Abstract: What is a fair way to assign rooms to several housemates, and divide the rent between them? This is not just a theoretical question: many people have used the Spliddit website to obtain envy-free solutions to rent division instances. But envy freeness, in and of itself, is insufficient to guarantee outcomes that people view as intuitive and acceptable. We therefore focus on solutions that optimize a criterion of social justice, subject to the envy freeness constraint, in order to pinpoint the “fairest” solutions. We develop a general algorithmic framework that enables the computation of such solutions in polynomial time. We then study the relations between natural optimization objectives, and identify the maximin solution, which maximizes the minimum utility subject to envy freeness, as the most attractive. We demonstrate, in theory and using experiments on real data from Spliddit, that the maximin solution gives rise to significant gains in terms of our optimization objectives. Finally, a user study with Spliddit users as subjects demonstrates that people find the maximin solution to be significantly fairer than arbitrary envy-free solutions; this user study is unprecedented in that it asks people about their real-world rent division instances. Based on these results, the maximin solution has been deployed on Spliddit since April 2015.

Citation: Ya’akov Gal, Moshe Mash, Ariel D. Procaccia, Yair Zick. Which Is the Fairest (Rent Division) of Them All? ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), July, Maasticht, The Netherlands. Best Paper Award.

Download: http://bit.ly/2iQYwGz

Smart-Watch Life Saver:
Smart-Watch Interactive-Feedback System for Improving Bystander CPR

This potentially life saving technology, uses a smart-watch to unobtrusively guide its user in efficiently delivering CPR, and is SmartSociety’s first step in developing the Smart Nurse project.

The 19th International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC 2015) was a conference dedicated to cutting-edge research in wearable technologies, and took place on 7-11 September in Osaka, Japan.

You can find the paper through our website, here, or in the conference proceedings, here.

Abstract: In this work a Smart-Watch application, that is able to monitor the frequency and depth of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and provide interactive corrective feedback is described. We have evaluated the system with a total of 41 subjects who had undertaken a single episode of CPR training several years previously. This training was part of a First Aid course for lay people, commonly accessed in this population. The evaluation was conducted by measuring participant CPR competence using the “gold standard” of CPR training, namely frequency and compression depth. The evaluation demonstrated that the Smart Watch feedback system provided a significant improvement in the participant performance. For example, it doubled the number of people who could maintain both the parameters in the recommended range for at least 50% of the time.

doi: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2802083.2802086

Citation: Agnes Gruenerbl, Gerald Pirkl, Eloise Monger, Mary Gobbi, and Paul Lukowicz. 2015. Smart-watch life saver: smart-watch interactive-feedback system for improving bystander CPR. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19-26.

Citation: http://bit.ly/1NgCIlk