nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
Public debt and growth: Heterogeneity and non linearity
Year: 2015

We study the long run relationship between public debt and growth in a large panel of countries. Our analysis builds on theoretical arguments and data considerations in modelling the debt growth relationship as heterogeneous across countries. We investigate the debt growth nexus adopting linear and non linear specifications, employing novel methods and diagnostics from the time series literature adapted for use in the panel. We find some support for a negative relationship between public debt and long run growth across countries, but no evidence for a similar, let alone common, debt threshold within countries.
African American Families on Autism Diagnosis and Treatment: The Influence of Culture
Venue: Journal of autism and developmental disorders
Year: 2015

Cultural factors such as health care access and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) symptom interpretations have been proposed as impacting delayed diagnosis and treatment for African American children with ASD. A qualitative study of urban African American families caring for their child with autism was conducted with 24 family members and 28 ASD professionals. Cultural caring meant families protected their child from harm including potential or actual distrustful encounters, and took action for their child and community to optimize their child's health and address the knowledge deficits of ASD within their community. Families and professionals believed cultural influences delayed families' receiving and seeking appropriate health care for the African American child with ASD affecting timely autism diagnosis and treatment.
Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI
Venue: Nature Machine Intelligence
Year: 2019

Artificial intelligence (AI) ethics is now a global topic of discussion in academic and policy circles. At least 84 public private initiatives have produced statements describing high level principles, values and other tenets to guide the ethical development, deployment and governance of AI. According to recent meta analyses, AI ethics has seemingly converged on a set of principles that closely resemble the four classic principles of medical ethics. Despite the initial credibility granted to a principled approach to AI ethics by the connection to principles in medical ethics, there are reasons to be concerned about its future impact on AI development and governance. Significant differences exist between medicine and AI development that suggest a principled approach for the latter may not enjoy success comparable to the former. Compared to medicine, AI development lacks (1) common aims and fiduciary duties, (2) professional history and norms, (3) proven methods to translate principles into practice, and (4) robust legal and professional accountability mechanisms. These differences suggest we should not yet celebrate consensus around high level principles that hide deep political and normative disagreement.AI ethics initiatives have seemingly converged on a set of principles that closely resemble the four classic principles of medical ethics. Despite this, Brent Mittelstadt highlights important differences between medical practice and AI development that suggest a principled approach may not work in the case of AI.
Online Gambling in the Midst of COVID 19: A Nexus of Mental Health Concerns, Substance Use and Financial Stress
Venue: International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction
Year: 2020

This study examined the emerging impact of COVID 19 on gambling during the first 6 weeks of emergency measures in Ontario, Canada. A cross sectional online survey of 2005 gamblers, including a sub sample of 1081 online gamblers (age 18 years and older) was administered to assess risky gambling behaviours and motivations, financial impacts from COVID 19, the influence of COVID 19 on online gambling, mental health concerns and substance use. A series of odds ratio comparisons and measures of association were carried out. Results show significant likelihood of online gambling among those classified as high risk gamblers (according to the Problem Gambling Severity Index) and those with past experience of online gambling, though migration from land based gambling was apparent. Among high risk online gamblers, the most predictive risk factors included moderate and severe anxiety and depression, reduced work hours, being influenced to gamble due to COVID 19, gambling under the influence of cannabis or alcohol and risky gambling motives tied to mental health concerns, including gambling because it helps with nervousness and depression, chasing gambling losses and seeking to earn income. This study has confirmed many of the risk associations presented in emerging COVID 19 related studies and past research on global economic crisis relating to gambling risk, mental health concerns and substance use. However, unlike many past studies, the present paper takes note of all of these elements holistically and provides incremental clarity on online gambling risk factors during the pandemic, specifically.
Multi Reservoir Echo State Network for Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell Remaining Useful Life prediction
Venue: IECON 2018 44th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society
Year: 2018

In this paper, a Multi Reservoir Echo State Network is used to estimate the Fuel Cell degradation, and its remaining useful lifespan. It proposes a methodology for predicting the fuel cell output voltage evolution with time. Echo State Network is a powerful Artificial Intelligence tool for time series predicting which main characteristics is the use of a reservoir of neurons, randomly created, instead of hidden layers such as for Artificial Neural Networks. Only the output layer is optimized by a multi linear regression, resulting in a time reduced training phase. This leads to a possible increase of the reservoir size to preserve, even improve, its accuracy. However, the bottleneck linked to the use of this tool lies in its architecture optimization. This paper proposes a way to overcome the echo state network parameters optimization process by using a Multi Reservoir Echo State Network. Then a comparison between an Echo State Network optimized algorithm and a Multi Reservoir Echo State Network for fuel cell RUL prediction is proposed. In order to have a good prediction of the FC lifetime, an innovative approach based on the Multi Reservoir Echo State Network is developed and validated using experimental data.
Bioremediation of toxic metals mercury and cesium using three types of biosorbent: bacterial exopolymer, gall nut, and oak fruit particles
Year: 2012

Cesium and mercury are two mono valent elements which can be found in toxic industrial, medical, and nuclear wastes. Their presence in the environment has deleterious effects on the ecosystem, living organisms including humans. Due to the chemical nature of these metals, bioremediation by conventional methods is more difficult to achieve compared to other metals. In this study, we used three biosorbents (oak powder, gall nut, and bacterial exopolymer) for the bioremediation of Hg and Cs. Bio polymer was produced in the GMS mineral broth. Synthetic wastes of Hg(NO3)2 and isotope Cs 133 as the single metal solutions were used. The biorefining process was carried out in glass columns, made of Pyrex, with dimensions 20 x 7/2 cm2 with a V shaped bottom. The samples were analyzed using atomic absorption. The experimental results showed that eliminated metal percent by oak powder, gall nut, and bacterial exopolymer were, respectively, of 94.8% 96% and 13.8% for Hg and 7.8% 4.4% and 69.4% for Cs. The tests revealed that Ca+ when used as flocculant, played a key role in both biosorption and bio precipitation rates. Consequently, it was concluded that the investigated biosorbents could be use as an integrated biosorption system for the refinement of mixed wastes.
Multimodal Fusion: Combining Visual and Textual Cues for Concept Detection in Video
Venue: Multimedia Data Mining and Analytics
Year: 2015

Visual concept detection is one of the most active research areas in multimedia analysis. The goal of visual concept detection is to assign to each elementary temporal segment of a video, a confidence score for each target concept (e.g. forest, ocean, sky, etc. The establishment of such associations between the video content and the concept labels is a key step toward semantics based indexing, retrieval, and summarization of videos, as well as deeper analysis (e.g. video event detection) Due to its significance for the multimedia analysis community, concept detection is the topic of international benchmarking activities such as TRECVID. While video is typically a multi modal signal composed of visual content, speech, audio, and possibly also subtitles, most research has so far focused on exploiting the visual modality. In this chapter, we introduce fusion and text analysis techniques for harnessing automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts or subtitles to improve the results of visual concept detection. Since the emphasis is on late fusion, the introduced algorithms for handling text and the fusion can be used in conjunction with standard algorithms for visual concept detection. We test our techniques on the TRECVID 2012 Semantic indexing (SIN) task dataset, which is made of more than 800 h of heterogeneous videos collected from Internet archives.
Feed supplementation with red seaweeds, Chondrus crispus and Sarcodiotheca gaudichaudii, affects performance, egg quality, and gut microbiota of layer hens.
Venue: Poultry science
Year: 2014

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of the inclusion of red seaweed supplementation to standard poultry diets on production performance, egg quality, intestinal histology, and cecal short chain fatty acids in Lohmann Brown Classic laying hens. A total of 160 birds were randomly assigned to 8 treatment groups. Control hens were fed a basal layer diet; positive control hens were fed a diet containing 2% inulin; and 6 treatment groups were fed a diet containing one of the following; 0.5, 1, or 2% Chondrus crispus (CC0.5, CC1, and CC2, respectively) and one of the same 3 levels of Sarcodiotheca gaudichaudii (SG0.5, SG1, and SG2, respectively) Dietary supplementation had no significant effect on the feed intake, BW, egg production, fecal moisture content, and blood serum profile of the birds. The feed conversion ratio per gram of egg was significantly more efficient (P 0.001) for CC2 and SG2 treatments. Moreover, SG1 supplementation increased egg yolk weight (P 0.0035) and birds with CC1 supplementation had higher egg weight (P 0.0006) The SG2 and CC2 groups had greater (P 0.05) villus height and villus surface area compared with the control birds. Seaweed supplementation increased the abundance of beneficial bacteria [e.g. Bifidobacterium longum (4 to 14 fold) Streptococcus salivarius (4 to 15 fold) and importantly reduced the prevalence of Clostridium perfringens in the gut of the chicken. Additionally, the concentrations of short chain fatty acids, including acetic acid, propionic acid, n butyric acid, and i butyric acid, were significantly higher (P 0.05) in CC and SG treatments than in the control. In conclusion, dietary supplementation using red seaweed inclusions can act as a potential prebiotic to improve performance, egg quality, and overall gut health in layer hens.
Plasmonic nanoprism enhanced quasi 2D Ruddlesden Popper layered perovskite photodetectors
Year: 2020

Compared with the three dimensional (3D) hybrid perovskite materials, the Ruddlesden Popper layered two dimensional (2D) perovskites are much more stable due to the introduction of large hydrophobic cations. And they have many important applications in optoelectronic devices. Here, we demonstrate that the performance of the quasi two dimensional (quasi 2D) perovskite photodetectors (PDs) can be improved by incorporating a layer of SiO2 coated AuAg alloyed nanoprisms (AuAg NPrisms@SiO2) Incorporation of AuAg NPrisms@SiO2 can increase the external quantum efficiency (EQE) values of the device over a broadband wavelength range. Under 532 nm laser illumination at an incident power density of 1 x 10 4 mW cm 2, the quasi 2D perovskite based PD with AuAg NPrisms@SiO2 exhibits a high EQE of 1670% at a low driving voltage of 0.3 V. Responsivity (R) and detectivity (D* reach 7.15 A W 1 and 3.2 x 1013 Jones, increased by 51.2% and 68.4% with respect to the control PD. Studies show that AuAg NPrisms@SiO2 incorporation can help to form high quality crystalline quasi 2D perovskite films, increase light absorption in the active layer, accelerate exciton dissociation at the interface and facilitate charge transport in the devices. These synergistic effects contribute to the improvement of EQE, R, D* and stability of the device after AuAg NPrisms@SiO2 doping. This work contributes to the fabrication of low cost and high performance PDs.
Moses and Magic: Notes on the Book of Exodus
Year: 2010

The scholarly world has known for some time that the book of Exodus demonstrates a rst hand knowledge of Egyptian customs and beliefs, even if somewhat tendentiously related. 1 This is especially apparent in the account of the ten plagues, which some see as representing an attack against the Egyptian pantheon, 2 and in the account of Moses' rst appearance before Pharaoh's magicians (Exod. 7:8 12) Regarding the latter, for example, not only does the word mymwfrj "magicians," derive from Egyptian h ry tp "lector priest, magician," 3 but the trick of turning a sta^ into a serpent has parallels both in Egyptian literature, in the so called "wax crocodile story," and in the repertoire of Near Eastern snake charming tricks. 4 In addition, J. Currid has demonstrated convincingly that, far from being theologically troubling, the frequent "hardening (lit. making heavy) of Pharaoh's heart," is a polemical play on the Egyptian belief that Pharaoh's heart would be weighed against the feather of truth before entering the afterlife. 5 While scholars often rightly note the theological polemic behind such allusions, namely the subordination of Egyptian magic and belief to the God of Israel, to my knowledge, no e^ort has been made to understand the magicians' tricks and their subsequent failures from the perspective of Egyptian magic. 6 Nevertheless, as I shall demonstrate, a knowledge of Egyptian magical practice greatly enhances our understanding of the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh. Therefore, in what follows I shall delineate and discuss several aspects of the Exodus account in the light of their linguistic and thematic a nities with Egyptian magic.
One Shot Learning for Deformable Medical Image Registration and Periodic Motion Tracking
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging
Year: 2020

Deformable image registration is a very important field of research in medical imaging. Recently multiple deep learning approaches were published in this area showing promising results. However, drawbacks of deep learning methods are the need for a large amount of training datasets and their inability to register unseen images different from the training datasets. One shot learning comes without the need of large training datasets and has already been proven to be applicable to 3D data. In this work we present a one shot registration approach for periodic motion tracking in 3D and 4D datasets. When applied to a 3D dataset the algorithm calculates the inverse of the registration vector field simultaneously. For registration we employed a U Net combined with a coarse to fine approach and a differential spatial transformer module. The algorithm was thoroughly tested with multiple 4D and 3D datasets publicly available. The results show that the presented approach is able to track periodic motion and to yield a competitive registration accuracy. Possible applications are the use as a stand alone algorithm for 3D and 4D motion tracking or in the beginning of studies until enough datasets for a separate training phase are available.
Arabidopsis Histone Methyltransferase SUVH5 Is a Positive Regulator of Light Mediated Seed Germination
Venue: Front. Plant Sci.
Year: 2019

Plant lifecycle starts from seed germination, which is regulated by various environmental cues and endogenous hormones. Light promotes seed germination mainly by phytochrome B (PHYB) during the initial phase of imbibition, which involves genome wide light responsive transcription changes. Recent studies indicated an involvement of multiple epigenetic factors in the control of seed germination. However, few studies have been reported about the role of a histone methyltransferase in light mediated seed germination process. Here, we identified SUVH5, a histone H3 lysine 9 methyltransferase, as a positive regulator in light mediated seed germination in Arabidopsis. Loss of function of SUVH5 leads to decreased PHYB dependent seed germination. RNA sequencing analysis displayed that SUVH5 regulates 24.6% of light responsive transcriptome in imbibed seeds, which mainly related to hormonal signaling pathways and developmental processes. Furthermore, SUVH5 represses the transcription of ABA biosynthesis and signal transduction related genes, as well as a family of DELAY OF GERMINATION (DOG) genes via dimethylation of histone H3 at lysine 9 (H3K9me2) in imbibed seeds. Taken together, our findings revealed that SUVH5 is a novel positive regulator of light mediated seed germination in Arabidopsis.
High Value Prioritized Experience Replay for Off Policy Reinforcement Learning
Venue: 2019 IEEE 31st International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI)
Year: 2019

In deep reinforcement learning, experience replay has been shown an effective solution to handle sample inefficiency. Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) uses temporal difference error (TD error) as replay priority in Deep Q Networks (DQN) so that agent can learn more effectively from important experiences. However, experiences with large TD error may appear near the edge of state space and these experiences do not help agent learn policy quickly. We present a novel technique called High Value Prioritized Experience Replay (HVPER) which designs a combination of TD error and value (reward or state action value) in replay priority. Specifically, we first propose prioritizing replay based on reward and TD error in sparse reward environment. Extendedly, we design prioritizing replay based on state action value and TD error for more ordinary environment. We design experiments in the gym environment to evaluate the proposed HVPER. First, we verify that the combination of TD error and reward improves the training speed in two problems with sparse rewards compared to DQN algorithm and PER algorithm. In addition, HVPER accelerates the network learning and achieves a better performance in two continuous space problems compared to Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm.
Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Stochastic Ensemble Value Expansion
Venue: NeurIPS
Year: 2018

Integrating model free and model based approaches in reinforcement learning has the potential to achieve the high performance of model free algorithms with low sample complexity. However, this is difficult because an imperfect dynamics model can degrade the performance of the learning algorithm, and in sufficiently complex environments, the dynamics model will almost always be imperfect. As a result, a key challenge is to combine model based approaches with model free learning in such a way that errors in the model do not degrade performance. We propose stochastic ensemble value expansion (STEVE) a novel model based technique that addresses this issue. By dynamically interpolating between model rollouts of various horizon lengths for each individual example, STEVE ensures that the model is only utilized when doing so does not introduce significant errors. Our approach outperforms model free baselines on challenging continuous control benchmarks with an order of magnitude increase in sample efficiency, and in contrast to previous model based approaches, performance does not degrade in complex environments.
A simple method to analyze the super harmonic and ultra harmonic behavior of the acoustically excited bubble oscillator.
Venue: Ultrasonics sonochemistry
Year: 2019

The bubble oscillator is a highly nonlinear system, which makes it difficult to generate a comprehensive understanding of its oscillatory behavior. One method used to investigate such complex dynamical systems is the bifurcation analysis. Numerous investigations have employed the method of bifurcation diagrams to study the effect of different control parameters on the bubble behavior. These studies, however, focused mainly on investigating the subharmonic (SH) and chaotic oscillations of the bubbles. Super harmonic (SuH) and ultra harmonic (UH) bubble oscillations remain under investigated. One reason is that the conventional method used for generating bifurcation diagrams cannot reliably identify features that are responsible for the identification of SuH and UH oscillations. Additionally, the conventional method cannot distinguish between the UHs and SHs. We introduce a simple procedure to address this shortcoming. In this method, the maxima of the bubble oscillatory response were selected and plotted alongside the traditional bifurcation points for the corresponding control parameter. Results show that depending on the control parameters the conventional method or the method of maxima may miss intricate details of the oscillations. In order to have a comprehensive knowledge on the rich dynamics of the system, the two methods should be employed side by side. Through plotting the two bifurcation structures in tandem, the oscillatory behavior of the bubble was analyzed with more detail, and stable SuH and UH bubble oscillations were investigated. Based on this new analysis, the conditions for the generation and amplification of UH and SuH regimes are discussed.
Iterative Decoding Based on Concatenated Belief Propagation for CRC Aided Polar Codes
Venue: 2018 Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference (APSIPA ASC)
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a novel iterative decoder based on concatenated belief propagation (BP) for CRC aided polar codes. Compared to the conventional BP based decoders for polar codes, soft cancellation (SCAN) decoder can generate a log likelihood ratio (LLR) of coded bit with lower computational complexity without sacrificing the detection capability. Unfortunately, its performance is not as good as that of CRC aided successive cancellation list decoder (SCLD) although SCAN decoder has advantage of hardware implementation. To compensate the performance gap, we exploit CRC structure for not only error detection but also error correction with the assistance of its error correction capability at a short code length by exchanging LLRs between SCAN decoder and BP decoder on the basis of CRC. Moreover, the sub optimal criterion for selecting a parity check matrix of CRC for BP decoder is proposed. Finally, computer simulations are conducted to confirm the validity of our proposed method. The proposed method can obtain the gain of about 0.6 dB at \mathbf{BER}=10^ 3} compared to the native SCAN decoder without requiring huge memory size as in SCLD.