Intersectionality

An individual studying and working at a university is never seen as simply an “educator”, “administrative staff member”, or “student”, but as a complex being with a profession, function, and various identity markers like age, gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, skin colour, social background, language, religious beliefs, class, and academic line, among others. Drawing from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 definition of “intersectionality”, we engage this framework in this chapter to examine how structures create both obstacles and opportunities for individuals along the lines of racism, ableism, sexism, trans- and homo-hate, and more. Illustrated with fictive cases, the chapter highlights how identity, power relations, discrimination, and inequalities occur in varying and intersecting dimensions in university spaces. We present intersectionality as a theoretical framework to facilitate a contemplative exercise in a manner that advances a critical understanding of power axes in academia. Subsequently, in line with the tenets of the framework, we list some questions for the critical evaluation of one’s own privileges and oppressions, as well as the structures of power in institutions, to foster action based on a more detailed understanding of problems

Pedestrian wind comfort: feasibility study of criteria homogenisation

One of the aims of COST C14 action is the assessment and evaluation of pedestrian wind comfort. At present there is no general rule available that is applied across Europe. There are several criteria that have been developed and applied in different countries. These criteria are based on the definition of two independent parameters, a threshold effective wind speed and a probability of exceedence of this threshold speed. The difficulty of the criteria comparison arises from the two-dimensional character of the criteria definition. An effort is being made to compare these criteria, trying both to find commonalities and to clearly identify differences, in order to build up the basis for the next step: to try to define common criteria (perhaps with regional and seasonal variations). The first point is to define clearly the threshold effective wind speed (mean velocity definition parameters: averaging interval and reference height) and equivalence between different ways of defining the threshold effective wind speed (mean wind speed, gust equivalent mean, etc.) in comparable terms (as far as possible). It can be shown that if the wind speed at a given location is defined in terms of a probability distribution, e.g. Weibull function, a given criterion is satisfied by an infinite set of wind conditions, that is, of probability distributions. The criterion parameters and the Weibull function parameters are linked to each other, establishing a set called iso-criteria lines (the locus of the Weibull function parameters that fulfil a given criterion). The relative position of iso-criteria lines when displayed in a suitable two-dimensional plane facilitates the comparison of comfort criteria. The comparison of several wind comfort criteria, coming from several institutes is performed, showing the feasibility and limitations of the method

When the going gets tough.. : How action versus state orientation moderates the impact of situational demands on cognition, affect, and behavior

High demands are a pervasive condition in many people’s professional, academic, and social lives. High demands occur, for instance, when people have many pressing affairs simultaneously on their mind. Because high demands can make people less successful at reaching their goals, it is important to understand how people can cope effectively with high demands. The present dissertation examines coping with high demands from an action control perspective (Kuhl, 1984, 2000). Action control refers to the mental processes that are involved in the formation, maintenance, and implementation of (or disengagement from) an intention. Such processes rely on a high-level working memory system that is partly located in the prefrontal cortex. In the present dissertation, high demands refer to conditions that are characterized by sustained use of working memory. Sustained use of working memory can lead to a transient decline of its effectiveness. Because working memory effectiveness is a key function of action control, strong action control skills may be an important factor in coping with high demands. Accordingly, the present dissertation tested the hypothesis that individuals who are highly skilled at action control, or action-oriented individuals, cope more effectively with high demands than individuals who are less skilled at action control, or state-oriented individuals. In three series of studies, I experimentally induced high versus low levels of demands or I measured participants’ level of demand in their real lives. Coping effectiveness among action- versus state-oriented individuals was measured across three major psychological domains including cognition, affect, and behavior. In a first line of research (Chapter 2), action- compared to state-oriented individuals were found to be better able at cognitive shielding as reflected by the efficiency with which people can make use of their working memory capacity under high demands. Specifically, action-oriented individuals displayed more efficient use of their working memory capacity in an “operation span task” (Study 2.1) and a “postponed intention task” (Study 2.2) under high compared to low demands. Among state-oriented individuals, I found the reversed pattern such that high demands led to less efficient use of working memory than low demands. A second line of research (Chapter 3) revealed that action- oriented individuals are also better able at affective shielding as reflected by their positive affective reactions in response to subliminally primed negative affect in comparison with state-oriented individuals’ reactions (Study 3.1). In a third and final line of research, action- compared to state-oriented individuals were also found to be better able at behavioral shielding (Chapter 4) as reflected by the ability to implement a difficult intention. Specifically, in a series of “Stroop color evaluation tasks”, action-oriented individuals were found to be better able to override a strong but inappropriate response tendency (Studies 4.1 – 4.4). Across all three lines of research, improved performance among action- compared to state-oriented individuals was found only under high but not under low demanding conditions indicating that action compared to state orientation reflects better coping abilities rather than better overall mental skills across conditions. To integrate the findings, the present dissertation proposes the “updating model” of action control and coping with high demands (Chapter 5). Based on recent neuro-cognitive theories of working memory regulation (Braver & Cohen, 2000; Kuhl, 2000), the updating model suggests that high demands inhibit the neuro-cognitive pathway between working memory and behavioral output systems thereby rendering an updating of information between these two systems difficult. When updating fails, working memory utilization becomes less efficient, and intentions become less available to guide behavioral output. Furthermore, pathway inhibition is linked to decreased dopaminergic activity and reduced positive affect. Taken together, failure to update working memory is la likely reason for detrimental effects of high demands on different psychological domains including cognition, affect, and behavior. The updating model further suggests that action compared to state orientation facilitates the updating function of working memory. A likely way how action orientation restores the updating function is by upregulating positive affect (cf. Koole & Jostmann, 2004). The empirical test of this assumption provides an important task for future research on effective coping with high demands. Chapter 5 provides some ideas about how this task may be accomplished. In sum, the updating model integrates the findings of the present dissertation with contemporary theories of working memory regulation, and provides some promising perspectives for further research.Semin, G.R. [Promotor]Koole, S.L. [Copromotor

Monte Carlo Tree Search with Heuristic Evaluations using Implicit Minimax Backups

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has improved the performance of game engines in domains such as Go, Hex, and general game playing. MCTS has been shown to outperform classic alpha-beta search in games where good heuristic evaluations are difficult to obtain. In recent years, combining ideas from traditional minimax search in MCTS has been shown to be advantageous in some domains, such as Lines of Action, Amazons, and Breakthrough. In this paper, we propose a new way to use heuristic evaluations to guide the MCTS search by storing the two sources of information, estimated win rates and heuristic evaluations, separately. Rather than using the heuristic evaluations to replace the playouts, our technique backs them up implicitly during the MCTS simulations. These minimax values are then used to guide future simulations. We show that using implicit minimax backups leads to stronger play performance in Kalah, Breakthrough, and Lines of Action.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 9 tables, expanded version of paper presented at IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) 2014 conferenc

Declarative Ajax Web Applications through SQL++ on a Unified Application State

Implementing even a conceptually simple web application requires an inordinate amount of time. FORWARD addresses three problems that reduce developer productivity: (a) Impedance mismatch across the multiple languages used at different tiers of the application architecture. (b) Distributed data access across the multiple data sources of the application (SQL database, user input of the browser page, session data in the application server, etc). (c) Asynchronous, incremental modification of the pages, as performed by Ajax actions. FORWARD belongs to a novel family of web application frameworks that attack impedance mismatch by offering a single unifying language. FORWARD's language is SQL++, a minimally extended SQL. FORWARD's architecture is based on two novel cornerstones: (a) A Unified Application State (UAS), which is a virtual database over the multiple data sources. The UAS is accessed via distributed SQL++ queries, therefore resolving the distributed data access problem. (b) Declarative page specifications, which treat the data displayed by pages as rendered SQL++ page queries. The resulting pages are automatically incrementally modified by FORWARD. User input on the page becomes part of the UAS. We show that SQL++ captures the semi-structured nature of web pages and subsumes the data models of two important data sources of the UAS: SQL databases and JavaScript components. We show that simple markup is sufficient for creating Ajax displays and for modeling user input on the page as UAS data sources. Finally, we discuss the page specification syntax and semantics that are needed in order to avoid race conditions and conflicts between the user input and the automated Ajax page modifications. FORWARD has been used in the development of eight commercial and academic applications. An alpha-release web-based IDE (itself built in FORWARD) enables development in the cloud.Comment: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Database Programming Languages (DBPL 2013), August 30, 2013, Riva del Garda, Trento, Ital

Edge Dynamics from the Path Integral: Maxwell and Yang-Mills

We derive an action describing edge dynamics on interfaces for gauge theories (Maxwell and Yang-Mills) using the path integral. The canonical structure of the edge theory is deduced and the thermal partition function calculated. We test the edge action in several applications. For Maxwell in Rindler space, we recover earlier results, now embedded in a dynamical canonical framework. A second application is 2d Yang-Mills theory where the boundary action becomes just the particle-on-a-group action. Correlators of boundary-anchored Wilson lines in 2d Yang-Mills are matched with, and identified as correlators of bilocal operators in the particle-on-a-group edge model.Comment: 50 pages, v2: typos corrected and references added, matches published versio

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Double Q-learning

The popular Q-learning algorithm is known to overestimate action values under certain conditions. It was not previously known whether, in practice, such overestimations are common, whether they harm performance, and whether they can generally be prevented. In this paper, we answer all these questions affirmatively. In particular, we first show that the recent DQN algorithm, which combines Q-learning with a deep neural network, suffers from substantial overestimations in some games in the Atari 2600 domain. We then show that the idea behind the Double Q-learning algorithm, which was introduced in a tabular setting, can be generalized to work with large-scale function approximation. We propose a specific adaptation to the DQN algorithm and show that the resulting algorithm not only reduces the observed overestimations, as hypothesized, but that this also leads to much better performance on several games.Comment: AAAI 201