Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Robustifying Convex Risk Measures : A Non-Parametric Approach

This paper introduces a framework for robustifying convex, law invariant risk measures, to deal with ambiguity of the distribution of random asset losses in portfolio selection problems. The robustified risk measures are defined as the worst-case portfolio risk over the ambiguity set of loss distributions, where an ambiguity set is defined as a neighborhood around a reference probability measure representing the investors beliefs about the distribution of asset losses. Under mild conditions, the infinite dimensional optimization problem of finding the worst case risk can be solved analytically and closed-form expressions for the robust risk measures are obtained. Using these results robustified versions of several risk measures, including the standard deviation, the Conditional Value-at-Risk, and the general class of distortion functionals. The resulting robust policies are of similar computational complexity as their non-robust counterparts. Finally, a numerical study shows that in most instances the robustified risk measures perform significantly better out-of-sample than their non-robust variants in terms of risk, expected losses, and turnover.
A Machine Learning based Textual Entailment Recognition System of JAIST Team for NTCIR9 RITE

is the first shared-task of recognizing tex- tual inference in text written in Japanese, Simplified Chi- nese, or Traditional Chinese. JAIST team participates in three subtasks for Japanese: Binary-class, Entrance exam and RITE4QA. We adopt a machine learning approach for these subtasks, combining various kinds of entailment fea- tures by using machine learning techniques. In our system, we use a Machine Translation engine to automatically pro- duce English translation of the Japanese data, and both orig- inal Japanese data and its translation are used to train an entailment classifier. Experimental results show the effec- tiveness of our method. Although our system is lightweight and does not require deep semantic analysis or extensive linguistic engineering, it obtained the first rank (accuracy of 58%) among participant groups on the Binary-class subtask for Japanese.
A Modal Logic for Information System Security

As a security mechanism, authorization or access control ensures that all accesses to the system resources occur exclusively according to the access polices and rules specified by the system security agent. Authorization specification has been extensively studied and a variety of approaches have been investigated. In this paper, we propose a knowledge oriented formal language to specify the system security policies and their reasoning in response to system resource access request. The semantics of our language is provided by translating our language into epistemic logic program in which knowledge related modal operators are employed to represent agents' knowledge in reasoning. We demonstrate how our authorization language handles the situation where the security agent's knowledge on access decision is incomplete.
Algorithms for Automatic Alignment of Arrays

Aggregate data objects (such as arrays) are distributed across the processor memories when compiling a data-parallel language for a distributed-memory machine. The mapping determines the amount of communication needed to bring operands of parallel operations into alignment with each other. A common approach is to break the mapping into two stages: analignmentthat maps all the objects to an abstract template, followed by adistributionthat maps the template to the processors. This paper describes algorithms for solving the various facets of the alignment problem: axis and stride alignment, static and mobile offset alignment, and replication labeling. We show that optimal axis and stride alignment is NP-complete for general program graphs and give a heuristic method that can explore the space of possible solutions in a number of ways. We show that some of these strategies can give better solutions than a simple greedy approach proposed earlier. We also show how local graph contractions can reduce the size of the problem significantly without changing the best solution. This allows more complex and effective heuristics to be used. We show how to model the static offset alignment problem using linear programming, and we show that loop-dependent mobile offset alignment is sometimes necessary for optimum performance. We describe an algorithm with for determining mobile alignments for objects withindoloops. We also identify situations in which replicated alignment is either required by the program itself or can be used to improve performance. We describe an algorithm based on network flow that replicates objects so as to minimize the total amount of broadcast communication in replication.
Design of Force-Reflection Joystick System for VR-Based Simulation

In this paper, we develop a force-reflection joystick system for VR-based simula- tion, including a 2-DOF joystick and the related software. The developed force-reflection joystick, as a kind of haptic device, provides two-way communication in both position and force, and is very helpful for the user to interact with a simulation system. By con- sidering the main factors in designing a force-reflection joystick, we build the joystick to be with the bandwidth, precision, and output torque comparable to the advanced com- mercial joystick. We also perform workspace analysis, system identification, and system modeling to better connect the joystick with the simulation system. To make it suitable for various applications, the software is developed to generate virtual motion constraints, so that the joystick is confined to operate within the workspace that corresponds to task requirements. In other words, the joystick may behave like a manipulative device spe- cific for the given task. For demonstration, in experiments, we use the developed joy- stick system to emulate a virtual manual gearshift system.
Classification and Regression Trees on Aggregate Data Modeling: An Application in Acute Myocardial Infarction

Cardiologists are interested in determining whether the type of hospital pathway followed by a patient is predictive of survival. The study objective was to determine whether accounting for hospital pathways in the selection of prognostic factors of one-year survival after acute myocardial infarction AMI provided a more informative analysis than that obtained by the use of a standard regression tree analysis CART method . Information on AMI was collected for 1095 hospitalized patients over an 18-month period. The construction of pathways followed by patients produced symbolic-valued observations requiring a symbolic regression tree analysis. This analysis was compared with the standard CART analysis using patients as statistical units described by standard data selected TIMI score as the primary predictor variable. For the 1011 84, resp. patients with a lower higher TIMI score, the pathway variable did not appear as a diagnostic variable until the third second stage of the tree construction. For an ecological analysis, again TIMI score was the first predictor variable. However, in a symbolic regression tree analysis using hospital pathways as statistical units, the type of pathway followed was the key predictor variable, showing in particular that pathways involving early admission to cardiology units produced high one-year survival rates.
Summary of the Principles of Hierarchy Theory

In both of these forms, when used to model systems, higher levels (control, regulate, interpret, harness) lower levels, whose behaviors are made possible by properties generated at still lower levels. So, higher levels provide boundary conditions on the behaviors of lower levels -behaviors initiated by still lower level configurations. (It is important to realize that few users of hierarchical forms would insist that particular levels exist in actuality. Levels are discerned from hierarchical analysis, aimed at constructing (discovering) Nature's "joints" with respect to given projects. ) (a) To use the scalar hierarchy we need to stipulate some focal level, as well as a lower and a higher, making up a basic triadic system -as, e.g., when the behavior of living cells is initiated by chemical events, and controlled by organismic events. (This reflects the putative way in which levels would have evolved, by interpolation between primal highest and lowest ones.) The three level form insures stability because with it in place (a third level always anchoring relations between the other two), the focal level cannot be reduced either upward or downward by assimilation into a contiguous level. Here we should note that this hierarchy has been invoked to explain how the world manages to be as stable as it is. (b) In the specification hierarchy the highest relevant level is always the one in focus, with all the lower levels of the hierarchy providing cumulative initiating conditions simultaneously upon it. (This reflects the fact that this hierarchy is implicitly developmental, with the levels being viewed as having emerged consecutively from the lowest, or most general, up -as with, e.g., biology emerging from chemistry, both historically and at any given moment.) The two-level form is unstable, allowing new levels to emerge at the top of the hierarchy. Use of this form provides us a model of how change has been possible in the world.
The Association of Genetic Markers for Type 2 Diabetes with Prediabetic Status - Cross-Sectional Data of a Diabetes Prevention Trial

Objective To investigate the association of risk alleles for type 2 diabetes with prediabetes accounting for age, anthropometry, inflammatory markers and lifestyle habits. Design Cross-sectional study of 129 men and 157 women of medium-sized companies in northern Germany in the Delay of Impaired Glucose Tolerance by a Healthy Lifestyle Trial (DELIGHT). Methods Besides established risk factors, 41 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that have previously been found to be associated with type 2 diabetes were analyzed. As a nonparametric test a random forest approach was used that allows processing of a large number of predictors. Variables with the highest impact were entered into a multivariate logistic regression model to estimate their association with prediabetes. Results Individuals with prediabetes were characterized by a slightly, but significantly higher number of type 2 diabetes risk alleles (42.5±4.1 vs. 41.3±4.1, p = 0.013). After adjustment for age and waist circumference 6 SNPs with the highest impact in the random forest analysis were associated with risk for prediabetes in a logistic regression model. At least 5 of these SNPs were positively related to prediabetic status (odds ratio for prediabetes 1.57 per allele (Cl 1.21–2.10, p = 0.001)). Conclusions This explorative analysis of data of DELIGHT demonstrates that at least 6 out of 41 genetic variants characteristic of individuals with type 2 diabetes may also be associated with prediabetes. Accumulation of these risk alleles may markedly increase the risk for prediabetes. However, prospective studies are required to corroborate these findings and to demonstrate the predictive value of these genetic variants for the risk to develop prediabetes.
Opinion summarisation through sentence extraction: an investigation with movie reviews

In on-line reviews, authors often use a short passage to describe the overall feeling about a product or a service. A review as a whole can mention many details not in line with the overall feeling, so capturing this key passage is important to understand the overall sentiment of the review. This paper investigates the use of extractive summarisation in the context of sentiment classification. The aim is to find the summary sentence, or the short passage, which gives the overall sentiment of the review, filtering out potential noisy information. Experiments on a movie review data-set show that subjectivity detection plays a central role in building summaries for sentiment classification. Subjective extracts carry the same polarity of the full text reviews, while statistical and positional approaches are not able to capture this aspect.
The UEDIN ASR systems for the IWSLT 2014 evaluation

This paper describes the University of Edinburgh (UEDIN) ASR systems for the 2014 IWSLT Evaluation. Notable features of the English system include deep neural network acoustic models in both tandem and hybrid configuration with the use of multi-level adaptive networks, LHUC adaptation and Maxout units. The German system includes lightly supervised training and a new method for dictionary generation. Our voice activity detection system now uses a semiMarkov model to incorporate a prior on utterance lengths. There are improvements of up to 30% relative WER on the tst2013 English test set.
Mating Systems, Reproductive Success, and Sexual Selection in Secretive Species: A Case Study of the Western Diamond-Backed Rattlesnake, Crotalus atrox

Long-term studies of individual animals in nature contribute disproportionately to our understanding of the principles of ecology and evolution. Such field studies can benefit greatly from integrating the methods of molecular genetics with traditional approaches. Even though molecular genetic tools are particularly valuable for species that are difficult to observe directly, they have not been widely adopted. Here, we used molecular genetic techniques in a 10-year radio-telemetric investigation of the western diamond-backed rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox) for an analysis of its mating system and to measure sexual selection. Specifically, we used microsatellite markers to genotype 299 individuals, including neonates from litters of focal females to ascertain parentage using full-pedigree likelihood methods. We detected high levels of multiple paternity within litters, yet found little concordance between paternity and observations of courtship and mating behavior. Larger males did not father significantly more offspring, but we found evidence for size-specific male-mating strategies, with larger males guarding females for longer periods in the mating seasons. Moreover, the spatial proximity of males to mothers was significantly associated with reproductive success. Overall, our field observations alone would have been insufficient to quantitatively measure the mating system of this population of C. atrox, and we thus urge more widespread adoption of molecular tools by field researchers studying the mating systems and sexual selection of snakes and other secretive taxa.
N- and P/Q-Type Ca2+ Channels Mediate Transmitter Release with a Similar Cooperativity at Rat Hippocampal Autapses

The relationship between extracellular Ca2+concentration and EPSC amplitude was investigated at excitatory autapses on cultured hippocampal neurons. This relationship was steeply nonlinear, implicating the cooperative involvement of several Ca2+ ions in the release of each vesicle of transmitter. The cooperativity was estimated to be 3.1 using a power function fit and 3.3 using a Hill equation fit. However, simulations suggest that these values underestimate the true cooperativity. The role of different Ca2+ channel subtypes in shaping the Ca2+ dose–response relationship was studied using the selective Ca2+ channel blockers ω-agatoxin GIVA (ω-Aga), which blocks P/Q-type channels, and ω-conotoxin GVIA (ω-CTx), which blocks N-type channels. Both blockers broadened the dose–response relationship, and the Hill coefficient was reduced to 2.5 by ω-Aga and to 2.6 by ω-CTx. This broadening is consistent with a nonuniform distribution of Ca2+ channel subtypes across presynaptic terminals. The similar Hill coefficients in ω-Aga or ω-CTx suggest that there was no difference in the degree of cooperativity for transmitter release mediated via N- or P/Q-type Ca2+ channels. A model of the role of calcium in transmitter release is developed. It is based on a modified Dodge–Rahamimoff equation that includes a nonlinear relationship between extracellular and intracellular Ca2+ concentration, has a cooperativity of 4, and incorporates a nonuniform distribution of Ca2+channel subtypes across presynaptic terminals. The model predictions are consistent with all of the results reported in this study.
An unsupervised purchase-based customer clustering method for e-supply chain

Making use of clustering technology to segment customers properly is the most important problem. The two most frequently used algorithms are the K-mean and the SOM algorithm. In this paper, a novel unsupervised clustering technology-ISODATA algorithm is proposed for the customer segment based on the customer's purchasing behavior. Unlike the K-mean algorithm, the clusters are merged if either the number of members in a cluster is less than a certain threshold or if the centers of two clusters are closer than a certain threshold in our method. On the contrast, the clusters are split into two different clusters if the cluster standard deviation exceeds a predefined value and the number of members is twice the threshold for the minimum number of members. It has some further refinements by splitting and merging of clusters. The customer clustering will be illustrated through a case study on the e-commerce database of bookshop.
Send Orders of Reprints at Reprints@benthamscience.net Can Participation in Documentation Influence Experiences of Involvement in Care Decision-making?

Introduction: Patients have the right to influence the care they receive, but their wish to participate in care decision-making is unclear. Aim: This study investigates whether participation in nursing documentation influences patient participation in care decision-making, mastery, self-esteem, empowerment and depressive feelings among adult in-patients with chronic disease. Materials and Methodology: Adult patients (n=39) with chronic diseases were randomized. The intervention group participated in nursing documentation. Upon departure, patients filled in questionnaires about participation in care decision-making, mastery, self-esteem, empowerment and depressive feelings. Results: The majority of the patients preferred a collaborative or passive role regarding care decision-making. Lack of knowledge was one reason for non-participation. Having been diagnosed more than five years previously meant stronger empowerment. Conclusion: It is a challenge for nurses to find strategies to assess patients' wishes regarding participation in care decision-making. Nurses must support patients' knowledge of their disease and empowerment.
A NOVEL MODAL SERIES REPRESENTATION APPROACH TO SOLVE A CLASS OF NONLINEAR OPTIMAL CONTROL PROBLEMS

This paper presents a new approach to solve a class of nonlinear optimal control problems which have a quadratic performance index. In this approach, the nonlin- ear two-point boundary value problem (TPBVP), derived from the Pontryagin 's maximum principle, is transformed into a sequence of linear time-invariant TPBVP's. Solving the proposed linear TPBVP sequence in a recursive manner leads to the optimal control law and the optimal trajectory in the form of uniformly convergent series. Hence, to obtain the optimal solution, only the techniques of solving linear ordinary differential equations are employed. In order to use the proposed method in practice, a control design algorithm with low computational complexity and fast convergence rate is presented. Through the �nite iterations of algorithm, a suboptimal control law is obtained for the nonlinear opti- mal control problem. Finally, numerical examples are included to demonstrate efficiency, simplicity and high accuracy of the proposed method.
Key Research Issues in User Interaction with Configuration Toolkits in a Mass Customization System

The idea of integrating users in the design and production process is a promising strategy for companies being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. While there is a vast managerial literature on mass customization, empirical findings are scarce. Our literature review shows that specifically the core of a mass customization system, the toolkit and the users’ interaction with it, is hardly researched. The objective of this paper is to set a research agenda in the field of user interaction with toolkits for mass customization. From the literature and 15 exploratory expert interviews with leading pioneering companies we deploy four key research issues in this evolving field
Violent mobilities: men, masculinities and road conflicts in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article focuses on violence(s) in traffic space as a gendered problem. It draws upon qualitative online studies and interviews with cyclists about their experiences of motorists’ violent practices, including cyclists’ negotiations of anti-cyclist discourses and their coping strategies. It is argued that automobility makes it possible for certain men to perform their ‘right to the road,’ including gender-identity-shaping practices, and that this has the negative effect of violating cyclists’ bodily integrity. It follows that a shift from cars to more sustainable mobilities also demands related shifts in masculinities and men’s practices in the context of transport and traffic.
OnRipple: A Distributed Overlay Framework for Targeted Immunization in Large-Scale Networks

Targeted immunization has been studied as an applicable measure for network epidemics. Unless global information is collected, existing targeted strategies are short of strength in organizing a potent structure to spread the vaccines fleetly. We propose a novel dynamic immunization mechanism, called OnRipple, to propagate vaccines in susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) epidemiological model. With a light-weighted, scalable and distributed framework and an "axis" structure, OnRipple builds-up an effective overlay network. Thus, nodes have essential sampling information of the whole network and targeted immunization can be easily implemented. Nodes are also able to radiate vaccines to both nearby and distant participants almost at the same time. We analyze the performance of this strategy by simulations on small-world networks. On average, OnRipple is 34 % faster than traditional targeted immunization. It is proven to be flexible and effective in large-scale peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and scale-free networks.
Know your customer: Client captivation and the epistemics of market research

Market research requires both making knowledge and maintaining client relationships. This article inquires into how this feature of commissioned knowledge is dealt with by a group of market researchers. Reception determines the value of the knowledge produced, prompting producers to both prepare informative content and ensure that it lands well with the recipient. Therefore, the nature and dispositions of clients and how their reception can be shaped are integral to the making of knowledge. The article explores an ethnographic case of how market researchers attempt to appeal to and shape the dispositions of their clients throughout the research process. Drawing on means of capture as a metaphor, I show how market researchers frame working with clients as a straightforward issue despite conflicting definitions of just who the client is and what it means to help them.
A Synthesis Method for Compact Nonlinear Springs with Custom Torque-Deflection Profiles and Bandwidth for Series Elastic Actuators

Historically, series elastic actuators (SEAs) used linear springs as the torque transmitting element in their drivetrains [1]. Use of linear springs requires tradeoffs between desired actuation bandwidth and measurable torque resolution. Nonlinear transmission elements overcome this limitation, enabling variable torque resolution and bandwidth through their deflection range. Many have recognized the benefits of variable stiffness elements in SEA drivetrains, which has led to multiple actively controlled variable stiffness actuator designs [2] as well as passive mechanisms that change stiffness during actuation [3][4]. The latter devices rely on cams to nonlinearly elongate a metal, linear spring to achieve a desired torque-deflection profile. However, these devices have a large form factor, which limits their use in existing SEA drivetrains.