Founded in 2006, Zillow established itself as the leading online real estate marketplace. In 2018, Zillow launched Zillow Offers, a new business that purchased and sold homes. Zillow Offers provided home sellers with a faster purchase process than traditional realtors by gathering data from sellers online and making offers immediately, a process…

This thesis studies four independent resource allocation problems with different assumptions on information available to the central planner, and strategic considerations of the agents present in the system. We start off with an online, non-strategic agents setting in Chapter 1, where we study the dynamic pricing and learning problem under the…

This study examined the effectiveness using an automatic algorithm to rank the results of Boolean searches of an inverted file design document retrieval system. Relevant documents were ranked significantly higher than nonrelevant documents on output lists. (Author/KP)

Describes the design of optimal tree-structured vector quantizers that minimize the expected distortion subject to cost functions related to storage cost, encoding rate, or quantization time. Since the optimal design problem is intractable in most cases, the performance of a general design heuristic based on successive partitioning is analyzed.…

The National Library of Medicine has discarded connect hour-only billing for a more equitable system, which distributes user costs by type and intensity of work performed and data delivered. User data (cost comparisons, interpolated input/output count per connect hours, connect hours per year) were analyzed and further improvements are planned.…

To fully develop a teacher cost model, it is essential to be able to forecast the number of teachers that leave the experience category distribution -- not only the total number that leave, but also the number that leave from each category and experience level within the distribution. Similarly, it is essential to be able to forecast, to the same…

Discusses ranking techniques for document retrieval and proposes an evaluation, or filtering, technique that reduces costs and memory usage by early recognition of which documents are likely to be highly ranked. Highlights include index design, ranked query evaluation, reducing the number of accumulators, inverted file structures, and experimental…

Discusses issues involved in obtaining patents for computer software. Topics discussed include copyright protection; algorithms and other software processes within programs; the software industry and the effects of patenting; perspectives on software patents within higher education; cost factors; and the use of patents to control information…

Discusses the results of modeling the performance of searching large text databases via various parallel hardware architectures and search algorithms. The performance under load and the cost of each configuration are compared, and a common search workload used in the modeling is described. (Contains 26 references.) (LRW)

This paper describes the method used by Tracz and Burtnyk for the estimation of future salary schedules in the Ontario secondary school system. The application of the algorithm to the Ontario secondary school system predicts a possible breakdown in the fixed step salary schedule at about 1980. This situation results primarily because of the…

CYBERNETICS, OR "THE ART OF ENSURING THE EFFICIENCY OF ACTIONS," MUST BE A TOOL SUPPORTING PEDAGOGY, THE EDUCATIONAL PHENOMENON, THAT IS DETERMINED BY COMMUNIST PARTY POLICY. ALTHOUGH ANALOGIES BETWEEN MEN AND MACHINES DERIVE FROM THE CONCEPTS OF A SYSTEM (A CONFIGURATION OF STABLE ELEMENTS), INFORMATION (A PROBABILITY SCIENCE),…