cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Simple model of a limit order-driven market

Abstract We introduce and study a simple model of a limit order-driven market. Traders in this model can either trade stock (or any other risky asset for that matter) at the market price or place a limit order, i.e., an instruction to buy (sell) a certain amount of the stock if its price falls below (raises above) a predefined level. The choice between these two options is purely random (there are no strategies involved), and the execution price of a limit order is determined simply by offsetting the most recent market price by a random amount. Numerical simulations of this model revealed that despite such minimalistic rules the price pattern generated by this model has such realistic features as “fat” tails of the probability distribution of price fluctuations, characterized by a crossover between two power law exponents, long range correlations of the volatility, and a non-trivial Hurst exponent of the price signal.
The Intersection of Judicial Attitudes and Litigant Selection Theories: Explaining U.S. Supreme Court Decision-Making

Two prominent theories of legal decision making provide seemingly contradictory explanations for judicial outcomes. In political science, the Attitudinal Model suggests that judicial outcomes are driven by judges' sincere policy preferences - judges bring their ideological inclinations to the decision making process and their case outcome choices largely reflect these policy preferences. In contrast, in the law and economics literature, Priest and Klein's well-known Selection Hypothesis posits that court outcomes are largely driven by the litigants' strategic choices in the selection of cases for formal dispute or adjudication - forward thinking litigants settle cases where potential judicial outcomes are readily discernable (e.g. judicial attitudes are known), hence nullifying the impact of judicial ideological preferences on case outcomes. We believe that the strategic case sorting process proposed in the law and economics literature does, in fact, affect the influence of judge ideology or attitudes on judicial outcomes. However, these two perspectives can be effectively wed to provide an integrated model of judicial decision making that accounts for the influences of both the strategic behavior of litigants and the attitudinal preferences of judges. We test this integrated model of decision making on case outcomes in the U.S. Supreme Court and employ an interactive specification to assess the influence of judicial ideology on Supreme Court outcomes while simultaneously accounting for litigants' (and justices) strategic case sorting behavior.
Elements, Sentencing Factors, and the Right to a Jury Trial: An Analysis of Legislative Power and Its Limits

The Supreme Court often states that the decision as to whether a given fact in a criminal statute is an element or a sentencing factor is a question for Congress, but this seemingly straightforward statement masks some complicated subtleties. This Comment explores the extent to which Congress is theoretically free to make these decisions, and the extent to which Congress makes them in practice.
The Institution-ICT-Economic Development Nexus: Two Cases

ABSTRACT ICT projects and institutions in developing countries superimpose in a complex interaction. The acceptance of an ICT project by various stakeholders and the contribution to economic development are functions of such interaction. In general, a successful implementation of an ICT project undertaken in a developing country requires significant institutional adjustments. Drawing upon institutional theories, this paper investigates how regulative, normative and cognitive legitimacy in developing countries influences the ICT-economic development nexus. We use a multiple case study research design. The findings of this paper suggests that the root causes of success or failure of ICT projects are nature of institutional components such as sanctioning and monitoring power, social norms and cognitive programs of stakeholders. We have examined interrelationships among orientation of an ICT project (economic elite centered vs. socially disadvantaged group centered); the nature of institutions and institutional adjustments associated with the project; diffusion pattern of the technology and resulting contribution to development.
Moral Panics and Body Cameras

This Commentary uses the lens of "moral panics" to evaluate public support for equipping law enforcement with body cameras as a response and solution to events in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. Body cameras are a generally good policy idea. But the rhetoric surrounding them erroneously treats them as the single guaranteed solution to the problem of excessive force and police-citizen conflicts, particularly by ignoring the limitations of video evidence and the difficult questions of implementing the body camera program. In overstating the case, the rhetoric of body cameras becomes indistinguishable from rhetoric surrounding responses to past moral panics.
Why does higher variability of trading activity predict lower expected returns

Abstract The paper shows that controlling for the aggregate volatility risk factor eliminates the puzzling negative relation between variability of trading activity and future abnormal returns. I find that variability of other measures of liquidity and liquidity risk is largely unrelated to expected returns. Lastly, I show that the low returns to firms with high variability of trading activity are not explained by liquidity risk or mispricing theories.
Measuring Securities Litigation Risk

Abstract Extant research commonly uses indicator variables for industry membership to proxy for securities litigation risk. We provide evidence on the construct validity of this measure by reporting on the predictive ability of alternative models of litigation risk. While the industry measure alone does a relatively poor job of predicting litigation, supplementing this variable with measures of firm characteristics (such as size, growth, and stock volatility) considerably improves predictive ability. Additional variables such as those that proxy for corporate governance quality and managerial opportunism do not add much to predictive ability and so do not meet the cost–benefit test for inclusion.
Disciplining Judicial Interpretation of Fundamental Rights: First Amendment Decadence in Southworth and Boy Scouts of America and European Alternatives

American constitutional jurisprudence has entered a period of decadence. The characteristics of this decadence is much in evidence in the constitutional jurisprudence of the American Supreme Court: judicial arbitrariness, the use of interpretive doctrine as an end rather than a means, disregard of existing interpretive doctrine and hyper-distinctions of fact, doctrine as a smokescreen for personal preference, and an inclination to permit the juridification of everyday life. Indeed, these characteristics of decadence are made worse by a bloated and ill-defined catalogue of interpretive doctrines that veils all distortion of constitutional principle in the service of personal politics. Here is a jurisprudence in decline, increasingly noted more for arbitrariness than principle. In this context, it is worth inquiring whether there might be a suggestion for improvement in the juristic traditions of European or supra-national constitutional systems. This article examines the latest example of the modern phenomenon of jurisprudential decline through an analysis of two First Amendment cases decided during the American Supreme Court's 1999-2000 Term. It then looks to the French and German systems of constitutional review, and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, to determine whether other systems provide translatable lessons for a more effective and democratically based supervision of the interpretive function of the American Supreme Court. It suggests that European traditions of hierarchies of fundamental constitutional values provide at least a basis for the policing of judicial interpretation. In the absence of regularization and restraint, the American system of constitutional jurisprudence (like any other system relying on judicial interpretation) will collapse of its own weight. Equally likely is the possibility that such a system will be abandoned because, having become so engorged in detail, point and counterpoint, thrust and counter-thrust, rule and exception, it will prove useless to all but the theoretician and the pedant.
Local Institutions and Environmental Outcomes: Evidence from Wetlands Protection in Massachusetts

Community-based efforts to address environmental problems occupy an increasingly large space on the environmental policy landscape. Advocates argue that local environmental institutions (LEIs) can deliver both procedural and environmental quality benefits. Yet, despite over a decade of expansive support, the performance of LEIs remains largely unknown, particularly with regard to environmental outcomes. In this article, we consider new environmental outcome data we compiled from local efforts to implement the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act. We find that stronger forms of LEIs generate both quantitatively and qualitatively better environmental outcomes, which suggests that LEIs may live up to their advocates’ expectations.
Slicing Through the Great Legal Gordian Knot: Ways to Assist Pro Se Litigants in Their Quest for Justice

In Greek mythology, the Gordian Knot was a large intertwined rope that was impossible to untie. The knot was the work of Gordius, a king in what is now Turkey. Legend has it that King Gordius fastened his chariot to a pole using the Gordian Knot. Then Alexander the Great arrived and attempted to unravel it. Anyone who has ever tried to unpack the box of last year’s Christmas lights can appreciate what Alexander was up against. He tried, unsuccessfully, and became frustrated at his inability to undo what could not be undone. So he finally opened the Gordian Knot by cutting through it with his sword. Alexander’s solution to the problem led to the idiom “cutting the Gordian Knot,” which simply means solving a complicated problem through bold action.1 The problems facing pro se litigants are as daunting as the famed Gordian Knot. Imagine trying to unravel the law without knowing where the ends of the knot begin. Or for that matter, imagine trying to plead your case without the benefit of a legal education. This was the quandary that confronted me. From 1998 to 2008, I was incarcerated in a federal prison—the result of five bank robberies I committed as a foolish young adult. While in prison, I was fortunate to receive a job in the prison law library. There, I sat reading novels until June of 2000, when the Supreme Court handed down Apprendi v. New Jersey,2
‘Catalogue’ vs ‘Order‐of‐sale’ effects in sequential auctions: theory and evidence from a rare book sale*

We examine bidding in a rare book sequential auction that has features of a natural experiment: lots were arranged in alphabetical order, the reserve set non-strategically and half the bids placed by mail-in bidders. We distinguish between the effects induced by the print order of the catalogue from those by the sequential nature of the sale. We document the existence of distinct 'catalogue' effects on prices, number of bids, and price variability and determine their causes. We demonstrate that these catalogue effects also influence floor bidder behaviour. We derive a theoretical model that generates key aspects of floor bidder behaviour. Copyright 2004 Royal Economic Society.
Quasi-hyperbolic discounting and retirement

Abstract Some people have self-control problems regularly. This paper adds endogenous retirement to Laibson’s quasi-hyperbolic discounting savings model [Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (1997) 443–477]. Earlier selves think that the deciding self tends to retire too early and may save less to induce later retirement. Still earlier selves may think the pre-retirement self does this too much, saving more to induce early retirement. The consumption pattern may be different from that with exponential discounting. Other observational non-equivalence includes the impact of changing mandatory retirement rules or work incentives on savings and a possibly negative marginal propensity to consume out of increased future earnings. Naive agents are briefly considered.
Should The Theory of Alimony Include Nonfinancial Losses and Motivations

Professor Schneider's careful critique of the author’s work, The Theory of Alimony (The Theory), raises some important points, which allows the author both to refine and to clarify The Theory's arguments. This article summarizes both The Theory and Professor Schneider's critique. It discusses the role of incentives, highlights The Theory's core assumptions, and explains why much of Professor Schneider's critique follows from The Theory's exclusive focus on financial losses and motivations. While conceding that The Theory's exclusive focus on financial losses and motivations necessarily results in an occasional failure to provide adequate incentives for the behavior it intends to encourage, it also shows that The Theory avoids a more serious flaw that Professor Schneider's analysis suggests it may make: that of creating disincentives for that behavior. It also examines in detail both the rationale for, and the effect of, The Theory's exclusion of nonfinancial factors.This article concludes that, while imperfect, The Theory's imperfections are ones of omission, rather than of commission. It therefore still offers an advance over a system without alimony, or over alimony without a system, which is how one might describe the current law. Additionally, it suggests that Professor Schneider’s concerns might more readily be redressed by tort law.
To Proceed with Caution? Aiding and Abetting Liability Under the Alien Tort Statute

This article examines the current state of the rule regarding aiding and abetting liability under the Alien Tort Statute. It analyzes a split between appellate court decisions with respect to the mens rea element of the rule in light of relevant international law jurisprudence and the Supreme Court's decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain.
Lashed to the Mast and Crying for Help

This article is an attempt to solve one of the central conundrums of consumer protection and the protection of elders: how to provide protection to those consumers and elderly who need it without unduly restricting the rights and freedom of those who do not need or want the limitations of autonomy that added protection might bring. The article starts by analyzing autonomy itself and how philosophers and others have defined and described autonomy. Autonomy does not consist of mere lack of restraints or in a multiplicity of options. Instead, a crucial element of autonomy is the ability to make considered decisions that conform to one's own preferences or beliefs and to put those decisions into action. Autonomy may even be enhanced, therefore, if people can choose restraints or limitations of options that allow them to make better, more considered decisions. For example, borrowers with fewer confusing options can make more informed decisions than those presented such an overwhelming welter of terms that they can no longer understand the loan they are obtaining. The article analyzes self exclusion programs in casinos. These programs allow a problem gambler to request a casino to exclude the gambler, in essence limiting the gambler's autonomy by banning gambling for that person in that casino. The article concludes that such programs increase the autonomy of the self-excluding gamblers, so long as they allow the potential self-excluders a reflective, considered method by which to be removed from the list of excluded gamblers. To put this theory into practice, the article develops the Elder Home Equity Loan Protection (Elder HELP) Instruments, which are voluntary instruments that an elder borrower can sign and record at the county recorder's office. Such an instrument would notify lenders that the borrower does not wish to enter into any loan with certain barred terms that often are inserted in predatory loans, such as prepayment penalties, balloon payment requirements, or fees or interest rates above certain targets. By recording the instrument with the county recorder, the senior would be providing notice to all lenders that the senior did not consent to any loan with these objectionable terms. Then, if a senior were still somehow induced into entering into any loan with such terms, the law would provide that the senior could sue to reform the note to eliminate the offending terms. By choosing whether to sign and record an Elder HELP Instrument, the senior would be retaining autonomous control over his financial destiny. At the same time, the senior could be choosing greater protections from fraud and sharp dealing, and so this proposal combines protection for the senior's assets and autonomy at the same time.
Do applicant patent citations matter

Abstract Patent law both imposes a duty on patent applicants to submit relevant prior art to the PTO and assumes that examiners use this information to determine an application's patentability. In this paper, we examine the validity of these assumptions by studying the use made of applicant-submitted prior art by delving into the actual prosecution process in over a thousand different cases. We find that patent examiners rarely use applicant-submitted art in their rejections to narrow patents, relying almost exclusively on prior art they find themselves. Our findings have implications for a number of important legal and policy disputes, including initiatives to improve patent quality and the strong presumption of validity the law grants issued patents—a presumption that makes patents more difficult to challenge in court.
Plugging leaks and lowering levees in the federal government: Practical solutions for securities trading based on political intelligence

From its founding, the federal government of the United States has been a potential gold mine for nonpublic market-moving information. By selectively disclosing this information to securities traders outside the government (or to persons who advise them), federal officials can substantially privilege certain wealthy or otherwise wellconnected investors over ordinary investors in the securities market. The trading profits that can be derived from the use of this material nonpublic government information are often tremendous. This disparity of access to government information may be unfair. But absent an identifiable personal benefit on the part of the government insider, neither the selective disclosure of government information nor the securities trading by persons on the outside constitutes a violation of the federal securities laws—even under the newly enacted Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act. Moreover, this “political intelligence” problem appears to be worsening: in recent months, news reports about federal officials’ selective disclosure of nonpublic government information have proliferated,
Commons, Anticommons, and Community in Biotechnological Assets

I argue for three theses: T1 — Access to scientific knowledge can be used to reinforce existing scientific communities and sometimes generate new ones. T2 — Community can be used to generate scientific knowledge, patent reform, scientific research, medical diagnostics, and trade secrets and occasionally patents. T3 — On the spectrum from commons to semicommons to private property to anticommons, an anticommons can arise if a biotechnological asset is fuzzily defined. I defend these propositions against objection and establish the fertility of my account by considering intellectual property issues relating to synthetic biology. Along the way I present a new understanding of the public domain. I also pursue several projects that are interwoven throughout the Article. The analytic project shows how careful definitions yield a useful taxonomy of biotechnological assets and their holders. The normative project explains why we should endorse intellectual property rights in some biotechnological assets but not others. Finally, the thematic project establishes larger contrasts between different forms of community on the one hand and individualism on the other, and reveals how my understanding of the public domain yields a surer grasp of these contrasts and their roles in institutions of property.
Machine learning for reliability engineering and safety applications: Review of current status and future opportunities

Abstract Machine learning (ML) pervades an increasing number of academic disciplines and industries. Its impact is profound, and several fields have been fundamentally altered by it, autonomy and computer vision for example; reliability engineering and safety will undoubtedly follow suit. There is already a large but fragmented literature on ML for reliability and safety applications, and it can be overwhelming to navigate and integrate into a coherent whole. In this work, we facilitate this task by providing a synthesis of, and a roadmap to this ever-expanding analytical landscape and highlighting its major landmarks and pathways. We first provide an overview of the different ML categories and sub-categories or tasks, and we note several of the corresponding models and algorithms. We then look back and review the use of ML in reliability and safety applications. We examine several publications in each category/sub-category, and we include a short discussion on the use of Deep Learning to highlight its growing popularity and distinctive advantages. Finally, we look ahead and outline several promising future opportunities for leveraging ML in service of advancing reliability and safety considerations. Overall, we argue that ML is capable of providing novel insights and opportunities to solve important challenges in reliability and safety applications. It is also capable of teasing out more accurate insights from accident datasets than with traditional analysis tools, and this in turn can lead to better informed decision-making and more effective accident prevention.
BciPy: brain–computer interface software in Python

There are high technological and software demands associated with conducting Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) research. In order to accelerate the development and accessibility of BCIs, it is worthwh...
Derivation of the Muon g-2 Anomaly from Non-Equilibrium Dynamics

As it is known, the anomalous magnetic moment of muons is a longstanding puzzle of the Standard Model (SM). Commonly referred to as the muon “g-2 problem”, the precise testing of this anomaly provides a sensitive probe for physics beyond SM. Here we show that the leading order contribution to the muon anomaly can be estimated from the onset of non-equilibrium dynamics near the Fermi scale. The derivation is straightforward and evades the postulated existence of new phenomena in the low to mid TeV range of high-energy physics.
Task-Motion Planning for Safe and Efficient Urban Driving

Autonomous vehicles need to plan at the task level to compute a sequence of symbolic actions, such as merging left and turning right, to fulfill people’s service requests, where efficiency is the main concern. At the same time, the vehicles must compute continuous trajectories to perform actions at the motion level, where safety is the most important. Task-motion planning in autonomous driving faces the problem of maximizing task-level efficiency while ensuring motion-level safety. To this end, we develop algorithm Task-Motion Planning for Urban Driving (TMPUD) that, for the first time, enables the task and motion planners to communicate about the safety level of driving behaviors. TMPUD has been evaluated using a realistic urban driving simulation platform. Results suggest that TMPUD performs significantly better than competitive baselines from the literature in efficiency, while ensuring the safety of driving behaviors.
Trends over time in the risk of adverse outcomes among patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection.

BACKGROUND: We aimed to describe trends in adverse outcomes among patients who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 between February and September 2020 within a national healthcare system. METHODS: We identified enrollees in the national U.S. Veterans Affairs healthcare system who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 between 2/28/2020 and 9/30/2020 (n=55,952), with follow-up extending to 11/19/2020. We determined trends over time in incidence of the following outcomes that occurred within 30 days of testing positive: hospitalization, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, mechanical ventilation and death. RESULTS: Between February and July 2020, there were marked downward trends in the 30-day incidence of hospitalization (44.2% to 15.8%), ICU admission (20.3% to 5.3%), mechanical ventilation (12.7% to 2.2%), and death (12.5% to 4.4%), which subsequently plateaued between July and September 2020. These trends persisted after adjustment for sociodemographic characteristics, comorbid conditions, documented symptoms and laboratory tests, including among subgroups of patients hospitalized, admitted to the ICU or treated with mechanical ventilation. From February to September, there were decreases in the use of hydroxychloroquine (56.5% to 0%), azithromycin (48.3% to 16.6%) vasopressors (20.6% to 8.7%), and dialysis (11.6% to 3.8%) and increases in the use of dexamethasone (3.4% to 53.1%), other corticosteroids (4.9% to 29.0%) and remdesivir (1.7% to 45.4%) among hospitalized patients. CONCLUSIONS: The risk of adverse outcomes in SARS-CoV-2-positive patients decreased markedly between February and July, with subsequent stabilization from July to September. These trends were not explained by changes in measured baseline patient characteristics and may reflect changing treatment practices or viral pathogenicity.
Benders Cut Classification via Support Vector Machines for Solving Two-Stage Stochastic Programs

We consider Benders decomposition for solving two-stage stochastic programs with complete recourse based on finite samples of the uncertain parameters. We define the Benders cuts binding at the fin...
Planning Under Non-Rational Perception of Uncertain Spatial Costs

This work investigates the design of risk-perception-aware motion-planning strategies that incorporate non-rational risk associated with uncertain spatial costs. Our proposed method employs the Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT) to generate a perceived risk map over a given environment. CPT-like perceived risks and path-length metrics are then combined to define a cost function that is compliant with the requirements of asymptotic optimality of sampling-based motion planners (RRT*). The modeling power of CPT is illustrated in theory and in simulation, along with a comparison to other risk perception models like Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR). Theoretically, we define a notion of expressiveness for a risk perception model and show that CPT's is higher than that of CVaR and expected risk. We then show that this expressiveness translates to our path planning setting, where we observe that a planner equipped with CPT together with a simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) method can better approximate arbitrary paths in an environment. Additionally, we show in simulation that our planner captures a rich set of meaningful paths, representative of different risk perceptions in a custom environment. We then compare the performance of our planner with T-RRT* (a planner for continuous cost spaces) and Risk-RRT* (a risk-aware planner for dynamic human obstacles) through simulations in cluttered and dynamic environments respectively, showing the advantage of our proposed planner.
Rolling Signal-Based Ripley's K: A New Algorithm to Identify Spatial Patterns In Histological Specimens

The spatial distribution, or pattern, of cells within a tissue underlies organ function. However, these are difficult to identify, making it challenging to evaluate how these patterns are established, or how diseases may disrupt and impair their function. To address this, we developed an algorithm that identifies spatial patterns within tissues and used it to study the bone marrow, a specialized microenvironment in which spatial patterning of regulatory cells influence the cell fate of hematopoietic stem cells. Using this algorithm, we discovered clusters of cells within the bone marrow that suggest an organization of micro-niches, which may form the basis of the hematopoietic stem cell microenvironment. This work provides a new tool for the identification of spatial patterns within tissues that can lead to a deeper understanding of tissue function, provide clues for the early onset of disease, and be used for studying the impact of pharmaceutics on tissue regeneration.
Acronym Identification and Disambiguation Shared Tasks for Scientific Document Understanding.

Acronyms are the short forms of longer phrases and they are frequently used in writing, especially scholarly writing, to save space and facilitate the communication of information. As such, every text understanding tool should be capable of recognizing acronyms in text (i.e., acronym identification) and also finding their correct meaning (i.e., acronym disambiguation). As most of the prior works on these tasks are restricted to the biomedical domain and use unsupervised methods or models trained on limited datasets, they fail to perform well for scientific document understanding. To push forward research in this direction, we have organized two shared task for acronym identification and acronym disambiguation in scientific documents, named AI@SDU and AD@SDU, respectively. The two shared tasks have attracted 52 and 43 participants, respectively. While the submitted systems make substantial improvements compared to the existing baselines, there are still far from the human-level performance. This paper reviews the two shared tasks and the prominent participating systems for each of them.
Assessing temperature-dependent competition between two invasive mosquito species

Invasive mosquitoes are expanding their ranges into new geographic areas and interacting with resident mosquito species. Understanding how novel interactions can affect mosquito population dynamics is necessary to predict transmission risk at invasion fronts. Mosquito life-history traits are extremely sensitive to temperature, and this can lead to temperature-dependent competition between competing invasive mosquito species. We explored temperature-dependent competition between Aedes aegypti and Anopheles stephensi, two invasive mosquito species whose distributions overlap in India, the Middle East, and North Africa, where An. stephensi is currently expanding into the endemic range of Ae. aegypti. We followed mosquito cohorts raised at different intraspecific and interspecific densities across five temperatures (16-32°C) to measure traits relevant for population growth and to estimate species' per capita growth rates. We then used these growth rates to derive each species' competitive ability at each temperature. We find strong evidence for asymmetric competition at all temperatures, with Ae. aegypti emerging as the dominant competitor. This was primarily because of differences in larval survival and development times across all temperatures that resulted in a higher estimated intrinsic growth rate and competitive tolerance estimate for Ae. aegypti compared to An. stephensi. The spread of An. stephensi into the African continent could lead to urban transmission of malaria, an otherwise rural disease, increasing the human population at risk and complicating malaria elimination efforts. Competition has resulted in habitat segregation of other invasive mosquito species, and our results suggest that it may play a role in determining the distribution of An. stephensi across its invasive range.
Covariance Steering of Discrete-Time Stochastic Linear Systems Based on Wasserstein Distance Terminal Cost

We consider a class of stochastic optimal control problems for discrete-time linear systems whose objective is the characterization of control policies that will steer the probability distribution of the terminal state of the system close to a desired Gaussian distribution. In our problem formulation, the closeness between the terminal state distribution and the desired (goal) distribution is measured in terms of the squared Wasserstein distance which is associated with a corresponding terminal cost term. We recast the stochastic optimal control problem as a finite-dimensional nonlinear program whose performance index can be expressed as the difference of two convex functions. This representation of the performance index allows us to find local minimizers of the original nonlinear program via the so-called convex-concave procedure [1] . Finally, we present non-trivial numerical simulations to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique by comparing it with sequential quadratic programming methods in terms of computation time.
Chasing the Atticus Code: Preserving Adjudication Integrity in Local Administrative Hearings

In the United States administrative law realm, there purportedly exist more than 19 thousand municipal governments, 16 thousand town or township governments; three thousand county governments, 13 thousand school districts and 35 thousand special district governments. This essay argues that these local adjudicative loci largely neglect the ethical guidance or direction of lawyers serving in government-official capacities without holding elected nor judicial positions. I dub these decision-makers “Atticus.” Citizens support the notion of external codes of professional responsibility for such persons not necessarily because they believe that “lawyering rules” are well constructed or property enforced, but because they doubt lawyers truly are self – governing in ways promoting fairness or basic cultural values. The failure of the attorney regulatory process is especially acutely felt in the local government realm. There, attorneys adjudicate through administrative hearing processes while serving as unelected and temporary. The public is intimately acquainted with those processes as direct participants. There are thousands of local governments in America, with estimates ranging to upwards of 90,000 such jurisdictions. Substantial numbers of attorneys act as hearing officers in those communities in a variety of roles. Some are independent contractors; others volunteer their services. Irrespective of compensation, I argue in this essay that, in a “non-counselor” role, Atticus is essentially ungoverned by codes of attorney professional conduct. Thus, potential for mischief abides, a circumstance worsened by the failure of many communities to impose standards of ethical behavior on these contractors or volunteers. I argue that in many instances the lone governing ethic affecting such lawyers’ behavior as they fulfill their hearing officers’ roles is their oaths of admission to practice before the bar. These oaths, sworn at the commencement of bar admission, are marginalized if not ignored altogether in discussions of appropriate lawyer professional conduct where the representation of clients is not implicated. Ultimately I recommend ways for communities and state supreme courts to implement standards appropriate for Atticus’s role and concurrently satisfy public expectations for the local adjudicative process. The paper is scheduled for publication in the Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary (2012)
Humans Judged by Machines: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.

There are opportunities but also worrisome trends as AI is applied in finance, insurance, and real estate. In these domains, persons are increasingly assessed and judged by machines. The financial technology (Fintech) landscape ranges from automation of office procedures, to new approaches for storing and transferring value, to the granting of credit. The Fintech landscape can be separated into “incrementalist Fintech” and “futurist Fintech.” Incrementalist Fintech uses data, algorithms, and software to complement professionals who perform traditional tasks of existing financial institutions. It promises financial inclusion, but this inclusion can be predatory, creepy, and subordinating. These forms of financial inclusion undermine their solvency, dignity, and political power of borrowers. Futurist Fintech’s promoters claim to be more equitable, but are likely to falter in their aspiration to substitute technology for key financial institutions. When used to circumvent or co-opt state monetary authorities, both incrementalist and futurist Fintech expose deep problems at the core of the contemporary digitization of finance.
Role-Based Deception in Enterprise Networks

Historically, enterprise network reconnaissance is an active process, often involving port scanning. However, as routers and switches become more complex, they also become more susceptible to compromise. From this vantage point, an attacker can passively identify high-value hosts such as the workstations of IT administrators, C-suite executives, and finance personnel. The goal of this paper is to develop a technique to deceive and dissuade such adversaries. We propose HoneyRoles, which uses honey connections to build metaphorical haystacks around the network traffic of client hosts belonging to high-value organizational roles. The honey connections also act as network canaries to signal network compromise, thereby dissuading the adversary from acting on information observed in network flows. We design a prototype implementation of HoneyRoles an OpenFlow SDN controller and evaluate its security using the PRISM probabilistic model checker. Our performance evaluation shows that HoneyRoles has a small effect on network request completion time, and security analysis demonstrates that once an alert is raised, HoneyRoles can quickly identify the compromised switch with high probability. In doing so, we show that role-based network deception is a promising approach for defending against adversaries in compromised network devices.
Chemoproteomic Study Uncovers HemK2/KMT9 As a New Target for NTMT1 Bisubstrate Inhibitors.

Understanding the selectivity of methyltransferase inhibitors is important to dissecting the functions of each methyltransferase target. From this perspective, we report a chemoproteomic study to profile the selectivity of a potent protein N-terminal methyltransferase 1 (NTMT1) bisubstrate inhibitor NAH-C3-GPKK (Ki, app = 7 ± 1 nM) in endogenous proteomes. First, we describe the rational design, synthesis, and biochemical characterization of a new chemical probe 6, a biotinylated analogue of NAH-C3-GPKK. Next, we systematically analyze protein networks that may selectively interact with the biotinylated probe 6 in concert with the competitor NAH-C3-GPKK. Besides NTMT1, the designated NTMT1 bisubstrate inhibitor NAH-C3-GPKK was found to also potently inhibit a methyltransferase complex HemK2-Trm112 (also known as KMT9-Trm112), highlighting the importance of systematic selectivity profiling. Furthermore, this is the first potent inhibitor for HemK2/KMT9 reported until now. Thus, our studies lay the foundation for future efforts to develop selective inhibitors for either methyltransferase.
MISTIQS: An open-source software for performing quantum dynamics simulations on quantum computers

Author(s): Powers, C; Bassman, L; Linker, TM; Nomura, KI; Gulania, S; Kalia, RK; Nakano, A; Vashishta, P | Abstract: We present MISTIQS, a Multiplatform Software for Time-dependent Quantum Simulations. MISTIQS delivers end-to-end functionality for simulating the quantum many-body dynamics of systems governed by time-dependent Heisenberg Hamiltonians across multiple quantum computing platforms. It provides high-level programming functionality for generating intermediate representations of quantum circuits which can be translated into a variety of industry-standard representations. Furthermore, it offers a selection of circuit compilation and optimization methods and facilitates execution of the quantum circuits on currently available cloud-based quantum computing backends. MISTIQS serves as an accessible and highly flexible research and education platform, allowing a broader community of scientists and students to perform quantum many-body dynamics simulations on current quantum computers.
Humble Teachers Teach Better Students for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

We propose a semi-supervised approach for contemporary object detectors following the teacher-student dual model framework. Our method 1 is featured with 1) the exponential moving averaging strategy to update the teacher from the student online, 2) using plenty of region proposals and soft pseudo-labels as the student’s training targets, and 3) a light-weighted detection-specific data ensemble for the teacher to generate more reliable pseudo-labels. Compared to the recent state-of-the-art – STAC, which uses hard labels on sparsely selected hard pseudo samples, the teacher in our model exposes richer information to the student with soft-labels on many proposals. Our model achieves COCO-style AP of 53.04% on VOC07 val set, 8.4% better than STAC, when using VOC12 as unlabeled data. On MS-COCO, it outperforms prior work when only a small percentage of data is taken as labeled. It also reaches 53.8% AP on MS-COCO test-dev with 3.1% gain over the fully supervised ResNet-152 Cascaded R-CNN, by tapping into unlabeled data of a similar size to the labeled data.
In Praise of Clausius Entropy: Reassessing the Foundations of Boltzmannian Statistical Mechanics

I will argue, pace a great many of my contemporaries, that there's something right about Boltzmann's attempt to ground the second law of thermodynamics in a suitably amended deterministic time-reversal invariant classical dynamics, and that in order to appreciate what's right about (what was at least at one time) Boltzmann's explanatory project, one has to fully apprehend the nature of microphysical causal structure, time-reversal invariance, and the relationship between Boltzmann entropy and the work of Rudolf Clausius.
Disentanglement for Audio-Visual Emotion Recognition Using Multitask Setup

Deep learning models trained on audio-visual data have been successfully used to achieve state-of-the-art performance for emotion recognition. In particular, models trained with multitask learning have shown additional performance improvements. However, such multitask models entangle information between the tasks, encoding the mutual dependencies present in label distributions in the real world data used for training. This work explores the disentanglement of multimodal signal representations for the primary task of emotion recognition and a secondary person identification task. In particular, we developed a multitask framework to extract low-dimensional embeddings that aim to capture emotion specific information, while containing minimal information related to person identity. We evaluate three different techniques for disentanglement and report results of up to 13% disentanglement while maintaining emotion recognition performance.
Sparse convex hull coverage

Abstract Given a set P of n data points and an integer k, a fundamental computational task is to find a smaller subset Q ⊆ P of only k points which approximately preserves the geometry of P. Here we consider the problem of finding the subset Q of k points which best captures the convex hull of P, where our error measure is the sum of the distances of the points in P to the convex hull of Q. We generalize the problem to allow the set R that we must select Q from to differ from P, as well as to allow more general functions of the distances of the uncovered points of P, such as other norms or weighted distance functions. We prove that approximating the convex hull in this manner in the plane can be solved by either a simple graph based or dynamic programming based algorithm in polynomial time. Complementing this result we show that in three dimensions and higher the problem is NP-hard. Moreover, we give an algorithm which in three dimensions selects O ( k log ⁡ ( n / e ) ) points to get a solution whose error is at most 1 + e times the optimal k point error. This generalizes to O ( k ⌊ d / 2 ⌋ log ⁡ ( n / e ) ) points for any constant dimension d.
Trends in bird abundance differ among protected forests but not bird guilds

Improved monitoring and associated inferential tools to efficiently identify declining bird populations, particularly of rare or sparsely distributed species, is key to informed conservation and management across large spatiotemporal regions. We assess abundance trends for 106 bird species in a network of eight forested national parks located within the northeast United States from 2006 to 2019 using a novel hierarchical model. We develop a multispecies, multiregion, removal-sampling model that shares information across species and parks to enable inference on rare species and sparsely sampled parks and to evaluate the effects of local forest structure. Trends in bird abundance over time varied widely across parks, but species showed similar trends within parks. Three parks (Acadia National Park and Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller and Morristown National Historical Parks [NHP]) decreased in bird abundance across all species, while three parks (Saratoga NHP and Roosevelt-Vanderbilt and Weir-Farm National Historic Sites) increased in abundance. Bird abundance peaked at medium levels of basal area and high levels of percent forest and forest regeneration, with percent forest having the largest effect. Variation in these effects across parks could be a result of differences in forest structural stage and diversity. By sharing information across both communities and parks, our novel hierarchical model enables uncertainty-quantified estimates of abundance across multiple geographical (i.e., network, park) and taxonomic (i.e., community, guild, species) levels over a large spatiotemporal region. We found large variation in abundance trends across parks but not across bird guilds, suggesting that local forest condition might have a broad and consistent effect on the entire bird community within a given park. Research should target the three parks with overall decreasing trends in bird abundance to further identify what specific factors are driving observed declines across the bird community. Understanding how bird communities respond to local forest structure and other stressors (e.g., pest outbreaks, climate change) is crucial for informed and lasting management.
Hot-carrier dynamics in InAs/AlAsSb multiple-quantum wells

A type-II InAs/AlAs $$_{0.16}$$ Sb $$_{0.84}$$ multiple-quantum well sample is investigated for the photoexcited carrier dynamics as a function of excitation photon energy and lattice temperature. Time-resolved measurements are performed using a near-infrared pump pulse, with photon energies near to and above the band gap, probed with a terahertz probe pulse. The transient terahertz absorption is characterized by a multi-rise, multi-decay function that captures long-lived decay times and a metastable state for an excess-photon energy of $$>100$$ meV. For sufficient excess-photon energy, excitation of the metastable state is followed by a transition to the long-lived states. Excitation dependence of the long-lived states map onto a nearly-direct band gap ( $$E{_g}$$ ) density of states with an Urbach tail below $$E{_g}$$ . As temperature increases, the long-lived decay times increase $$<E{_g}$$ , due to the increased phonon interaction of the unintentional defect states, and by phonon stabilization of the hot carriers $$>E{_g}$$ . Additionally, Auger (and/or trap-assisted Auger) scattering above the onset of the plateau may also contribute to longer hot-carrier lifetimes. Meanwhile, the initial decay component shows strong dependence on excitation energy and temperature, reflecting the complicated initial transfer of energy between valence-band and defect states, indicating methods to further prolong hot carriers for technological applications.