788 research outputs found

    When Deep Learning Meets Polyhedral Theory: A Survey

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    In the past decade, deep learning became the prevalent methodology for predictive modeling thanks to the remarkable accuracy of deep neural networks in tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. Meanwhile, the structure of neural networks converged back to simpler representations based on piecewise constant and piecewise linear functions such as the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU), which became the most commonly used type of activation function in neural networks. That made certain types of network structure \unicode{x2014}such as the typical fully-connected feedforward neural network\unicode{x2014} amenable to analysis through polyhedral theory and to the application of methodologies such as Linear Programming (LP) and Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) for a variety of purposes. In this paper, we survey the main topics emerging from this fast-paced area of work, which bring a fresh perspective to understanding neural networks in more detail as well as to applying linear optimization techniques to train, verify, and reduce the size of such networks

    New Cold War? A comparison of Russian and US foreign policy discourses in the time of deteriorating relations

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    This thesis examines the role that the Cold War discourse themes play in informing and structuring the American and Russian newspaper narratives in the time period of 2014-2017. It uncovers whether the portrayal of the contemporary relationship between Russia and the US in newspaper discourse can be traced back to the historical roots of Cold War struggles. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, the thesis seeks to identify the contexts interwoven in newspaper narratives examined in this study, and how their interactions with themes of the Cold War discourse work to create meanings for these newspapers’ audiences. The study does a qualitative textual analysis of newspaper discourse within the frame of two case studies: the 2014 conflict in Ukraine and the 2016–2017-time frame that is associated with the U.S. presidential election pre-election period and the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency. This thesis fills a gap in the New Cold War discourse where no thematic comparative U.S.-Russia newspaper discourse study has been done thus far. The findings indicate that particular elements of the Cold War discourse continue structuring the narratives that different Russian and American newspapers produce while reporting events occurring in the post-Cold War time, raising critical questions about the persistence of powerful historical discourses, and about the ability of media in Russia and in the US to rearticulate and regenerate discourses of global politics in the post-Cold War world

    Planeswalking: Magic: The Gathering Across Analog and Digital Platforms

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    This dissertation analyzes the relationship between Wizards of the Coast\u27s trading card game Magic: The Gathering and its digital adaptations. I used critical technocultural, ludic discourse analysis, and ludic textual analysis to examine the analog trading card game and digital adaptations. I examined an archive of paratextual media including trade magazines, developer blogs, game reviews, and player guides. I chose Magic for its long history, impact on the analog game industry, and the sheer number of adaptations that have been produced. This analysis begins by introducing a method for describing analog to digital adaptations called Adaptation Mapping. Adaptation mapping describes adaptations as a relationship between how the interface of the game is remediated and the degree to which a game represents the thematic and ludic experiences of the original. Then I examine the narrative framework that allows Magic to tell stories through both its theme and mechanics. Identifying the figure of the Planeswalker as a key component in how narrative functions in Magic, I trace the development of the planeswalker as a player analog to independent original characters under the purview of Wizards of the Coast. The adaptations provide a backdrop for this change and highlights the way that the same mechanical and algorithmic systems can characterize both player and official characters within Magics ecosystem. This shift highlights the way that marketing is approached and influences the design of the game. Finally, I examine how digital adaptations are intwined with ludic platform economy that has emerged through the 2010s. The apparatus that allows for capital to flow through the community is coopted via adaptation and remediated in ways that redirect capital back towards Wizards of the Coast as the platform owner. Analog to digital adaptation is a critical juncture in examining the impact of platformization on play and games

    Indigenous Territorial Autonomy and Self-Government in the Diverse Americas

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    Across the Americas, Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples have demanded autonomy, self-determination, and self-governance. By exerting their collective rights, they have engaged with domestic and international standards on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, implemented full-fledged mechanisms for autonomous governance, and promoted political and constitutional reform aimed at expanding understandings of multicultural citizenship and the plurinational state. Yet these achievements come in conflict with national governments’ adoption of neoliberal economic and neo-extractive policies which advance their interests over those of Indigenous communities. Available for the first time in English, Indigenous Territorial Autonomy and Self-Government in the Diverse Americas explores current and historical struggles for autonomy within ancestral territories, experiences of self-governance in operation, and presents an overview of achievements, challenges, and threats across three decades. Case studies across Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, and Canada provide a detailed discussion of autonomy and self-governance in development and in practice. Paying special attention to the role of Indigenous peoples’ organizations and activism in pursuing sociopolitical transformation, securing rights, and confronting multiple dynamics of dispossession, this book engages with current debates on Indigenous politics, relationships with national governments and economies, and the multicultural and plurinational state. This book will spark critical reflection on political experience and further exploration of the possibilities of the self-determination of peoples through territorial autonomies

    Northeastern Illinois University, Academic Catalog 2023-2024

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    https://neiudc.neiu.edu/catalogs/1064/thumbnail.jp

    MOLECULAR ANALYSIS OF EPIGENETIC MEMORY OF STRESS ESTABLISHMENT AND LONG-TERM MAINTENANCE IN A PERENNIAL WOODY PLANT

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    Plants adapt to extreme environmental conditions through physiological adaptations, which are usually transient. Recent research has suggested that environmental conditions can activate a memory of stress that can result in a primed response to subsequent stress events. While the effect of priming has been observed in many plants, the underlying mechanisms are puzzling and seldom studied. A large body of research has been developed in the last decade linking response to stress, stress priming, and memory of stress with epigenetic mechanisms. This understanding of plant epigenetics has opened the door to the application of epigenetics to crop improvement, such as the use of epigenetic breeding for the generation of more resilient crops. Although well-studied in annual and model species, research on epigenetic memory of stress in perennials is still minimal. Viticulture, a perennial form of agriculture, is highly dependent on climatic conditions, not only for yield but also for fruit quality, which is the most important factor affecting produce value at the farm gate and would benefit from more in-depth knowledge on epigenetic memory of stress. Here we present the results of an experiment conducted over two growing seasons, which constitute the first comprehensive study providing insights into the memory of stress establishment and temporal maintenance, and its potential effect on priming in a perennial crop. Gene expression and DNA methylation data were obtained from 222 plants exposed to the most common forms of abiotic stress faced by vineyards (drought, heat, and combined drought and heat). Our results indicate that the effect of the combined stress on physiology and gene expression is more severe than that of individual stresses, but not simply additive. Common genes expressed under both individual and combined treatments included heat-shock proteins, mitogen-activated kinases, and sugar-metabolizing enzymes, while phenylpropanoid biosynthesis and histone-modifying genes were unique to the combined stress treatment. We also found evidence of the establishment of memory of stress after the heat and combined stress, but not after drought, and that epigenetic chromatin modifications may play an important role during this process. Additionally, we identified genes that are differentially expressed in primed plants one year after their initial exposure to environmental insult and in the absence of recurrent stress. Moreover, primed plants showed a stronger response in gene expression to recurrent stress than plants exposed for the first time to that same stress. Finally, we explored the effect that two types of vegetative propagation may have on the maintenance of epigenetic memory of stress in primed grapevines. Briefly, although primed propagules generated using callused cuttings presented more differentially expressed genes in response to a second stress than those propagated using layering, only primed layered propagules showed differentially expressed genes in the absence of a recurrent stress, suggesting that the established stress memory is, at least partially, lost during cutting propagation. Collectively, our results constitute the first molecular evidence of long-term stress memory in grapevine and lay the foundation for the development of a comprehensive model integrating plant response to stress, the establishment of epigenetic memory of stress, and its maintenance, over time and during vegetative propagation in perennial plants

    Value Distributions of Perfect Nonlinear Functions

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    In this paper, we study the value distributions of perfect nonlinear functions, i.e., we investigate the sizes of image and preimage sets. Using purely combinatorial tools, we develop a framework that deals with perfect nonlinear functions in the most general setting, generalizing several results that were achieved under specific constraints. For the particularly interesting elementary abelian case, we derive several new strong conditions and classification results on the value distributions. Moreover, we show that most of the classical constructions of perfect nonlinear functions have very specific value distributions, in the sense that they are almost balanced. Consequently, we completely determine the possible value distributions of vectorial Boolean bent functions with output dimension at most 4. Finally, using the discrete Fourier transform, we show that in some cases value distributions can be used to determine whether a given function is perfect nonlinear, or to decide whether given perfect nonlinear functions are equivalent.Comment: 28 pages. minor revisions of the previous version. The paper is now identical to the published version, outside of formattin

    Learning Motion Skills for a Humanoid Robot

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    This thesis investigates the learning of motion skills for humanoid robots. As groundwork, a humanoid robot with integrated fall management was developed as an experimental platform. Then, two different approaches for creating motion skills were investigated. First, one that is based on Cartesian quintic splines with optimized parameters. Second, a reinforcement learning-based approach that utilizes the first approach as a reference motion to guide the learning. Both approaches were tested on the developed robot and on further simulated robots to show their generalization. A special focus was set on the locomotion skill, but a standing-up and kick skill are also discussed. Diese Dissertation beschĂ€ftigt sich mit dem Lernen von BewegungsfĂ€higkeiten fĂŒr humanoide Roboter. Als Grundlage wurde zunĂ€chst ein humanoider Roboter mit integriertem Fall Management entwickelt, welcher als Experimentalplatform dient. Dann wurden zwei verschiedene AnsĂ€tze fĂŒr die Erstellung von BewegungsfĂ€higkeiten untersucht. Zu erst einer der kartesische quintische Splines mit optimierten Parametern nutzt. Danach wurde ein Ansatz basierend auf bestĂ€rkendem Lernen untersucht, welcher den ersten Ansatz als Referenzbewegung benutzt. Beide AnsĂ€tze wurden sowohl auf der entwickelten Roboterplatform, als auch auf weiteren simulierten Robotern getestet um die Generalisierbarkeit zu zeigen. Ein besonderer Fokus wurde auf die FĂ€higkeit des Gehens gelegt, aber auch Aufsteh- und SchussfĂ€higkeiten werden diskutiert

    The co-evolution of networked terrorism and information technology

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    This thesis describes for the first time the mechanism by which high-performing terrorist networks leverage new iterations of information technology and the two interact in a mutually propulsive manner. Using process tracing as its methodology and complexity theory as its ontology, it identifies both terrorism and information technology as complex adaptive systems, a key characteristic of whose make-up is that they co-evolve in pursuit of augmented performance. It identifies this co-evolutionary mechanism as a classic information system that computes the additional scale with which the new technology imbues its terrorist partner, in other words, the force multiplier effect it enables. The thesis tests the mechanism’s theoretical application rigorously in three case studies spanning a period of more than a quarter of a century: Hezbollah and its migration from terrestrial to satellite broadcasting, Al Qaeda and its leveraging of the internet, and Islamic State and its rapid adoption of social media. It employs the NATO Allied Joint Doctrine for Intelligence Procedures estimative probability standard to link its assessment of causal inference directly to the data. Following the logic of complexity theory, it contends that a more twenty-first century interpretation of the key insight of RAND researchers in 1972 would be not that ‘terrorism evolves’ but that it co-evolves, and that co-evolution too is arguably the first logical explanation of the much-vaunted ‘symbiotic relationship’ between terrorists and the media that has been at the heart of the sub-discipline of terrorism studies for 50 years. It maintains that an understanding of terrorism based on co-evolution belatedly explains the newness of much-debated ‘new terrorism’. Looking forward, it follows the trajectory of terrorism driven by information technology and examines the degree to which the gradual symbiosis between biological and digital information, and the acknowledgment of human beings as reprogrammable information systems, is transforming the threat landscape
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