pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Origin Gaps and the Eternal Sunshine of the Second-Order Pendulum

The rich experiences of an intentional, goal-oriented life emerge, in an
unpredictable fashion, from the basic laws of physics. Here I argue that this
unpredictability is no mirage: there are true gaps between life and non-life,
mind and mindlessness, and even between functional societies and groups of
Hobbesian individuals. These gaps, I suggest, emerge from the mathematics of
self-reference, and the logical barriers to prediction that self-referring
systems present. Still, a mathematical truth does not imply a physical one: the
universe need not have made self-reference possible. It did, and the question
then is how. In the second half of this essay, I show how a basic move in
physics, known as renormalization, transforms the "forgetful" second-order
equations of fundamental physics into a rich, self-referential world that makes
possible the major transitions we care so much about. While the universe runs
in assembly code, the coarse-grained version runs in LISP, and it is from that
the world of aim and intention grows.Comment: FQXI Prize Essay 2017. 18 pages, including afterword on
  Ostrogradsky's Theorem and an exchange with John Bova, Dresden Craig, and
  Paul Livingsto
Atari games and Intel processors

The asynchronous nature of the state-of-the-art reinforcement learning
algorithms such as the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic algorithm, makes
them exceptionally suitable for CPU computations. However, given the fact that
deep reinforcement learning often deals with interpreting visual information, a
large part of the train and inference time is spent performing convolutions. In
this work we present our results on learning strategies in Atari games using a
Convolutional Neural Network, the Math Kernel Library and TensorFlow 0.11rc0
machine learning framework. We also analyze effects of asynchronous
computations on the convergence of reinforcement learning algorithms
Isomorphisms of $AC(\sigma)$ spaces for countable sets

It is known that the classical Banach--Stone theorem does not extend to the
class of $AC(\sigma)$ spaces of absolutely continuous functions defined on
compact subsets of the complex plane. On the other hand, if $\sigma$ is
restricted to the set of compact polygons, then all the corresponding
$AC(\sigma)$ spaces are isomorphic. In this paper we examine the case where
$\sigma$ is the spectrum of a compact operator, and show that in this case one
can obtain an infinite family of homeomorphic sets for which the corresponding
function spaces are not isomorphic.Comment: 14 pages. Revised version with slightly expanded introduction. Some
  minor typos corrected. (To appear in the Proceedings of the 28th IWOTA, in
  "Operator Theory: Advances and Applications".
Usable and Accessible Tourism Websites for Children: a Case Study of a Naturalistic Oasis

The children’s use of technology is increasing year by year and recent statistics show that children receive their first smartphone and autonomously navigate the Web when they are 10.3 years old (on average). Nevertheless, while the number of tourist packages for families with children grows, the number of websites that can be directly visited by children is small; more relevant, is the number of tourism applications developed for children. This paper discusses the design of usable and accessible websites for children, and proposes, as a case study, our experience on a dedicated section of the tourism website of a Naturalistic Oasis located close to Treviso, in Italy
Blind Symbol Rate Estimation of Faster-than-Nyquist Signals Based on Higher-Order Statistics

Both faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) and cognitive radio go towards an efficient use of spectrum in radio communications systems at the cost of an added computational complexity at the receiver side. To gain the maximum potential from these techniques, non-data-aided receivers are of interest. In this paper, we use fourth-order statistics to perform blind symbol rate estimation of FTN signals. The estimator shows good performance results for moderate system's densities beyond the Nyquist rate and for a reasonable number of received samples
Magnetic table for levitating food for entertainment

In this paper, we discuss our work towards a new dining platform that uses magnetic levitating food and magnetic utensils in an initial prototype device. The ultimate goal of the project is a complete table with dynamic levitating food, but the current implementation is a set of levitating magnets that can be encased in food hovering over static locations. We investigated different weights and shapes of 3-D printed objects to mimic food and found that the levitating magnets are strong enough to support lightweight food. This magnetic levitating table can produce a playful and entertaining dining experience by moving and rotating to stay in place. The key novelties of this paper are the integration of food with a magnetic levitating table for playful interactions and novel dining experiences
Transport out of locally broken detailed balance

Electrons move along potential or thermal gradients. In the presence of a
global gradient, applied e.g. to the two terminals of a conductor, this induces
electric charge and heat currents. They can also flow between two equilibrated
terminals (at the same voltage and temperature) if detailed balance is broken
in some part of the system. A minimal model involving two metallic islands in
series is introduced whose internal potential and temperatures can be
externally modulated. The conditions for a finite electric flow are discussed.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures. Chapter of a boo
Modelling the unfolding pathway of biomolecules: theoretical approach
  and experimental prospect

We analyse the unfolding pathway of biomolecules comprising several
independent modules in pulling experiments. In a recently proposed model, a
critical velocity $v_{c}$ has been predicted, such that for pulling speeds
$v>v_{c}$ it is the module at the pulled end that opens first, whereas for
$v<v_{c}$ it is the weakest. Here, we introduce a variant of the model that is
closer to the experimental setup, and discuss the robustness of the emergence
of the critical velocity and of its dependence on the model parameters. We also
propose a possible experiment to test the theoretical predictions of the model,
which seems feasible with state-of-art molecular engineering techniques.Comment: Accepted contribution for the Springer Book "Coupled Mathematical
  Models for Physical and Biological Nanoscale Systems and Their Applications"
  (proceedings of the BIRS CMM16 Workshop held in Banff, Canada, August 2016),
  16 pages, 6 figure
Coherent states in fermionic Fock-Krein spaces and their amplitudes

We generalize the fermionic coherent states to the case of Fock-Krein spaces,
i.e., Fock spaces with an idefinite inner product of Krein type. This allows
for their application in topological or functorial quantum field theory and
more specifically in general boundary quantum field theory. In this context we
derive a universal formula for the amplitude of a coherent state in linear
field theory on an arbitrary manifold with boundary.Comment: 20 pages, LaTeX + AMS + svmult (included), contribution to the
  proceedings of the conference "Coherent States and their Applications: A
  Contemporary Panorama" (Marseille, 2016); v2: minor corrections and added
  axioms from arXiv:1208.503
A meta-evaluation of evaluation methods for diversified search

For the evaluation of diversified search results, a number of different methods have been proposed in the literature. Prior to making use of such evaluation methods, it is important to have a good understanding of how diversity and relevance contribute to the performance metric of each method. In this paper, we use the statistical technique ANOVA to analyse and compare three representative evaluation methods for diversified search, namely alpha-nDCG, MAP-IA, and ERR-IA, on the TREC-2009 Web track dataset. It is shown that the performance scores provided by those evaluation methods can indeed reflect two crucial aspects of diversity --- richness and evenness --- as well as relevance, though to different degrees
Towards measuring content coordination in microblogs

The value of microblogging services (such as Twitter) and social networks (such as Facebook) in disseminating and discussing important events is currently under serious threat from automated or human contributors employed to distort information. While detecting coordinated attacks by their behaviour (e.g. different accounts posting the same images or links, fake profiles, etc.) has been already explored, here we look at detecting coordination in the content (words, phrases, sentences). We are proposing a metric capable of capturing the differences between organic and coordinated posts, which is based on the estimated probability of coincidentally repeating a word sequence. Our simulation results support our conjecture that only when the metric takes the context and the properties of the repeated sequence into consideration, it is capable of separating organic and coordinated content. We also demonstrate how those context-specific adjustments can be obtained using existing resources
Impact Of Content Features For Automatic Online Abuse Detection

Online communities have gained considerable importance in recent years due to
the increasing number of people connected to the Internet. Moderating user
content in online communities is mainly performed manually, and reducing the
workload through automatic methods is of great financial interest for community
maintainers. Often, the industry uses basic approaches such as bad words
filtering and regular expression matching to assist the moderators. In this
article, we consider the task of automatically determining if a message is
abusive. This task is complex since messages are written in a non-standardized
way, including spelling errors, abbreviations, community-specific codes...
First, we evaluate the system that we propose using standard features of online
messages. Then, we evaluate the impact of the addition of pre-processing
strategies, as well as original specific features developed for the community
of an online in-browser strategy game. We finally propose to analyze the
usefulness of this wide range of features using feature selection. This work
can lead to two possible applications: 1) automatically flag potentially
abusive messages to draw the moderator's attention on a narrow subset of
messages ; and 2) fully automate the moderation process by deciding whether a
message is abusive without any human intervention
Coexisting graphical and structured textual representations of requirements : insights and suggestions

[Context & motivation] Many requirements documents contain graphical and textual representations of requirements side-byside. These representations may be complementary but oftentimes they are strongly related or even express the same content. [Question/problem] Since both representation may be used on their own, we want to nd out why and how a combination of them is used in practice. In consequence, we want to know what advantages such an approach provides and whether challenges arise from the coexistence. [Principal ideas/results] To get more insights into how graphical and textual representations are used in requirements documents, we conducted eight interviews with stakeholders at Daimler. These stakeholders work on a system that is speci ed by tabular textual descriptions and UML activity diagrams. The results indicate that the di erent representations are associated with di erent activities. [Contribution] Our study provides insights into a possible implementation of a speci cation approach using mixed representations of requirements. We use these insights to make suggestions on how to apply the approach in a way that pro ts from its advantages and mitigates potential weaknesses. While we draw our conclusions from a single use case, some aspects might be applicable in general
Using tools to assist identification of non-requirements in requirements specifications : A controlled experiment

[Context and motivation] In many companies, textual fragments in specification documents are categorized into requirements and non-requirements. This categorization is important for determining liability, deriving test cases, and many more decisions. In practice, this categorization is usually performed manually, which makes it labor-intensive and error-prone.
[Question/Problem] We have developed a tool to assist users in this task by providing warnings based on classification using neural networks. However, we currently do not know whether using the tool actually helps increasing the classification quality compared to not using the tool.
[Principal idea/results] Therefore, we performed a controlled experiment with two groups of students. One group used the tool for a given task, whereas the other did not. By comparing the performance of both groups, we can assess in which scenarios the application of our tool is beneficial.
[Contribution] The results show that the application of an automated classification approach may provide benefits, given that the accuracy is high enough
Measuring social spam and the effect of bots on information diffusion in
  social media

Bots have been playing a crucial role in online platform ecosystems, as
efficient and automatic tools to generate content and diffuse information to
the social media human population. In this chapter, we will discuss the role of
social bots in content spreading dynamics in social media. In particular, we
will first investigate some differences between diffusion dynamics of content
generated by bots, as opposed to humans, in the context of political
communication, then study the characteristics of bots behind the diffusion
dynamics of social media spam campaigns.Comment: Chapter of the book "Spreading Dynamics in Social Systems" edited by
  Y.Y. Ahn and Sune Lehman
Blind Speech Deconvolution via Pretrained Polynomial Dictionary and Sparse Representation. 18th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia, Harbin, China, September 28-29, 2017

Blind speech deconvolution aims to estimate both the source\ud
speech and acoustic channel from the convolutive reverberant speech.\ud
The problem is ill-posed and underdetermined, which often requires prior knowledge for the estimation of the source and channel. In this paper, we propose a blind speech deconvolution method via a pretrained polynomial dictionary and sparse representation. A polynomial dictionary\ud
learning technique is employed to learn the dictionary from room impulse responses, which is then used as prior information to estimate the\ud
source and the acoustic impulse responses via an alternating optimization strategy. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the performance\ud
of the proposed method
Joint L1 − L2 Regularisation for Blind\ud
Speech Deconvolution. 18th Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia, Harbin, China, September 28-29, 2017

The purpose of blind speech deconvolution is to recover both\ud
the original speech source and the room impulse response (RIR) from the\ud
observed reverberant speech. This can be beneficial for speech intelligibility and speech perception. However, the problem is ill-posed, which often\ud
requires additional knowledge to solve. In order to address this problem,\ud
prior informations (such as the sparseness of signal or acoustic channel)\ud
are often exploited.  In this paper, we propose a joint\ud
L1 − L2 regularisation based blind speech deconvolution method for a\ud
single-input and single-output (SISO) acoustic system with a high level\ud
of reverberation, where both the sparsity and density of the room impulse\ud
responses (RIR) are considered, by imposing an L1 and L2 norm constraint\ud
on their early and late part respectively. By employing an alternating\ud
strategy, both the source signal and early part in the RIR can be\ud
well reconstructed while the late part of the RIR can be suppressed
Combinatorics of Beacon-based Routing in Three Dimensions

A beacon is a point-like object which can be enabled to exert a magnetic pull
on other point-like objects in space. Those objects then move towards the
beacon in a greedy fashion until they are either stuck at an obstacle or reach
the beacon's location. Beacons placed inside polyhedra can be used to route
point-like objects from one location to another. A second use case is to cover
a polyhedron such that every point-like object at an arbitrary location in the
polyhedron can reach at least one of the beacons once the latter is activated.
  The notion of beacon-based routing and guarding was introduced by Biro et al.
[FWCG'11] in 2011 and covered in detail by Biro in his PhD thesis [SUNY-SB'13],
which focuses on the two-dimensional case.
  We extend Biro's result to three dimensions by considering beacon routing in
polyhedra. We show that $\lfloor\frac{m+1}{3}\rfloor$ beacons are always
sufficient and sometimes necessary to route between any pair of points in a
given polyhedron $P$, where $m$ is the number of tetrahedra in a tetrahedral
decomposition of $P$. This is one of the first results that show that beacon
routing is also possible in three dimensions.Comment: submitted to "LATIN 2018: Theoretical Informatics
Mutants and Residents with Different Connection Graphs in the Moran
  Process

The Moran process, as studied by Lieberman et al. [L05], is a stochastic
process modeling the spread of genetic mutations in populations. In this
process, agents of a two-type population (i.e. mutants and residents) are
associated with the vertices of a graph. Initially, only one vertex chosen
u.a.r. is a mutant, with fitness $r > 0$, while all other individuals are
residents, with fitness $1$. In every step, an individual is chosen with
probability proportional to its fitness, and its state (mutant or resident) is
passed on to a neighbor which is chosen u.a.r. In this paper, we introduce and
study for the first time a generalization of the model of [L05] by assuming
that different types of individuals perceive the population through different
graphs, namely $G_R(V,E_R)$ for residents and $G_M(V,E_M)$ for mutants. In this
model, we study the fixation probability, i.e. the probability that eventually
only mutants remain in the population, for various pairs of graphs.
  First, we transfer known results from the original single-graph model of
[L05] to our 2-graph model. Among them, we provide a generalization of the
Isothermal Theorem of [L05], that gives sufficient conditions for a pair of
graphs to have the same fixation probability as a pair of cliques.
  Next, we give a 2-player strategic game view of the process where player
payoffs correspond to fixation and/or extinction probabilities. In this
setting, we attempt to identify best responses for each player and give
evidence that the clique is the most beneficial graph for both players.
  Finally, we examine the possibility of efficient approximation of the
fixation probability. We show that the fixation probability in the general case
of an arbitrary pair of graphs cannot be approximated via a method similar to
[D14]. Nevertheless, we provide a FPRAS for the special case where the mutant
graph is complete.Comment: This work can be found at the proceedings of LATIN 201
Trust and the Governance of Higher Education: The Introduction of Chancellor System in Hungarian Higher Education

Trust plays a vital role in the cooperation of social actors. While researching trust becomes important in public management, the impact of trust on higher education policy and management has drawn less attention. This chapter analyses the introduction of the chancellor system in Hungarian higher education from the perspective of trust. In this new governance model, chancellors, who are appointed by the government, became responsible for the administration and budgets of higher institutions (HEIs), while rectors kept their prerogatives only on academic issues. The success of an institution now depends on the cooperation of its two interdependent leaders. Trust plays an especially critical role in such leadership constellation. The study is based on empirical data collected through two surveys conducted in 2015 and 2016 among academic leaders of Hungarian higher education institutions and uses Hurley’s decision-to-trust-model (Hurley 2012) as an analytic framework
Toward the Online Visualisation of Algorithm Performance for Parameter Selection

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer Verlag via the DOI in this recordA visualisation method is presented that is intended to assist evolutionary algorithm users with the parametrisation of their algorithms. The visualisation method presents the convergence and diversity properties such that different parametrisations can be easily compared, and poor performing parameter sets can be easily identified and discarded. The efficacy of the visualisation is presented using a set of benchmark optimisation problems from the literature, as well as a benchmark water distribution network design problem. Results show that it is possible to observe the different performance caused by different parametrisations. Future work discusses the potential of this visualisation within an online tool that will enable a user to discard poor parametrisations as they execute to free up resources for better ones
On the educational curriculum in finance and technology

Recent technological developments have enabled a wide array of new applications in financial markets, e.g. big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, peer-to-peer lending, crowdfunding, and robo-advising, inter alia. While traditionally comprising of computer programs and other technology used to support or enable banking and financial services, the new fintech sector is often seen as enabling transformation of the financial industry. A more moderate and critical view suggests that for the full transformative potential of fintech to be enabled, there is a need for an updated educational curriculum that balances knowledge and understanding of finance and technology. A curriculum that provides a skill portfolio in the two core components and complements them with applied knowledge can support the enabling forces which will render fintech as a true opportunity for the financial service industry and for society as a whole. We attempt a scholarship inquiry into the educational curriculum in finance and technology, aiming to inform this modern educational agenda. We review skills shortages, as identified by firms and experts, and examine the state-of-the art by some of the first educational programs in fintech
RoboJam: A Musical Mixture Density Network for Collaborative Touchscreen
  Interaction

RoboJam is a machine-learning system for generating music that assists users
of a touchscreen music app by performing responses to their short
improvisations. This system uses a recurrent artificial neural network to
generate sequences of touchscreen interactions and absolute timings, rather
than high-level musical notes. To accomplish this, RoboJam's network uses a
mixture density layer to predict appropriate touch interaction locations in
space and time. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of
RoboJam's network and how it has been integrated into a touchscreen music app.
A preliminary evaluation analyses the system in terms of training, musical
generation and user interaction