges in designing systems to support knowledge management is to increase knowledge sharing. In this research-in-progress we explore attitudes of humanitarian workers of Médecins Sans Frontières towards knowledge sharing and propose novel designs to visualize individual and group contributions on a knowledge management system.

DinerRouge: Bringing Wealth and Income Inequality to the Table through a Provocative UX

Income and wealth inequality is one of the important social issues of the last decade. Nevertheless, it is rarely discussed through the lense of Human Computer Interaction. In this paper, we aim at investigating how a provocative user experience can contribute to engaging users when it comes to issues about wealth and income inequality. More precisely, we present the design of DinerRouge, a novel mobile application that can spark income inequality discussion by providing a provoking way to split the bill in restaurants based on income. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of DinerRouge with 78 participants which convey the fact that DinerRouge is usable, provocative and informative. Finally, we present open research question to guide future investigations.