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Program: PoM Conference in Aachen

Programmable biosensors, life-like robotics and other artificial models – the present and the future are dominated by new phenomena in the life sciences. How can the challenges, opportunities and uncertainties associated with these advances be addressed?

The transdisciplinary conference series “PoM – Politics of the Machines”, which will take place from April 22 to 25, 2024 at the Super C at RWTH Aachen University (Templergraben 57, 52062 Aachen) under the title “Lifelikeness & beyond”, will explore this question. At the interface of science and art, the conference aims to stimulate reflection on the comprehensive connections that shape our perception of the world.

International researchers and practitioners from various fields of science, technology and art will come together to discuss socio-cultural concepts of the future, the interaction between human and machine and ideas of the living and non-living in different formats.


The main program from 22 to 25 April will take place in Aachen in the Super C of the RWTH Aachen University and in the LOGOI Institute.

Super C: Templergraben 57, 52062 Aachen
LOGOI Institute: Jakobstraße 25a, 52064 Aachen

You can register with this form.
Further information on the schedule can be found in this program.
You can find a longer version with all abstracts in this program.


On Thursday, April 25, Dr. Jürgen Kippenhan will give a talk on “Artificial intelligence and the sensory structures of human speech, thought and action” as part of the “POM Conference” at LOGOI, Jakobstraße 25a, 52064 Aachen.


As part of the conference, the choreographic centre PACT Zollverein in Essen will realize the accompanying programme ‘life.like’ on 26 and 27 April 2024, which consists of six artistic positions in the form of performance, installation, discourse and sound.


‘Lifelikeness & beyond’ is the fourth edition of the “Politics of the Machines” conference series, founded by Laura Beloff (Aalto University Helsinki) and Morten Søndergaard (Aalborg University Denmark) and organized in collaboration with RWTH Aachen University, LOGOI Institute for Philosophy and Discourse and PACT Zollverein in Essen.

Objects of Research: Sarah R. Davies

For today’s edition of the “Objects of Research” series, c:o/re Senior Fellow Sarah R. Davies gives an insight into her desk set up. As a professor of Technosciences, Materiality, and Digital Cultures, her work focuses on the intersections between science, technology, and society, with a particular focus on digital tools and spaces.

“I guess many academics would share some varient of this image: a careful arrangement of computer equipment, coffee, notepads, pens, and the other detritus that lives on (my) desk.

For me it’s important that the technical equipment is shown in conjunction with the paper notebook and pens. I’m fussy about all of these things – it’s distracting when my computer set-up isn’t what I’m used to, and I need to use very specific pens from a particular store – but ultimately my thinking lives in the interactions between them.

My colleagues and I are working on an autoethnographic study of knowledge production, and notice that (our) creative research work often emerges as we move notes and ideas from paper to computer (and back again).”

Would you like to find out more about our Objects of Research series at c:o/re? Then take a look at the pictures by Benjamin Peters, Andoni Ibarra, Hadeel Naeem, Alin Olteanu, Hans Ekkehard Plesser, Ana María Guzmán, Andrei Korbut, Erica Onnis, Phillip H. Roth, Bart Penders and Dawid Kasprowicz.

Workshop “Art, Science, the Public”

On 16 February and 17 February 2024, the workshop “Art, Science, the Public” took place at the KHK c:o/re in cooperation with the project “Computer Signals: Art and Biology in the Age of Digital Experimentation“, a research collaboration between artists, biologists and humanities scholars, in which c:o/re director Gabriele Gramelsberger has been involved since a long time. 

Together with representatives and colleagues from the research group “Computer Signals”, PACT Zollverein and RWTH Knowledge Hub, different formats and practices of science communication, in particular those that experiment with artistic forms, were discussed. The aim of the workshop was to exchange ideas and best practice examples on the interface between science and art and the associated communication challenges.

Prof. Hannes Rickli provides insights into the “Computer Signals” research project.
Prof. Gabriele Gramelsberger and c:o/re research associate Ana María Guzmán talking about science communication at KHK c:o/re

A special highlight was the sound work by Valentina Vuksic, a transdisciplinary associate of the project “Computer Signals”. During the workshop, Valentina set up an installation format in which the archive of sounds, produced by the research project, could be explored.

The sound archive collected by the project “Computer Signals” can be visited here: https://archiv.computersignale.zhdk.ch.

In the evening, the workshop was concluded with a live performance by Valentina, in which she presented artistic formats that stem from straightforward audifications of computational processes with little aesthetic consideration taken at first, and yet, took on a double life as musical works outside of their context.

The electromagnetic, electric and mechanical recordings originate from the research infrastructure of the biological laboratory at UT Austin by Hans Hofmann and the underwater observatory RemOS in Kongsfjorden, Spitsbergen by Philipp Fischer (Alfred-Wegener-Institut for polar and marine research). The audio material stays unprocessed; it is merely re-arranged and layered. The sonic works set out from digital data generation as part of scientific procedures to take a specific course outlined by a series of sonic extracts.

Valentina Vuksic during her live performance
A special place for a special event: the cellar of c:o/re

Here you can listen to excerpts from Valentina’s work that she presented that evening

Photos and videos by Jana Hambitzer

Header picture: RemOs1, Archiv Stereometrie (15. 9. 2012 – 16. 6. 2020), 2022. Detailansicht Fotoinstallation Ausstellung «Daten lauschen» im Deutschen Schifffahrtsmuseum, Bremerhaven 2022. Fotodruck auf Polycarbonatplatten, 135.168 Bildpaare, 2.32 x 1.59 x 60 m.  Fotografie: Marc Latzel.

Objects of Research: Bart Penders

Here comes the new edition of our “Objects of Research” series. c:o/re Senior Fellow Dr. Bart Penders provides an insight into his research work and introduces an important tool for this:

“As part of the work I do at KHK c:/ore, as well as extending beyond that, I collect empirical data. In my case, that data consists of records of interviews with scientists and others. Those records can be notes, but they can also be integral recordings of the conversations.

Relying on technology for the production of data is what scientists do on a daily basis. With that comes a healthy level of paranoia around that technology. Calibrating measurement instruments, measurement triangulation, and comparisons to earlier and future records all help us to alleviate that paranoia. I am not immune and my coping mechanism has been, for many years, to take a spare recording device with me.

This is that spare, my backup, and thereby the materialisation of how to deal with moderate levels of technological paranoia. It is not actually a formal voice recorder, but an old digital music player I have had for 15 years, the Creative Zen Vision M. It has an excellent microphone, abundant storage capacity (30 gigabytes) and, quite importantly, no remote access options. That last part is quite important to me, because it ensures that the recording cannot enter the ‘cloud’ and be accessed by anyone but me. Technologically, it is outdated. It no longer serves its original purpose: I never listen to music on it. Instead, it has donned a new mantle as a research tool.”

Would you like to find out more about our Objects of Research series at c:o/re? Then take a look at the pictures by Benjamin Peters, Andoni Ibarra, Hadeel Naeem, Alin Olteanu, Hans Ekkehard Plesser, Ana María Guzmán, Andrei Korbut, Erica Onnis and Phillip H. Roth.

Objects of Research: Phillip H. Roth

For this edition of the “Objects of Research” series, c:o/re postdoc and event coordinator Dr. Phillip H. Roth shows a picture of his favorite research tool. He is currently working on a book/habilitation project that will be a media history of preprints in science.

“I use mechanical pencils (like the one in the photo) to highlight, annotate, question, clarify, or reference things I read in books. This helps me digest the arguments, ideas, and discourses I deal with in my historical and sociological research. I also have software for annotating and organizing PDFs on my iPad as well as a proper notebook for excerpting and writing down ideas. However, I’ve found that the best way for me to connect my reading practices with my thoughts is through the corporeal employment of a pencil on the physical pages of a book.”

Would you like to find out more about our Objects of Research series at c:o/re? Then take a look at the pictures by Benjamin Peters, Andoni Ibarra, Hadeel Naeem, Alin Olteanu, Hans Ekkehard Plesser, Ana María Guzmán, Andrei Korbut and Erica Onnis.

Inaugurating the collaboration of c:o/re and Ritsumeikan University on Emotionalized Artificial Intelligence

We are delighted to be commencing a collaboration on Emotionalized Artificial Intelligence with colleagues at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. Professor Peter Mantello (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University) leads a project funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, on which c:o/re is a partner, that over the coming three years will compare attitudes in Japan and in Germany on Emotionalized Artificial Intelligence in the workspace. This is explorative pathway contributes to the c:o/re outlook on Varieties of Science.

Being hosted as a short-term fellow at c:o/re, on February 15th, Professor Peter Mantello inaugurated this collaboration by presenting the rationale and framework of this project.

Prof. Peter Mantello presenting the project “Emotional AI in the Japanese and German Workplace: Exploring Cultural Diversity in AI Ethics”.
Prof. Mantello talks about the questions that philosophy has to tackle on Emotionalized AI.

Get to know our Fellows: Bart Penders

Get to know our current fellows and gain an impression of their research.
In a new series of short videos, we asked them to introduce themselves, talk about their work at c:o/re, the impact of their research on society and give book recommendations.

You can now watch the fifth video of Dr. Bart Penders, PhD in Science and Technology Studies and Associate Professor in ‘Biomedicine and Society’ at Maastricht University, on our YouTube channel:

Check out our media section or our YouTube channel to have a look at the other videos.

Marketplace Engineers at Work: How Dynamic Airline Ticket Pricing Came into Being

GUILLAUME YON

If you have recently been online looking up for flights, you may have noticed that prices for airfares are always in flux. But what online shoppers usually do not know is that these dynamic price changes are enabled by large and intricate technological systems powered by cutting-edge science and technology.

These systems were first deployed by airlines in the United States in the 1980s. Up until today, they have been an object of intense scientific and technological research and development. When deploying such systems in airlines at scale, engineers and scientists blend statistics and probabilities, mathematical optimization, computer science, and economics, all this to implement sophisticated business strategies.

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Dr. Guillaume Yon

Guillaume Yon is a historian of economics, who researches and teaches how the ideas that shaped our economic thinking emerged. He is particularly interested in the economic knowledge produced by engineers working in industry.

In the talk I delivered at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg ‘Cultures of Research’ on December 13th, I focused on what is often considered as the first of these systems: DINAMO. DINAMO stands for dynamic inventory and maintenance optimizer. It was developed at American Airlines and was fully operational in 1988. Similar systems were implemented at other major airlines in the United States around the same time, and these systems came to be known to specialists as ‘revenue management’ systems.

What was the problem that American Airlines’ engineers had to solve? As the airline industry was being deregulated in the U.S. (a process completed in 1978), American Airlines’ marketing department came up with a new strategy, which had two connected components.

The idea was to offer multiple price points for the same seats in the same class of service on the same flight. At the time, aircrafts had two classes of service, first and coach. Coach was the second class and main cabin, as in trains in Europe these days, and less like today’s economy seats in airplanes. In coach, American Airlines’ flights were regularly departing half-empty, hence the idea, in order to fill up these empty seats and avoid the associated loss in revenue, to stimulate a new demand, coming from people travelling for leisure. Before deregulation, air travel was a luxury product, and American Airlines was not alone in thinking that there was an untapped and potentially huge new market out there: middle-class families going on vacation, college students coming back home, young couples going away for the weekend, senior citizens visiting their children and grandchildren. However, these new leisure travelers were price sensitive, hence the need for a price discount to attract them, and fill the empty seats.

The second component was to prevent American Airlines’ already existing business customers, who travelled in coach too, from buying at the discounted price. Business customers were less price sensitive than the new leisure travelers, as they traveled on company money. They were willing to pay more for the same seat in coach. If business customers could buy the discounted fare, the new strategy would only result in a new source of revenue loss, this time from the business travelers’ side. American Airlines’ marketing department came up with the idea to tie the discounted prices to restrictions. For instance, American Airlines Ultimate Super Saver, a fare launched in 1985, was cheaper than the full fare for the same seats in coach. However, it was available only up to 30-days before departure (the so-called ‘advance purchase requirement’), had a steep cancellation fee, and was available only to those buying a round trip ticket with a Saturday night stay. Business travelers could not abide to those restrictions. They tended to book later and wanted to spend the weekends with their families. Therefore, even though discounted fares were available for a flight, business travelers would carry on buying at a higher price the seats on the same flight.

The outcome of American Airlines’ new pricing strategy was that for a given flight – from A to B, with a given departure date in the future – the seats in coach were offered at different prices with different restrictions (the lower the price, the more stringent the restrictions). These different ‘fare classes’ were available for sale at the same time. This new marketing strategy was a tremendous success for American Airlines, and it played an important role in turning air travel into mass transportation.

TV Ad for American Airlines’ Ultimate Super Saver Fare in 1985. Note the mention of ‘round trip purchase’ and that ‘restrictions may apply’.

This tremendous success from a revenue perspective turned into a nightmare from a business process perspective. At American Airlines, hundreds of new revenue management analysts were hired, and they were struggling. Each revenue management analyst had a set of flights to manage. They needed to decide, for each flight, how many seats should be made available for sale in each fare class in order to obtain, at the flight departure, the mix of passengers which maximizes revenue. That decision needed to be made at first a year before departure, when the flight opened for booking. In the mid-1980s, there were at least three different fare classes in coach (the full fare, the Ultimate Super Saver, and a Super Saver in between), in addition to the first class, on each flight. Worse, American Airlines re-organized its network after deregulation as a hub-and-spoke, in order to efficiently serve more destinations domestically and internationally. Each path in the network with a connection at the hub also had at least three fare products in coach. For the local traffic, if the analyst allocated too many seats to the lowest fares, it could displace high paying business travelers. But allocating too few seats to the lowest fares could mean departing with empty seats, if high paying demand did not materialize late in the booking process. Simultaneously, for the same flight, the analysts needed to decide what the revenue maximizing mix of local and connecting traffic was. Was it best to have one more seat protected for a high paying business passenger on that flight, or have one more discounted passenger on the same seat but with a connection to a long-haul expensive flight? It depended on the price each of those two passengers paid, the likeliness of each passenger showing up for booking, and how full each of the two flights were. Humans could not possibly make all these decisions efficiently at scale. Therefore, around 1982/1983 American Airlines management tasked its operations research department with automating the process.

The hub-and-spoke problem: if the analyst focusses only on maximizing revenue on the Los Angeles-Dallas flight, and that flight is expected to be quite full, they might offer too many full fares for sale, displacing potential passengers on discounted fares but continuing their journey to Miami – or even further away. The Los Angeles-Miami via Dallas low fare passenger might be more profitable for the airline than full fare passengers travelling only from Los Angeles to Dallas, in particular if the Dallas-Miami flight has lots of empty seats. To put it simply, if you are operating a hub-and-spoke network, it does not make any sense to lock people out of your hub – and in particular, to lock people out of long-haul flight because of high local traffic to the hub. Moving from the flight level to the whole network level made the revenue optimization problem unmanageable by humans. This picture presents only a sample network. In the mid-1980s, in Dallas, any American Airlines passengers could connect not just with two, as in this sample network, but with 30+ other flights, including very profitable long-haul international flights.
Source: Smith, Leimkuhler and Darrow (1992) ‘Yield Management at American Airlines’ Interfaces 22 (1), pp. 8-31.

To automate the process, operations researchers started thinking from the actual available technology: SABRE (for semi-automated business research environment). SABRE was big tech at the time. It was the first global electronic commerce infrastructure, allowing travel agents to sell tickets through a dedicated terminal, connected to American Airlines inventory in real-time, by telephone transactions. SABRE was also an amazing database, as it recorded the numbers of bookings for each fare class on each flight. However, for revenue management analysts, this deluge of data was overwhelming.

A travel agent with a SABRE terminal, date unknown. With this terminal, travel agents could check remotely, on behalf of a customer, whether a fare is available in American Airlines central inventory, and book the seat. This was the airline ‘store front’, and the customer-facing end of the first global electronic commerce infrastructure.
Source: IBM; https://www.ibm.com/history/sabre; Last Accessed Jan. 2024.

American Airlines’ engineers aimed at overcoming the limitations of human decision-making through automation. To do so, they needed to redesign SABRE, which was simultaneously an information system (or a database, recording bookings in each fare class at the flight level) and a distribution infrastructure (a marketplace). They asked: how to expand it, and turn it into a pricing system (able to manage which fares were available for sale on each flight from a network flow management perspective)?

The articulation of that problem is historically significant. American Airlines’ operations researchers sought to solve a business problem, the implementation of a sophisticated new pricing strategy, which aimed at making pricing more dynamic, more market-responsive, more granular. But they did not look for the theoretically optimal solution. Instead, they sought to deploy a new technology. To do so, they started from an already existing technology, identifying the constrains and opportunities it offered. This already existing technology (SABRE) was a global electronic commerce infrastructure, i.e. the marketplace itself, coupled with a large database on bookings, i.e. customers’ purchasing behavior.

I spent most of the talk narrating how American Airlines’ operations researchers came to a solution. I tried to show how their thinking was shaped by the details of the distribution infrastructure: how airlines’ products were sold to customers through a computerized system, i.e. the features of the marketplace itself. I also tried to show how their thinking was shaped by the data (availability and size) and the computing power they had access to.

I argued that the crucial step to the solution was nothing spectacular, just a hack in SABRE called ‘virtual nesting’. This hack enabled the management at the flight level of the availability of the connecting fare classes, when working with two new components plugged into SABRE. First, an automated demand forecast, powered by statistical and probabilistic approaches, extracted the historical booking data in each fare class in each flight from SABRE, and then provided an expected revenue for each ‘virtual bucket’ on a flight. The expected revenue of a bucket meant the average price of the range of fare classes clustered in the bucket, weighted by the probability of having that many customers booking in that bucket. Second, an algorithm allocated a number of seats to each bucket of fare classes, given the average expected revenue for each bucket; this component was called the optimizer. The mathematics supporting the optimization were not trivial. American Airlines’ operations researchers used mathematical programming approaches which belonged to the standard toolbox of operations research at the time. However, these tools needed to be creatively applied to the specific problem at hand, accounting in particular for the limitations in computing power. This required the development of completely new heuristics. Overall, using mathematical programming to make pricing more dynamic, more market responsive, and much more fine-grained than it had ever been before in any industry, was an important innovation. And it all hinged on a hack in SABRE.

DINAMO opened decades of intense research and development to improve the ‘hack’, the forecasting, and the optimization. The underlying logic is still in use today, at least in the largest networked airlines. It directly inspired marketplace engineers in many industries, from Amazon to Uber, from hotels to concert tickets sellers. It features prominently in the training of the future generation of marketplace engineers. And if your local supermarket uses digital price tags on the shelves, it is likely that they are using a version of it too.

Sources

The knowledge produced by marketplace engineers is not widely shared beyond the community of specialists. Furthermore, it is very practical and operational, and for that reason not fully codified in the scientific literature. Therefore, the main sources for my research are interviews with the engineers and scientists who built these systems in airlines (50 people interviewed so far, and the list is still open!). I asked them how they proceeded, the resources they had, the environment they were working in, what their thought process was, their path to the solution. My interviewees also walked me through the technical literature they have produced, in particular technical presentations delivered at an industry forum called AGIFORS, the Airline Group of the International Federation of Operational Research Societies. This talk on DINAMO drew on my broader research project, in which I study the practices, forms of reasoning, and ways of thinking of engineers and scientists who built revenue management systems in the airline industry, from the origins in the 1980s to today. On DINAMO, the interested reader can start with this great paper that was published by its three main inventors: Smith, Leimkuhler and Darrow (1992) ‘Yield Management at American Airlines’ Interfaces 22 (1), pp. 8-31.


Proposed citation: Guillaume Yon. 2024. Marketplace Engineers at Work: How Dynamic Airline Ticket Pricing Came into Being. https://khk.rwth-aachen.de/2024/01/31/9192/marketplace-engineers-at-work-how-dynamic-airline-ticket-pricing-came-into-being/.

Peter Mantello

c:o/re short-term Senior Fellow (11/02 − 17/02/2024)

Peter Mantello is an artist, filmmaker and Professor of Media Studies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. Since 2010, he has been a principal investigator on various research projects examining the intersection between emerging media technologies, social media artifacts, artificially intelligent agents, hyperconsumerism and conflict. His recent research focuses on interdisciplinary inquiries into phenomenological aspects of human-machine relations, especially, those related to emotional AI. He is also working on a feature film that deals with social, political, and cultural concerns surrounding the rise of emotional AI on six continents.


A comparison of views on emotional AI in Japan and Germany

This research project examines the impact of emotional AI (EAI) in the Japanese and German workplace (on-site, hybrid, gig, and platform), to understand how to create ethical, human-centric, and dignity-enhancing forms of work practices and governance. Employing a mixed methods approach involving interviews, surveys, and innovative design-fiction and policy workshops, the project has five main goals. First, to understand the determinants of technological trust and risk perception of workers toward a new technologically mediated work situation. Second, to cultivate a nuanced understanding of the importance of cultural diversity in AI ethics by exploring the epistemological and ontological dimensions of emotion-sensing technologies. Third, to flesh out potential best practices so that these systems support rather than exploit workers. Fourth, to enable cross-cultural knowledge exchange (Japan/German) between academics and stakeholders. Fifth, to mentor the next generation of Early Career Researchers into leadership roles pertaining to AI ethics and the emerging world of emotion-recognition technologies.

Publications (selection)

Mantello, P., Ho MT, Nguyen, M. & Vuong, Q (2023) Machines that feel: Behavioral determinants of attitude towards affect recognition technology—Upgrading technology acceptance theory with the mindsponge model. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), 1-16. Nature.com https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01837-1

Mantello, P., Ho MT, (2023) Emotional AI and the Future of Wellbeing in the Post-Pandemic Workplace, AI and Society, Springer Nature. DOI: 0.1007/s00146-023-01639-8.

Mantello, P., Ho MT, Podoletz, L (2023) ‘Automating Extremism: Mapping The Affective Role of Artificially Intelligent Agents in Online Radicalisation’ in E.Pashentsev’s, The Palgrave Handbook of Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence, Palgrave McMillan.  ISBN: 9783031225512

Mantello, P., Manh, T. Vuong.Q (2021) Bosses without a Heart: A Bayesian analysis of socio-demographic and cross-cultural determinants of attitude toward the Automated Management, AI & Society. Springer Nature. DOI: 10.1007/s00146-021-01290-1.

Mantello, P. (2021) Fatal Portraits: The Selfie as Agent of Radicalization, Sign Systems Studies, Tartu University Press, 2021 https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2021.49.3-4.16 

Listening to Science – Live Performance by Valentina Vuksic

Making digital data work audible and tangible – this is the focus of the artistic research project “Computersignals. Art and Biology in the Age of Digital Experimentation” under the direction of Prof. Hannes Rickli at the Zurich University of the Arts.

On Friday, 16 February 2024 at 7:30 pm at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re), Valentina Vuksic, transdisciplinary employee in the research project, will present artistic formats that are based on direct audifications of computer processes and – even without this context – can be performed as musical works.

The sound recordings (electromagnetic fields, current fluctuations and mechanical vibrations) originate from research equipment in biology laboratories of Hans Hofmann at the University of Texas at Austin and the underwater observatory RemOs of the climate impact research by Philipp Fischer (Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research) in Kongfjorden in Spitsbergen, which are stored as audio files and merely reassembled. The performance reflects the materiality of digital data production and processing in the processes of gaining scientific knowledge and operates at the interface between art and scientific research.

You are cordially invited to register at events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.