Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards Improved QUBO Formulations of IR Tasks for Quantum Annealers

In recent years the interest in applying Quantum Computing to Information Retrieval and Recommendation Systems task has increased and several papers have proposed formulations of relevant tasks that can be solved with quantum devices (community detection, feature selection etc.), usually focusing on Quantum Annealers (QA), a special purpose device able to solve combinatorial optimization problems. However, most research only focuses on the mathematical aspect of the formulation, without accounting for the underlying physical processes of the quantum device. Indeed, theoretical studies indicate that certain characteristics make a problem difficult to solve on QA, but it is not clear how to use this knowledge to inform the development of better problem formulations that are equivalent but easier to solve on QA. This work presents a preliminary study which approaches this issue with an empirical perspective. We consider several problems both general and related to IR and Recommendation tasks to assess whether we can identify characteristics of the problem formulation or the solution space that affect the effectiveness of QA. The results indicate interesting correlations and suggest that this is a promising area to investigate further. 1
Context-Based Concurrent Experience Sharing in Multiagent Systems ( Extended Abstract )

One of the key challenges for multi-agent learning is scalability. We introduce a technique for speeding up multi-agent learning by exploiting concurrent and incremental experience sharing. This solution adaptively identifies opportunities to transfer experiences between agents and allows for the rapid acquisition of appropriate policies in large-scale, stochastic, multi-agent systems. We introduce an online, supervisor-directed transfer technique for constructing high-level characterizations of an agent’s dynamic learning environment—called contexts—which are used to identify groups of agents operating under approximately similar dynamics within a short temporal window. Supervisory agents compute contextual information for groups of subordinate agents, thereby identifying candidates for experience sharing. We show that our approach results in significant performance gains, that it is robust to noise-corrupted or suboptimal context features, and that communication costs scale linearly with the supervisor-to-subordinate ratio.
Safety Veriﬁcation of Deep Neural Networks ∗

Deep neural networks have achieved impressive experimental results in image classiﬁcation, matching the cognitive ability of humans in complex tasks with thousands of classes. Many applications are envisaged, including their use as perception modules and end-to-end controllers for self-driving cars. Let R n be a vector space of images (points) that we wish to classify and assume that f : R n → C
Use of various versions of Schwarz method for solving the problem of contact interaction of elastic bodies

A definition of a sufficiently common problem of mechanical contact interaction in a system of elastic bodies is given. Various versions of realization of the Schwarz method for solving the contact problem numerically are described and the results of solution of a number of problems are presented. Special attention is paid to calculations where the grids in the bodies significantly differ in steps.
Regulation Room: Getting "More, Better" Civic Participation in Complex Government Policymaking

Purpose – Rulemaking (the process agencies use to make new health, safety, social and economic regulations) is one of the US Government's most important policymaking methods and has long been a target for e-government efforts. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many citizens. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – RegulationRoom.org is an online experimental e-participation platform, designed and operated by Cornell e-rulemaking Initiative (CeRI), the cross-disciplinary CeRI. Using the Regulation Room as a case study, this paper addresses what capacities are required for effective civic engagement and how they can be nurtured and supported by an online participation system. Findings – The research suggests that effectively designing and deploying technology, although essential, is only one dimension of realizing broader, better online civic engagement. Effective e-participation systems must be prepared to address procedural, social, and psychological barriers that impede citizens' meaningful participation in complex policymaking processes. The research also suggests the need for re-conceptualizing the value of broad civic participation to the policymaking processes and for recognizing that novice commenters engage with policy issues differently than experienced insiders. Practical implications – The paper includes a series of strategic recommendations for policymaking seeking public input. While it indicates that a broader range of citizens can indeed be meaningfully engaged, it also cautions that getting better participation from more people requires the investment of resources. More fundamental, both government decision makers and participation designers must be open to recognizing non-traditional forms of knowledge and styles of communication – and willing to devise participation mechanisms and protocols accordingly. Originality/value – This paper describes lessons from a unique design-based research project with both practical and conceptual implications for more, better civic participation in complex government policymaking.
Welcome message from the chairs

Nowadays, providing personalized service to customers is one of the main issues in big data services. To provide the personalized service, analyzing various logs and cooperation between data analysts and developers are critical. However, the problem is that overhead can occur when the log data is analyzed due to general characteristics of big data system as well-known 4Vs(Velocity, Various, Value and Volume). Also, generally it is hard for data analysts and developers to work together because they use different interfaces. Therefore, we propose a personalized log analysis system including rule-based data grouping method in order for the improved performance of personalized log analysis and more flexible cooperation between data analysts and developers. The evaluation of the proposed system performs well for cooperation and grouping along with the R SW tool.
Multiscale analysis of poly-ADP-ribosylation dependent chromatin remodeling mechanisms at DNA breaks

Pendant longtemps, la chromatine a ete uniquement decrite comme un moyen de compacter pres de deux metres d’ADN dans un noyau de quelques micrometres de diametre. On sait aujourd’hui que la chromatine represente en fait un element majeur de regulation de toutes les fonctions nucleaires impliquant l’ADN. Dans le contexte de dommages de l’ADN induits par irradiations UV, la chromatine endommagee subit une decondensation rapide et transitoire qui l’amene a occuper un volume 1,5 fois plus grand que son volume initial. Cette relaxation chromatinienne est associee a une plus grande accessibilite de l’ADN. Neanmoins, le lien entre ces deux effets decoulant de la presence de dommages, n’a pas ete etabli, ni caracterise. En couplant l’imagerie de cellules vivantes a l’induction de dommages cibles au sein de noyaux cellulaires par micro-irradiation laser, ces travaux ont permis de mettre en evidence le role majeur de PARP1 dans la reponse chromatinienne aux dommages de l’ADN. En effet, certaines conclusions contradictoires presentes dans la litterature scientifique concernant l’action de PARP1 sur la chromatine ont ete reconciliees en demontrant que PARP1 seul peut se lier a la chromatine et entrainer une plus forte compaction de celle-ci, tandis que son activite catalytique de PARylation va, quant a elle, conduire a une decompaction de la structure chromatinienne. Cette etude s’est aussi interessee a la dynamique particuliere de l’histone H1 suite aux dommages de l’ADN. En effet, celui-ci est rapidement exclu des zones de dommages par un mecanisme encore inconnu, et les elements apportes ici suggerent que H1 pourrait jouer un role dans la decondensation de la chromatine suite aux dommages de l’ADN. Pour finir, des techniques de photo-perturbation et de spectroscopie de correlation de fluorescence ont ete employees pour comprendre et caracteriser l’environnement moleculaire que constitue la chromatine endommagee et decondensee. Bien qu’une augmentation significative des interactions entre la chromatine et certains de ses partenaires d’interactions soit observee au sein des zones endommagees, aucun changement en termes d’encombrement moleculaire n’a pu etre mis en evidence a ce niveau qui pourrait expliquer une plus grande accessibilite de l’ADN.
Sustainability in Food: AI-based interactions, based on data fusion for consumer protection by the government (poster)

Sustainability-aware grocery shopping can be challenging for consumers since product information becomes more and more extensive. Especially the variety and trustworthiness of labels makes it difficult to find the most sustainable products, in particular with respect to the heterogenic and varying level of detail claimed by producers based on these labels. In order to decrease information overload and increase consumer protection, we develop a government-driven platform that fuses heterogeneous food data and provides chatbot-like AI services to communicate a sustainability score. We demonstrate the use and potential of the government-governed platform with two prototypical interfaces. Furthermore, we present first insights from the cooperation with start-ups who integrate the data platform into their products.
Feasibility Analysis of 1-D Carbon Material in Application of Negative Particle Beam Diagnostics

Abstract An important feature of the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) project is the additional heating obtained from the injection of neutral beams based on accelerated negative ions. For the neutral beams based on negative ions, the most important measurements are beam uniformity, beamlet divergence, and stripping losses. According to the CFETR requirement, the maximum allowed beam divergence angle and beam nonuniformity are 6 mrads and ±10%, respectively. As one-dimensional (1-D) carbon tiles have large ratio between perpendicular conductivity and parallel conductivity and high stability, they can be used for beam uniformity and beamlet divergence measurement. This paper investigates the influence on the response of 1-D carbon tile having the thermal characteristics and features of some dedicated diagnostics. Simulations show that it will be possible to verify experimentally whether the beam meets the requirement about the maximum allowed value. This work lays a foundation for design and application of high-precision beam diagnostic targets.
High frame-rate en face optical coherence tomography system using KTN optical beam deflector

We developed high frame-rate en face optical coherence tomography (OCT) system using KTa1-xNbxO3 (KTN) optical beam deflector. In the imaging system, the fast scanning was performed at 200 kHz by the KTN optical beam deflector, while the slow scanning was performed at 800 Hz by the galvanometer mirror. As a preliminary experiment, we succeeded in obtaining en face OCT images of human fingerprint with a frame rate of 800 fps. This is the highest frame-rate obtained using time-domain (TD) en face OCT imaging. The 3D-OCT image of sweat gland was also obtained by our imaging system.
QUANTUM CASCADE LASER: from 3 to 26 mum

Absorption spectroscopy of gases and liquids is amongst the most widely used methods to measure molecular concentrations. It is used in various fields, amongst them are industrial leak testing, medical analysis and surgery, process control and monitoring. Trace gas analysis of low-mass molecules is preferably performed in the mid-IR wavelength region, where the line strength for many molecules are high. With the QCL, invented in 1994, this spectral range has a laser source that delivers sufficient output power in continuous-wave operation. The semiconductor laser is robust and operates in a wide temperature range. This work is dedicated to explore the capabilities of QCLs and improve their performance in the wavelength region from 3 to 26 μm. Our active region simulations are based on a Density Matrix model. The choice of basis wavefunctions is verified and a method to find the optimal injection barrier is presented. The influence of different interface roughness models is discussed. Our model agrees well with the full quantum Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function model and with experiments. In this thesis we explore the short wavelength boundary of QCLs. Lasing emission around 3.3 μm requires highly strained
Consumer Fairness Benchmark in Recommendation

Several mitigation procedures have emerged to address consumer unfairness in personalized rankings. However, evaluating their performance is difficult due to variations in experimental protocols, such as differing fairness definitions, data sets, evaluation metrics, and sensitive attributes. This makes it challenging for scientists to choose a suitable procedure for their practical setting. In this paper, we summarize our previous work on investigating the properties a given mitigation procedure against consumer unfairness should be evaluated on. To this end, we defined eight technical properties and leveraged two public datasets to evaluate the extent to which existing mitigation procedures against consumer unfairness met these properties. Source code and data: https://github.com/jackmedda/Perspective-C-Fairness-RecSys.
Private Information Retrieval from MDS Coded Data With Colluding Servers: Settling a Conjecture by Freij-Hollanti et al.

A <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(K, N, T, K_{c})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> instance of private information retrieval from MDS coded data with colluding servers (in short, MDS-TPIR), is comprised of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> messages and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula> distributed servers. Each message is separately encoded through a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(K_{c}, N)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> MDS storage code. A user wishes to retrieve one message, as efficiently as possible, while revealing no information about the desired message index to any colluding set of up to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$T$ </tex-math></inline-formula> servers. The fundamental limit on the efficiency of retrieval, i.e., the capacity of MDS-TPIR is known only at the extremes where either <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$T$ </tex-math></inline-formula> or <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K_{c}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> belongs to <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\{1,N\}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. The focus of this work is a recent conjecture by Freij-Hollanti, Gnilke, Hollanti, and Karpuk which offers a general capacity expression for MDS-TPIR. We prove that the conjecture is false by presenting as a counterexample a PIR scheme for the setting <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(K, N, T, K_{c}) = (2,4,2,2)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, which achieves the rate 3/5, exceeding the conjectured capacity, 4/7. Insights from the counterexample lead us to capacity characterizations for various instances of MDS-TPIR, including all cases with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(K, N, T, K_{c}) = (2,N,T,N-1)$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$N$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$T$ </tex-math></inline-formula> can be arbitrary.
impact of diabetes mellitus on the survival of pancreatic cancer: a meta-analysis

Background: Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a risk factor for pancreatic cancer (PC), but its prognostic value in PC is still unclear. To elucidate this issue, we systematically reviewed the evidence concerning the association between diabetes status and PC. Methods: Medline and EMBASE databases were searched to identify the eligible studies. Overall and subgroup analyses were performed to detect the discrepancy of prognosis according to diabetes status. Hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% CI were used to estimate the effect size. Results: Eighteen studies including 16,181 patients with sample size ranging from 113 to 4,658 were pooled in this meta-analysis. Results showed that patients with DM had worse survival (HR 1.19, 95% CI: 1.07–1.32). In view of the impact of diabetes duration and tumor stage on the outcomes, we classified the studies into different groups. The results indicated that DM was associated with survival in both long-standing diabetes (HR 1.26, 95% CI: 1.14–1.40) and recent-onset diabetes (HR 1.29, 95% CI: 1.09–1.51). Data regarding localized disease (HR 1.57, 95% CI: 1.00–2.46) and nonlocalized (locally advanced and metastatic) disease (HR 1.42, 95% CI: 1.16–1.73) verified that the prognostic value was independent of tumor stage. Conclusion: Our results suggested that patients with DM were associated with worse survival than those without DM. Diabetes may be a predictive factor of survival in patients with PC. Surveillance of diabetes status and antidiabetes medication administration after the diagnosis of PC is of clinical importance. resistance or compensatory hyperinsulinemia. resistance-related
Thermosolutal instability in a horizontal fluid layer affected by rotation

Thermosolutal convective instability in a horizontal layer affected by rotation is studied. Stationary convection and over-stability cases are considered for different boundary conditions. Analytical solutions were obtained when both boundaries are free and numerical results were obtained for the cases of free and rigid boundaries. The numerical computations of this problem were performed using the method of expansion of Chebyshev polynomials. This method is better suited to the solution of hydrodynamic stability problems than expansions in other sets of orthogonal polynomials. This method not only has high accuracy but also allows stationary and over-stable modes to be treated simultaneously, which is important if perchance the critical eigenvalue flits between the different modes in response to changing parameter values. The results obtained show that the effect of both solute concentration and rotation is to stabilize the system for stationary convection case and for the over-stability case when both boundaries are free. However, when both boundaries are rigid some unexpected behavior are obtained in the case of over-stability.
Approaches to the Control of Infectious Disease

Maurice Bartlett's work on the mathematical theory of epidemics, recurrent epidemics and endemicity over the years 1953–66 has helped to stimulate a wide range of applied studies of practical importance. This paper reviews contemporary trends in the control of infectious disease. Historically, the subject started in response to very practical problems, but subsequent developments showed an increasingly marked divergence between general theory and practical applications. In recent years, however, improvements in parameter estimation, asymptotic and stochastic approximation, the modelling of individual diseases, advances in computerized simulations, the construction of resource allocation models, the use of control theory, etc., have been gradually leading to a synthesis of the utmost importance to public health action. Models can now be fitted to specific field data; alternative intervention strategies involving immunization, prophylaxis or treatment can be evaluated; and the incorporation of realistic epidemiological models in a wider decision-oriented system dynamics setting may soon help to solve broader strategic problems on the policy level.
A Lattice Boltzmann-Immersed Boundary-Finite Element Method for Nonlinear Fluid–Solid Interaction Simulation with Moving Objects

A nonlinear finite element method (FEM) was introduced into the immersed boundary (IB) — lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) framework to simulate the nonlinear fluid–solid interactions for moving deformable objects in incompressible fluid flow. The fluid motion is obtained by solving the discrete lattice Boltzmann equation, the moving boundaries of the solids are handled by the IB method, and the nonlinear dynamics of the deforming/moving objects are calculated by nonlinear FEM solvers in which the structural nodes are also set as Lagrangian markers to track the moving boundaries of the structures in IB method. The simulation results indicate that the proposed IB-LBM-FEM simulation framework not only satisfies the nonslip boundary condition well at the boundary points, but also has better accuracy for capturing nonlinearity because of its mature nonlinear FEM solver.
Learning in the rational speech acts model

When a person says something that has multiple possible interpretations, which interpretation stands out as the most likely intended meaning often depends on context outside the utterance itself: salient objects in the environment, utterances the speaker could have chosen but didn’t, common-sense knowledge, etc. Systematically predicting these contextual effects is a major unsolved problem in computational natural language understanding. A recently-developed framework, known in cognitive science as the rational speech acts (RSA) model, proposes that speaker and listener reason probabilistically about each other’s goals and private knowledge to produce interpretations that differ from literal meanings. The framework has shown promising experimental results in predicting a wide variety of previously hard-to-model contextual effects. This dissertation describes a variety of methods combining RSA approaches to context modeling with machine learning methods of language understanding and production. Learning meanings of utterances from examples avoids the need to build an impractically large, brittle lexicon, and having models of both speaker and listener also provides a way to reduce the search space by sampling likely subsets of possible utterances and meanings. Using recently-collected corpora of human utterances in simple language games, I show that a combination of RSA and machine learning yields more human-like models of utterances and interpretations than straightforward machine learning classifiers. Furthermore, the RSA insight relating the listener and speaker roles enables the use of a generation model to improve understanding, as well as suggesting a new way to evaluate natural language generation systems in terms of an understanding task.
How Much Should We Trust Instrumental Variable Estimates in Political Science? Practical Advice Based on Over 60 Replicated Studies

Instrumental variable (IV) strategies are widely used in political science to establish causal relationships. However, the identifying assumptions required by an IV design are demanding, and it remains challenging for researchers to assess their validity. In this paper, we replicate 67 papers published in three top journals in political science during 2010-2022 and identify several troubling patterns. First, researchers often overestimate the strength of their IVs due to non-i.i. d. errors, such as a clustering structure. Second, the most commonly used t-test for the two-stage-least-squares (2SLS) estimates often severely underestimates uncertainty. Using more robust inferential methods, we find that around 19-30% of the 2SLS estimates in our sample are underpowered. Third, in the majority of the replicated studies, the 2SLS estimates are much larger than the ordinary-least-squares estimates, and their ratio is negatively correlated with the strength of the IVs in studies where the IVs are not experimentally generated, suggesting potential violations of unconfoundedness or the exclusion restriction. To help researchers avoid these pitfalls, we provide a checklist for better practice.