Uniform Setting Research Articles

Plasp 3: Towards Effective ASP Planning

AbstractWe describe the new version of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL)-to-Answer Set Programming (ASP) translatorplasp. First, it widens the range of accepted PDDL features. Second, it contains novel planning encodings, some inspired by Satisfiability Testing (SAT) planning and others exploiting ASP features such as well-foundedness. All of them are designed for handling multivalued fluents in order to capture both PDDL as well as SAS planning formats. Third, enabled by multishot ASP solving, it offers advanced planning algorithms also borrowed from SAT planning. As a result,plaspprovides us with an ASP-based framework for studying a variety of planning techniques in a uniform setting. Finally, we demonstrate in an empirical analysis that these techniques have a significant impact on the performance of ASP planning.

Approximation algorithms for the graph balancing problem with two speeds and two job lengths

Consider a set of n jobs and m uniform parallel machines, where each job has a length \(p_j \in {\mathbb {Q}}^+\) and each machine has a speed \(s_i \in {\mathbb {Q}}^+\). The goal of the graph balancing problem with speeds is to schedule each job j non-preemptively on one of a subset \({\mathcal {M}}_j\) of at most 2 machines so that the makespan is minimized. This is a \(\textsf {NP}\)-hard special case of the makespan minimization problem on unrelated parallel machines, where for the latter a longstanding open problem is to find an approximation algorithm with approximation ratio better than 2. Our main contribution is an approximation algorithm for the graph balancing problem with two speeds and two job lengths with approximation ratio \((\sqrt{65}+7)/8 \approx 1.88278\). In addition, we consider when every \({\mathcal {M}}_j\) has no cardinality constraints, this is the restricted assignment problem in the uniform parallel machine setting. We present a simple \((2-\alpha /\beta )\)-approximation algorithm in this case when every job has one of two job lengths \(p_j \in \{\alpha , \beta \}\) where \(\alpha < \beta \).

Fast and Accurate Emissivity and Absolute Temperature Maps Measurement for Integrated Circuits

The comparison of temperatures between measurement and simulation (i.e., temperature correlation) is commonly needed in many thermal studies. However, existing methods to measure temperature maps are either inaccurate or inconvenient due to various assumptions or measurement conditions needed. It still remains a missing piece in the literature how to accurately and flexibly measure temperature maps. Toward this, we propose a practical and feasible method for emissivity map measurement. Two reference plates are utilized to obtain an emissivity map, from which real emissivity value of each pixel of the infrared thermographer is obtained. According to the experimental results herein, the deviation of the emissivity measured using this method is on the order of 0.01, consistent with the minimum resolution of all currently available infrared thermographic instruments. With the emissivity map, highly accurate temperature map is then obtained. The method can be flexibly applied to various test samples whether the emissivity of the test sample changes with the wavelength or not. Experimental results on real ICs indicate that compared with commonly used infrared thermographer with uniform emissivity setting or black coating approaches, our method can obtain significantly better temperature correlation.

Adaptive expansion order for diffusion Variational Nodal Method

The Variational Nodal Method (VNM) has been employed as the diffusion module in our PWR core analysis code Bamboo-Core within our PWR fuel management code system NECP-Bamboo. It expands the nodal volumetric flux and surface partial currents into the sums of orthogonal basis functions without using the transverse integration technique. To reduce the extra computing cost by the uniform expansion order setting, an adaptive expansion order technique has been developed in this paper. After estimating the net currents between each pair of neighboring nodes by using the Coarse-Mesh Finite-Difference (CMFD) technique, it estimates the required expansion orders in each node analytically. This technique increases the complexity of the code, but reduces the computational efforts both in computing time and memory storage by a factor of about 5 and 4, respectively. In addition, the CMFD acceleration is also employed to further improve the performance of the code. It is demonstrated by the numerical results that the CMFD acceleration technique can provide a speedup ratio of about 17.

Making pottery in the Nile Delta: ceramic provenance and technology at Naukratis, 6th–3rd centuries BC

The interdisciplinary study of Egyptian- and Greek-style pottery found in the Nile Delta aims to test and expand the potential of different scientific methods to identify regional variation and cultural traditions in ceramic fabrics from a relatively uniform geological setting. Neutron activation analysis (NAA), polarised light microscopy and SEM-EDX analyses were used to examine raw materials and technological tradition in 32 objects, including 15 previously partly analysed pieces, chosen to test the hypotheses of (a) chemical and (b) technological variation between regionally and/or culturally distinct pottery traditions. Several hundred published NAA data from other studies of Egyptian ceramics were re-assessed within this work. Our NAA results confirmed that all 28 objects analysed originated in Egypt, but could not distinguish production centres. Polarised light microscopy clarified the chaine operatoire and highlighted Greek and Egyptian technological traditions and regional variations in the production of macroscopically similar ware (e.g. Black Ware). SEM-EDX was essential in distinguishing different recipes used for slips, suggesting patterns of technological transfer and adaptation.

Pick and peak interpolation

We show how Pick interpolation and interpolation on peak interpolation sets can be combined in an abstract uniform algebra setting. In particular, as a special case, the Rudin-Carleson theorem can be combined with the classical Pick interpolation theorem on the disc.

Comorbidities, complications and mortality in people of South Asian ethnicity with type 1 diabetes compared with other ethnic groups: a systematic review

ObjectiveThe aim of this systematic review is to explore the association of South Asian (SA) ethnicity on comorbidities, microvascular and macrovascular complications and mortality compared with other ethnic groups in...

탈후견주의적 시각에서 바라본 자율주행 자동차의 일률적 프로그래밍의 한계

탈후견주의적 시각에서 바라본 자율주행 자동차의 일률적 프로그래밍의 한계

Computing the smallest eigenpairs of the graph Laplacian

The graph Laplacian, a typical representation of a network, is an important matrix that can tell us much about the network structure. In particular its eigenpairs (eigenvalues and eigenvectors) incubate precious topological information about the network at hand, including connectivity, partitioning, node distance and centrality. Real networks might be very large in number of nodes; luckily, most real networks are sparse, meaning that the number of edges (binary connections among nodes) are few with respect to the maximum number of possible edges. In this paper we experimentally compare three important algorithms for computation of a few among the smallest eigenpairs of large and sparse matrices: the Implicitly Restarted Lanczos Method, which is the current implementation in the most popular scientific computing environments (MATLAB $$\slash $$ R), the Jacobi–Davidson method, and the Deflation Accelerated Conjugate Gradient method. We implemented the algorithms in a uniform programming setting and tested them over diverse real-world networks including biological, technological, information, and social networks.

Parameter estimation of anisotropic Manning's n coefficient for advanced circulation (ADCIRC) modeling of estuarine river currents (lower St. Johns River)

A rich dataset of time- and space-varying velocity measurements for a macrotidal estuary was used in the development of a vector-based formulation of bottom roughness in the Advanced Circulation (ADCIRC) model. The updates to the parallel code of ADCIRC to include directionally based drag coefficient are briefly discussed in the paper, followed by an application of the data assimilation (nudging analysis) to the lower St. Johns River (northeastern Florida) for parameter estimation of anisotropic Manning's n coefficient. The method produced converging estimates of Manning's n values for ebb (0.0290) and flood (0.0219) when initialized with uniform and isotropic setting of 0.0200. Modeled currents, water levels and flows were improved at observation locations where data were assimilated as well as at monitoring locations where data were not assimilated, such that the method increases model skill locally and non-locally with regard to the data locations. The methodology is readily transferrable to other circulation/estuary models, given pre-developed quality mesh/grid and adequate data available for assimilation.

Public employment policies and regional unemployment differences

This paper contributes to the existing literature on public employment showing that the wage setting policy of the public sector is an important determinant of private employment and unemployment. I look at the case of geographically homogeneous wages across regions with different productivity, and show that public employment generates a crowding out effect against private employment. This effect is larger the larger is the public sector share of total employment. However, when the government pays wages according to local productivity the crowing out effect vanishes. I present a two region two sector model based on Pissarides (2000) heterogeneous search and matching model where vacancies are posted by the private and the public sector as in Quadrini and Trigari (2007), Gomes (Forthcoming) and Boeing-Reicher et al. (2016). I calibrate the model to the Italian labor market and show that the uniform wage setting policy adopted by the central government, in the presence of productivity unbalance across regions, is responsible for up to 33% of the unemployment gap between the North and South. Moreover, I show that the geographical homogeneous wage setting is responsible for a stronger and geographically highly asymmetric response of unemployment to aggregate productivity shocks. I also allow for migration from one region to the other and find that it has only a very limited mitigating role in reducing this gap. Policy experiments suggest that reducing the size of public employment reduces unemployment in lower productive regions while allowing for regional wage setting in the public sector almost eliminates the unemployment differential.

Privacy preserving data anonymization of spontaneous ADE reporting system dataset.

BackgroundTo facilitate long-term safety surveillance of marketing drugs, many spontaneously reporting systems (SRSs) of ADR events have been established world-wide. Since the data collected by SRSs contain sensitive personal health information that should be protected to prevent the identification of individuals, it procures the issue of privacy preserving data publishing (PPDP), that is, how to sanitize (anonymize) raw data before publishing. Although much work has been done on PPDP, very few studies have focused on protecting privacy of SRS data and none of the anonymization methods is favorable for SRS datasets, due to which contain some characteristics such as rare events, multiple individual records, and multi-valued sensitive attributes.MethodsWe propose a new privacy model called MS(k, θ*)-bounding for protecting published spontaneous ADE reporting data from privacy attacks. Our model has the flexibility of varying privacy thresholds, i.e., θ*, for different sensitive values and takes the characteristics of SRS data into consideration. We also propose an anonymization algorithm for sanitizing the raw data to meet the requirements specified through the proposed model. Our algorithm adopts a greedy-based clustering strategy to group the records into clusters, conforming to an innovative anonymization metric aiming to minimize the privacy risk as well as maintain the data utility for ADR detection. Empirical study was conducted using FAERS dataset from 2004Q1 to 2011Q4. We compared our model with four prevailing methods, including k-anonymity, (X, Y)-anonymity, Multi-sensitive l-diversity, and (α, k)-anonymity, evaluated via two measures, Danger Ratio (DR) and Information Loss (IL), and considered three different scenarios of threshold setting for θ*, including uniform setting, level-wise setting and frequency-based setting. We also conducted experiments to inspect the impact of anonymized data on the strengths of discovered ADR signals.ResultsWith all three different threshold settings for sensitive value, our method can successively prevent the disclosure of sensitive values (nearly all observed DRs are zeros) without sacrificing too much of data utility. With non-uniform threshold setting, level-wise or frequency-based, our MS(k, θ*)-bounding exhibits the best data utility and the least privacy risk among all the models. The experiments conducted on selected ADR signals from MedWatch show that only very small difference on signal strength (PRR or ROR) were observed. The results show that our method can effectively prevent the disclosure of patient sensitive information without sacrificing data utility for ADR signal detection.ConclusionsWe propose a new privacy model for protecting SRS data that possess some characteristics overlooked by contemporary models and an anonymization algorithm to sanitize SRS data in accordance with the proposed model. Empirical evaluation on the real SRS dataset, i.e., FAERS, shows that our method can effectively solve the privacy problem in SRS data without influencing the ADR signal strength.

Frequency estimation of sinusoids from nonuniform samples

Sinusoid signals with multiple frequencies appear in various systems and their frequencies may carry some important features. Frequency estimation from their discrete samples is one of the fundamental problems and many frequency estimators have been proposed for uniform sampling setting. In this paper, frequency estimators based on adaptive notch filtering are proposed for nonuniform sampling setting. We observe that some dynamic systems associated with adaptive notch filters can be solved in nonuniformly sampled time steps with high accuracy. This leads us to propose a digital adaptive notch filtering method to estimate frequency of a sinusoidal signal with single frequency from its nonuniform samples. The proposed method exhibits convergent and robust frequency estimation in the presence of random sampling noises, and its variance is comparable to the Cramer–Rao lower bound in the presence of additive white noise. The above method designed for single frequency estimation could track abrupt single frequency change of an input signal, but it is not applicable directly for multiple frequency estimation. Our simulations show that the proposed estimators have robust performance for sinusoidal signals with multiple distinct frequencies, and they can be used to separate two very close frequencies of an input signal in a highly noisy sampling environment.

Generalized bucketization scheme for flexible privacy settings

Bucketization is an anonymization technique for publishing sensitive data. The idea is to group records into small buckets to obscure the record-level association between sensitive information and identifying information. Compared to the traditional generalization technique, bucketization does not require a taxonomy of attribute values, so is applicable to more data sets. A drawback of previous bucketization schemes is the uniform privacy setting and uniform bucket size, which often results in a non-achievable privacy goal or excessive information loss if sensitive values have variable sensitivity.In this work, we present a flexible bucketization scheme to address these issues. In the flexible scheme, each sensitive value can have its own privacy setting and buckets of different sizes can be formed. The challenge is to determine proper bucket sizes and group sensitive values into buckets so that the privacy setting of each sensitive value can be satisfied and overall information loss is minimized. We define the bucket setting problem to formalize this requirement. We present two efficient solutions to this problem. The first solution is optimal under the assumption that two different bucket sizes are allowed, and the second solution is heuristic without this assumption. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of this generalized bucketization scheme.

Abstract P4-12-04: Clinical evaluation of multigene testing for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer

Abstract Background: Advances in DNA sequencing technology have fueled the development of multigene panels for hereditary cancer testing. While such assays are potentially both practical and affordable for routine clinical genetic testing, there remains uncertainty regarding their proper application and interpretation. Among the unanswered questions are which patients are appropriate candidates for such expanded testing; what is the likelihood that finding deleterious variants will alter risk assessment and management, and what is the prevalence of variants of unknown significance (VUS) that may create uncertainty for providers and anxiety for patients. Methods: 821 patients who met NCCN guidelines for BRCA1/2 testing for hereditary breast/ovarian cancer (HBOC) were prospectively recruited at two major academic medical centers. These patients received traditional BRCA1/2 tests as part of their clinical care and also were later tested for a panel of 29 known cancer risk genes. This panel also re-tested BRCA1/2. Both sequence changes and deletions/duplications were reported, and the panel-testing laboratory was blind to the earlier results. Panel testing results were validated by comparison with the earlier data or by independent testing using established technologies. Family history information was collected directly by genetic counselors. Results: 13.8% of the patients carried BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, with &amp;gt;99% concordance between the traditional and panel results for these two genes. 53 (7.6%) of the BRCA1/2-negative patients carried mutations in other cancer risk genes. Some of these findings confer a high risk for breast/ovarian cancer (e.g. TP53), while others (i.e. CHEK2, BRIP1, PALB2, RAD51C, CDKN2A, ATM, and NBN) confer a moderate increase in risk. 10 of these 55 patients were positive for genes involved in Lynch syndrome (MLH1, MSH2, MSH6, and PMS2), although breast and ovarian cancer are not uniformly accepted as part of this syndrome. 40% of these patients were heterozygous carriers of pathogenic variants in MUTYH, which have a less clear impact on breast/ovarian cancer, although this rate (3%) is higher than the expected carrier frequency in this population. About 60% of patients had one or more VUS in the 29 genes. The rate of VUS was highly gene dependent, with ATM, APC, and PTCH1 providing the largest number. A small but significant subset of patients did not have personal or family histories consistent with the classical presentation of their identified mutation. Nevertheless, a majority of the non-BRCA1/2 findings would have prompted consideration of a management change for the tested patient even considering the personal and family cancer history. Conclusions: Multigene panel testing for hereditary cancer risk assessment increased the yield of findings with potential clinical impact for almost 8% of patients. This is consistent with prior data from our laboratory and others. This study, carried out in a uniform clinical practice setting and with data collected directly by health care providers, provides a representative view of the benefit from such testing in an unselected patient population. Citation Format: Leif Ellisen, Allison Kurian, Stephen Lincoln, Andrea Desmond, Meredith Mills, Kristen Shannon, Michelle Gabree, Michael Anderson, Yuya Kobayashi, Federico Monzon, James Ford. Clinical evaluation of multigene testing for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh Annual CTRC-AACR San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium: 2014 Dec 9-13; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2015;75(9 Suppl):Abstract nr P4-12-04.

Apatite fission-track thermochronological constraints on the pattern of late Mesozoic–Cenozoic uplift and exhumation of the Qinling Orogen, central China

The Qinling Orogen of central China was formed by intracontinental collision between the North and South China Blocks. The orogen comprises several micro-blocks bounded by sutures and faults, and has undergone long-term intracontinental deformation since the Late Triassic. The micro-blocks include the southern margin of the North China Block (S-NCB), the Northern Qinling Belt (NQB), the Southern Qinling Belt (SQB), and the northern margin of the South China Block (N-SCB). Under a uniform tectonic setting in late Mesozoic–Cenozoic, these micro-blocks have been subjected to a range of deformation styles, as demonstrated by their structural deformation, history of magmatism, and the development of sedimentary basins. To investigate the differences among the micro-blocks and to quantify their uplift and exhumation, we obtained 45 rock samples from eight Mesozoic granites in these micro-blocks, and conducted apatite fission-track (AFT) thermochronological modeling. The results reveal that the Qinling Orogen underwent four distinct stages of rapid cooling histories during the late Mesozoic–Cenozoic, and showed variation in uplift and exhumation whereby the intracontinental deformation started in the south (the N-SCB) and propagated to the north (S-NCB). In the first stage, during the Late Jurassic–Early Cretaceous (ca. 160–120Ma), rock cooling occurred mainly in the N-SCB, attributed to the clockwise rotation and northward subduction of the South China Block beneath the Qinling Orogen. In the second stage, compression- and extension-related uplift was initiated during the late Early Cretaceous–early Late Cretaceous (ca. 120–90Ma) in the SQB, consistent with the southward subduction of the North China Block and broadly extensional deformation in the eastern China continent. In the third stage, a gentle regional-scale cooling event that occurred during the latest Cretaceous–Paleocene (ca. 90–50Ma) started in the NQB and became widespread in the Qinling Orogen. This regional-scale uplift and exhumation event was probably a response to the opposite polarity subduction beneath the Qinling Orogen combined with the effects of subduction of the Pacific Plate from the southeast. The fourth stage (Eocene–Oligocene, ca. 50–20Ma) was marked by another phase of rapid cooling in the S-NCB, the NQB, and the NW-SQB, and is interpreted as being cause by the eastward tectonic escape of Tibetan Plateau related to India–Asia collision. Furthermore, the record of variable timings and rates of cooling of these micro-blocks, together with regional structural analysis, indicates that the late Mesozoic–Cenozoic intracontinental deformation in the Qinling Orogen was characterized by a spatiotemporally variable and propagating-style uplift and exhumation of the micro-blocks, and the predominant deformation was through displacement across various boundary sutures and faults.

Optimal combinatorial batch codes based on block designs

Batch codes, introduced by Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky and Sahai, represent the distributed storage of an $$n$$ -element data set on $$m$$ servers in such a way that any batch of $$k$$ data items can be retrieved by reading at most one (or more generally, $$t$$ ) items from each server, while keeping the total storage over $$m$$ servers equal to $$N$$ . This paper considers a class of batch codes (for $$t=1$$ ), called combinatorial batch codes (CBCs), where each server stores a subset of a database. A CBC is called optimal if the total storage $$N$$ is minimal for given $$n,m$$ , and $$k$$ . A $$c$$ -uniform CBC is a combinatorial batch code where each item is stored in exactly $$c$$ servers. A $$c$$ -uniform CBC is called optimal if its parameter $$n$$ has maximum value for given $$m$$ and $$k$$ . Optimal $$c$$ -uniform CBCs have been known only for $$c\in \{2,k-1,k-2\}$$ . In this paper we present new constructions of optimal CBCs in both the uniform and general settings, for values of the parameters where tight bounds have not been established previously. In the uniform setting, we provide constructions of two new families of optimal uniform codes with $$c\sim \sqrt{k}$$ . Our constructions are based on affine planes and transversal designs.

Multipurpose machine scheduling with rejection and identical job processing times

We study a set of scheduling problems on a uniform machine setting. We focus on the case of equal processing time jobs with the additional feature of job rejection. Jobs can either be processed on ...

Public Employment Policies and Regional Unemployment Differences

This paper contributes to the existing literature on public employment showing that the wage setting policy of the public sector can be an important determinant of private employment and unemployment. I look at the case of geographically homogeneous wages across regions with different private sector productivity, and show that public employment generates a crowding out effect against private employment. This effect is larger the larger is the public sector share of total employment.I present a two region two sector model based on Pissarides (2000) heterogeneous search and matching model where vacancies are posted by the private and the public sector as in Quadrini and Trigari (2007) and Gomes (2014). I calibrate the model to the Italian labor market and show that the uniform wage setting policy adopted by the central government, in the presence of productivity unbalance across regions, is responsible for up to 40% of the unemployment gap between the North and South. Policy experiments suggest that reducing the size of public employment reduces unemployment in lower productive regions while allowing for regional wage setting in the public sector almost eliminates the unemployment differential.

Categorical Aspects of Compact Quantum Groups

We show that either of the two reasonable choices for the category of compact quantum groups is nice enough to allow for a plethora of universal constructions, all obtained “by abstract nonsense” via the adjoint functor theorem. This approach both produces new objects (such as the coproduct of a family of compact quantum groups or the compact quantum group freely generated by a locally compact quantum space) and recovers in a uniform setting constructions which have appeared in the literature, such as the quantum Bohr compactification of a locally compact semigroup. We also provide Tannakian descriptions of these universal constructions, and characterize epimorphisms and monomorphisms in the category of compact quantum groups.