Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning and Solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a rich representation for agents acting in a stochastic domain under partial observability. POMDPs optimally balance key properties such as the need for information and the sum of collected rewards. However, POMDPs are difficult to use for two reasons; first, it is difficult to obtain the environment dynamics and second, even given the environment dynamics, solving POMDPs optimally is intractable. This dissertation deals with both difficulties. We begin with a number of methods for learning POMDPs. Methods for learning POMDPs are usually categorized as either model-free or model-based. We show how model-free methods fail to provide good policies as noise in the environment increases. We continue to suggest how to transform model-free into model-based methods, thus improving their solution. This transformation is first demonstrated in an offline process — after the model-free method has computed a policy, and then in an online setting — where a model of the environment is learned together with a policy through interactions with the environment. The second part of the dissertation focuses on ways to solve predefined POMDPs. Pointbased methods for computing value functions have shown a great potential for solving large scale POMDPs. We provide a number of new algorithms that outperform existing point-based methods. We first show how properly ordering the value function updates can greatly reduce the required number of updates. We then present a trial-based algorithm that outperforms all current point-based algorithms. Due to the success of point-based algorithms on large domains, a need arises for compact representations of the environment. We thoroughly investigate the use of Algebraic Decision Diagrams (ADDs) for representing system dynamics. We show how all operations required for point-based algorithms can be implemented efficiently using ADDs.
The relationships between leadership styles and organizational innovation climate: Cases of some high-tech enterprises in Hebei

In the era of knowledge economy, the innovation already became the motivation of foundation for organization growth, it's especially for high-tech organizations. The researches demonstrated that the organizational creative climate have the remarkable influence to the organization innovation achievements. The purpose of this study is to understand the relationship between the manager's leadership style and the staff's cognition about organization innovation climate. It can help the high-level manger to control and adjust individual leadership style, by the way of the individual consciousness cognition, may strengthen and promotes the organization innovation climate, then achieve organization's performance. This study conducts the research by the questionnaire survey procedure in some high-tech corporations in Hebei and takes transactional leadership, transformational leadership as independent variable, and the organization innovation climate of the manager encourages, the job independency, the job challenging as dependent variable. We discovered: both leadership style have the remarkable influence on managers' encourages and the job independency. But there are no remarkable influences on work challenging. Implications for practice are discussed.
Twenty years on: lesbian, gay and bisexual police officers' experiences of workplace discrimination in England and Wales

Twenty years ago Mark Burke's pioneering research into homosexuality and policing evidenced widespread prejudice and hostility toward lesbian, gay and bisexual police officers in nine forces across England and Wales. These serving officers were felt to represent the most serious kind of contamination and threat to the integrity of the British Police Service by their heterosexual colleagues. Twenty years on this research, which represents one of the largest ever surveys of LGB police officers in England and Wales (N=836), evidences that just under one-fifth reported experiencing discrimination, with those in small and large forces, those in senior ranks and non-uniformed positions, and those who identify as gay male and Black, Minority Ethnic experiencing the highest levels of victimisation in training, deployment and promotion. Like Brown and Woolfenden, the authors conclude that a central aim of the diversity reform agenda must be a renegotiation of the psychological contract between staff and the organisation. A relational setup must be sought where mutual expectations of exchange are established and efforts are made to create a rich working environment that draws upon and invests in the subjective and intersubjective identity characteristics of LGB police officers.
Integrating Parallel File I/O and Database Support for High-Performance Scientific Data Management

Many scientific applications have large I/O requirements, in terms of both the size of data and the number of files or data sets. Management, storage, efficient access, and analysis of this data present an extremely challenging task. Traditionally, two different solutions are used for this problem: file I/O or databases. File I/O can provide high performance but is tedious to use with large numbers of files and large and complex data sets. Databases can be convenient, flexible, and powerful but do not perform and scale well for parallel supercomputing applications. We have developed a software system, called Scientific Data Manager (SDM), that aims to combine the good features of both file I/O and databases. SDM provides a high-level API to the user and, internally, uses a parallel file system to store real data and a database to store application-related metadata. SDM takes advantage of various I/O optimizations available in MPI-IO, such as collective I/O and noncontiguous requests, in a manner that is transparent to the user. As a result, users can write and retrieve data with the performance of parallel file I/O, without having to bother with the details of actually performing file I/O. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of SDM. With the help of two parallel application templates, ASTRO3D and an Euler solver, we illustrate how some of the design criteria affect performance.
The FlockLab testbed architecture

A vital factor for a successful deployment of sensor nodes is testing of all system aspects in a realistic setup. This work presents a testbed architecture which allows for detailed monitoring and stimulation of a wireless sensor node. In particular, time-accurate state extraction and power measurements are provided in a distributed, yet synchronized context. The FlockLab testbed architecture provides a distributed lab instrument, where detailed observations of every sensor node enable thorough testing. Software services allow for formulating testcases and reliable test data collection.
A Monthly Double-blind Peer Reviewed Refereed Open Access International E-journal -included in the International Serial Directories Customer Realtionship Marketing as a Strategy for Better Banking Relationship –a Comarative Study of State Bank and Private Bank _______________________________________

Since the end of the war in May 2009 the Central Bank has approved new bank 45 branches to be setup in the Northern peninsula. Already 11 banks have commenced operations. Hence it is clear that a bank operation in the war affected area is booming. It is worthwhile to compare this operation by looking at the perspective of private bank and state bank. The purpose of this study was to find out how customer relationship marketing (CRM) can be sued as a strategy to compete in the market. This study found out how the concept of relationship marketing helps to increase the operation in the banking system. Primary data were collected from the customers of one state bank and private bank through questionnaire and interviews. The Sample was 100 customers who visit once in a week at least. Collected data has analyzed by using both quantitative and qualitative methods to find out the Relationship marketing orientation of customers. Relationship marketing has been operationalized by using the model of trust and commitment (Morgan and Hunt 1994). It has found out there is a significance difference in " relationship marketing orientation " in state bank and private bank. Private Banks can be considered as more relationship marketing oriented than state banks. Additionally it has revealed that most of the female customers preferred Customers relationship marketing (CRM) than male customers. Further it has disclosed there is an impact on duration which customers spend with the bank and CRM. This research will highlight the importance of relationship marketing practice in both private and the state banking sector. This research can be expanded in other areas of services in business to business as well as business to customer.
Implementing a multilayer framework for pathway data integration, analysis and visualization

Personalized medicine, i.e. a medicine focused on the individual and proactive in nature, promises an improved health care by customizing the treatment according to patient needs. The methods to analyze data, model knowledge and store interpretable results vary widely. A common approach is to use networks for modelling and organizing this information. Network theory has been used for many years in the modelling and analysis of complex systems, as epidemiology, biology and biomedicine. As the data evolves and becomes more heterogeneous and complex, monoplex networks become an oversimplification of the corresponding systems. This imposes a need to go beyond traditional networks into a richer framework capable of hosting objects and relations of different scales, called Multilayered Network. These complex networks have contributed in many contexts and fields, and they are very applicable in the investigation of biological networks. In order to enrich this investigation, we aim to implement a multilayer framework that can be applicable in various domains, especially in the field of pathway modelling. Our idea is to integrate pathways and their related knowledge into a multilayer model, where each layer represents one of their elements. The model offers a feature we call “Selective Inclusion of Knowledge”, as well as a collection of related knowledge into a single graph, like diseases and drugs. The main layers are mapped to the entities of the pathways and the additional knowledge, for instance, a convenient model would have 3 layers respectively representing proteins, drugs and diseases. The model imports knowledge from multiple sources like the Reactome database, PharmGKB, DrugBank, OMIM and other public sources. The submitted poster will give an overview of the various models of multilayered networks, then it will describe the model we are building, and the workflow of implementing it into R as well as the future plan. The workflow consists of multiple R packages, of which we present the first implemented package, mully, that provides the multilayer layout. The data import and the integration will be done by another package to be implemented, Multipath.
Reasoning about Linguistic Regularities in Word Embeddings using Matrix Manifolds

Recent work has explored methods for learning continuous vector space word representations reflecting the underlying semantics of words. Simple vector space arithmetic using cosine distances has been shown to capture certain types of analogies, such as reasoning about plurals from singulars, past tense from present tense, etc. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to capture analogies in continuous word representations, based on modeling not just individual word vectors, but rather the subspaces spanned by groups of words. We exploit the property that the set of subspaces in n-dimensional Euclidean space form a curved manifold space called the Grassmannian, a quotient subgroup of the Lie group of rotations in n- dimensions. Based on this mathematical model, we develop a modified cosine distance model based on geodesic kernels that captures relation-specific distances across word categories. Our experiments on analogy tasks show that our approach performs significantly better than the previous approaches for the given task.
TRANSFORMATION OF BIOCHEMICALLY DEFICIENT STRAINS OF BACILLUS SUBTILIS BY DEOXYRIBONUCLEATE.

and so that under T the sign of the coordinate x, remains invariant. LEMMA 5.1. The mapping k = s t-1 I is a C'-diff. of E P onto X*. 6. Solution of a Problem of Type K. -Let D be an n-interval in E, geometrically similar to H', containing P, and with the vertex (a) in common with H' (ai = -1; i = 1, . ., n). Let Di D 0' be a second n-interval, geometrically similar to H' and D, with vertex (a), and with H' D Di. Note that D v Di. We define a C'-diff. a of D onto H', which leaves Di pointwise invariant. The open subsets
Dendrogeomorphological Evidence of Flood Frequency Changes and Human Activities (Portainé Basin, Spanish Pyrenees)

Abstract The Portainé mountain catchment, containing the Port Ainé ski resort (Lleida, Spanish Pyrenees), displays active erosional and depositional phenomena caused by periodic torrential floods. These events present a potential risk and incur significant economic losses. In ungauged remote catchments (like Portainé), trees might be the only paleohydrological source of information regarding past floods. Thus, we estimated the temporal and spatial distribution of torrential floods by dendrogeomorphological techniques to assess whether human impact (land-use changes and infrastructure works) affected their frequency and magnitude. One-hundred and sixty-six samples from 67 trees belonging to 10 different species were analyzed; past flood events of the last 50 years were identified by dating and relating evidence between them. Moreover, a detailed geomorphological study was performed and the available historical data compiled. Our multi-evidence analysis provides new insight into the occurrence of paleofloods. Changes in flood frequency since 2006, especially from 2008, suggest that the geomorphological equilibrium has been disturbed, coinciding with both major earthworks within the ski resort and intense but not extraordinary rainfall. This conclusion has important implications for land planning and the design of future projects in the mountain watersheds.
COHORT PROFILE Cohort Profile : The Chronic Kidney Disease Prognosis Consortium

Department of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA, Department of Medicine and Department of Population Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, Madison, WI, USA, Department of Nephrology, University of Groningen, University Medical Center Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands, Departments of Medicine, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, Division of Nephrology, Tufts Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA, Department of Medicine, St Paul’s Hospital, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan and Institute of Population Science, National Health Research Institutes, Zhunan, Taiwan and George Institute, University of Sydney, Australia
On the (In)security of the Fiat-Shamir paradigm

In 1986, Fiat and Shamir proposed a general method for transforming secure 3-round public-coin identification schemes into digital signature schemes. The idea of the transformation was to replace the random message of the verifier in the identification scheme, with the value of some deterministic hash function evaluated on various quantities in the protocol and on the message to be signed. The Fiat-Shamir methodology for producing digital signature schemes quickly gained popularity as it yields efficient and easy to implement digital signature schemes. The most important question however remained open: are the digital signatures produced by the Fiat-Shamir methodology secure? We answer this question negatively. We show that there exist secure 3-round public-coin identification schemes for which the Fiat-Shamir transformation yields insecure digital signature schemes for any hash function used by the transformation. This is in contrast to the work of Pointcheval and Stern which proved that the Fiat-Shamir methodology always produces digital signatures secure against chosen message attack in the "Random Oracle Model" - when the hash function is modeled by a random oracle. Among other things, we make new usage of Barak's technique for taking advantage of nonblack-box access to a program, this time in the context of digital signatures.
Gemini near-infrared integral field spectrograph (NIFS)

NIFS is a near-infrared integral field spectrograph designed for near diffraction-limited imaging spectroscopy with the ALTAIR facility adaptive optics system on Gemini North. NIFS is currently under construction at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Australian National University. Commissioning is planned for 2003. NIFS uses a reflective concentric integral field unit to reformat its 3.0"x3.0" field-of-view into 29 slitlets each 0.1" wide with 0.04" sampling along each slitlet. The NIFS spectrograph has a resolving power of ~ 5300, which is large enough to significantly separate terrestrial airglow emission lines and resolve velocity structure in galaxies. The output format is matched to a 2048x2048 pixel Rockwell HAWAII-2 detector. The detector is read out through a SDSU-2 detector controller connected via a VME interface to the Gemini Data Handling System. NIFS is a fast-tracked instrument that reuses many of the designs of the Gemini Near-InfraRed Imager (NIRI); the cryostat, On-Instrument Wave Front Sensor, control system, and control software are largely duplicates.
Decomposing the Causes of the Socioeconomic Status–Health Gradient with Biometrical Modeling

The consistent relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and health has been widely covered in both the popularmedia and scientific journals. These articles argue that physical health inequalities are caused by material disadvantage directly (e.g., access tomedical care) or indirectly (e.g., chronic environmental stress). Such explanations account for differences between those who have resources and those who do not, but they do not account for the finely stratified health differences that exist across the entire range of SES. Recent theories to explain the SES–health gradient have grappled with limitations and contradictions of early models and have implicated very different pathways to explain the gradient. For example, articles in differential epidemiology have argued that individual differences are the “fundamental cause” of the gradient, acting through genetic sources. Other perspectives such as the risky family model implicate the early home environment. Little research has applied behavior genetic modeling to understanding the sources of the SES–health gradient. The purpose of this article is to narrow the scope of fundamental causes by untangling the sources of variance associated with the gradient. Specifically, we decompose the gradient into genetic (a2), shared environmental (c2), and nonshared environmental (e2) pathways (ACE), using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Monozygotic-twin, dizygotic-twin, full-sibling, half-sibling, and cousin pairs from validated kinship links are used in the current study (4,018 pairs; Rodgers et al., 2016). Three stages of analyses were conducted: (a) univariate ACE models, (b) bivariate correlated factors ACE models, and (c) trivariate correlated factors ACE models. Only the final trivariate model is reported here (see Figure 1). The estimates of a2, c2, and e2 were similar across analysis stages. The genetic correlation between SES and physical health (PCS) was . 66 (95% CI [.41, .98]),
The O(1S) 297.2‐nm Dayglow Emission: A Tracer of CO2 Density Variations in the Martian Lower Thermosphere

The O(1S) metastable atoms can radiatively relax by emitting airglow at 557.7 and 297.2 nm. The latter one has been observed with the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph onboard the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mars orbiter since 2014. Limb profiles of the 297.2‐nm dayglow have been collected near periapsis with a spatial resolution of 5 km or less. They show a double‐peak structure that was previously predicted but never observed during earlier Mars missions. The production of both 297.2‐nm layers is dominated by photodissociation of CO2. Their altitude and brightness is variable with season and latitude, reflecting changes in the total column of CO2 present in the lower thermosphere. Since the lower emission peak near 85 km is solely produced by photodissociation, its peak is an indicator of the unit optical depth pressure level and the overlying CO2 column density. Its intensity is directly controlled by the Lyman‐α solar flux reaching the Martian upper atmosphere. We take advantage of the Lyman‐α flux measurements of the solar Extreme Ultraviolet Monitor instrument onboard Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution to model the observed OI 297.2‐nm limb profiles. For this, we combine photodissociation sources with chemical processes and photoelectron impact excitation. To determine the relative importance of the excitation processes, we apply the model to the atmospheric structure measured by the Viking 1 lander before applying it to a model atmosphere. We find very good agreement with the lower peak structure and intensity if the CO2 density provided by the Mars Climate Database is scaled down by a factor between 0.50 and 0.66. We also determine that the previously uncertain quantum yield for production of O(1S) atoms by photodissociation of CO2 at Lyman‐α wavelength is about 8%.
Uniform Design of Multi-Peak Bandwidth Enhancement Technique for Multistage Amplifiers

A new technique for designing uniform multistage amplifiers (MAs) for high-frequency applications is introduced. The proposed method uses the multi-peak bandwidth enhancement technique while it employs identical, simple and inductorless stages. The intrinsic capacitances within transistors are exploited by the active negative feedbacks to expand the bandwidth. While all stages of the proposed MA topology are identical, the gain-bandwidth product can be extended several times. Using the proposed topology, a six-stage amplifier in TSMC 0.35-mum CMOS process was designed. Measurement results show that the gain can be varied between 16 and 44 dB within 0.7-3.2-GHz bandwidth with less than 5.2-nV /radicHz noise. Die area of the amplifier is 175 mum times 300 mum.
Regulation of connexin36 gap junction channels by n‐alkanols and arachidonic acid

• Under control conditions only one of ∼128 connexin (Cx)36 gap junction channels assembled in junctional plaques are open at a given time. This ratio was increased several times by short carbon chain n‐alkanols and BSA, and reduced by long carbon chain n‐alkanols. • Bovine serum albumin (BSA) increased junctional conductance (gj) by removal of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) including arachidonic acid (AA) from the plasma membrane of HeLaCx36‐EGFP cells. BSA modified with 1,2‐cyclohexanedione, which does not bind PUFAs, did not affect gj. • A primary culture of pancreatic β‐cells, expressing solely Cx36, shows similar properties as HeLa transfectants, i.e. gj increases under an exposure to BSA and hexanol, while decanol and nonanol caused full uncoupling. • Methyl arachidonyl fluorophosphonate (MAFP) and thapsigargin, inhibitor and activator of AA synthesis, increased and reduced gj, respectively. • The gj‐enhancing effect of hexanol did not change during combined application with MAFP and BSA, whereas AA and thapsigargin reduced the potentiating effect of hexanol.