7,214 research outputs found
Uncertain Data in Initial Boundary Value Problems: Impact on Short and Long Time Predictions
We investigate the influence of uncertain data on solutions to initial
boundary value problems. Uncertainty in the forcing function, initial
conditions and boundary conditions are considered and we quantify their
relative influence for short and long time calculations. It is shown that
dissipative boundary conditions leading to energy bounds play a crucial role.
For short time calculations, uncertainty in the initial data dominate. As time
grows, the influence of initial data vanish exponentially fast. For longer time
calculations, the uncertainty in the forcing function and boundary data
dominate, as they grow in time. Errors due to the forcing function grows faster
(linearly in time) than the ones due to the boundary data (grows as the square
root of time). Roughly speaking, the results indicate that for short time
calculations, the initial conditions are the most important, but for longer
time calculations, focus should be on modelling efforts and boundary
conditions. Our findings have impact on predictions where similar mathematical
and numerical techniques are used for both short and long times as for example
in regional weather and climate predictions
Consideration Set Sampling to Analyze Undecided Respondents
Researchers in psychology characterize decision-making as a process of
eliminating options. While statistical modelling typically focuses on the
eventual choice, we analyze consideration sets describing, for each survey
participant, all options between which the respondent is pondering. Using a
German pre-election poll as a prototypical example, we give a proof of concept
that consideration set sampling is easy to implement and provides the basis for
an insightful structural analysis of the respondents' positions. The set-valued
observations forming the consideration sets are naturally modelled as random
sets, allowing to transfer regression modelling a
Perspective and Perception: Terrorism Then and Now in Conrad, Chesterton, Hamid and Shamsie.
The aim of this thesis is to develop a perspectival and perceptional approach to terrorism through its literary representations. The understanding of terrorism is characterised by a unidirectional perspective that prevents inclusive and varied interpretation of the intricacies of terrorism. In the aim of achieving the intention of this study, four primary texts have been selected: The Secret Agent: Simple Tale (1907), The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Home Fire (2017). The textual analysis of the novels is based on different aspects of perspective and perception that include pictorial metaphors structured around disguise, deceit and the changing insights that these suggest, as a way of mirroring the existing multidimensional aspect of terrorism. Sound as in narrative points of view, being an element that contributes to the formation of perception, is another analytical apparatus that serves to uncover the multifaceted character of terrorism. The primary texts, although not covering the period of colonial and postcolonial period, pave the way for the wider purpose of this study. They cover both representations of anarchist and contemporary violence. They are geographically diverse, which permits the exploration of the influence of geopolitics on the perception of terrorism. Moreover, the research analyses the representation of the terrorist from different contexts in the aim of revealing the different perceptions that can be associated with the choice of terrorism. This research aims at exploring the literary representation of all voices existing within terrorism but are absent from the mainstream terrorism discourse and perspective. It creates a literary grey space outside the unidirectional formulation of terrorism, that paints the images, the sounds and silence within terrorism to mimic the kaleidoscope effect of perspectives and perceptions through Conrad, Chesterton, Hamid and Shamsie
Reinforcement learning in large state action spaces
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising framework for training intelligent agents which learn to optimize long term utility by directly interacting with the environment. Creating RL methods which scale to large state-action spaces is a critical problem towards ensuring real world deployment of RL systems. However, several challenges limit the applicability of RL to large scale settings. These include difficulties with exploration, low sample efficiency, computational intractability, task constraints like decentralization and lack of guarantees about important properties like performance, generalization and robustness in potentially unseen scenarios.
This thesis is motivated towards bridging the aforementioned gap. We propose several principled algorithms and frameworks for studying and addressing the above challenges RL. The proposed methods cover a wide range of RL settings (single and multi-agent systems (MAS) with all the variations in the latter, prediction and control, model-based and model-free methods, value-based and policy-based methods). In this work we propose the first results on several different problems: e.g. tensorization of the Bellman equation which allows exponential sample efficiency gains (Chapter 4), provable suboptimality arising from structural constraints in MAS(Chapter 3), combinatorial generalization results in cooperative MAS(Chapter 5), generalization results on observation shifts(Chapter 7), learning deterministic policies in a probabilistic RL framework(Chapter 6). Our algorithms exhibit provably enhanced performance and sample efficiency along with better scalability. Additionally, we also shed light on generalization aspects of the agents under different frameworks. These properties have been been driven by the use of several advanced tools (e.g. statistical machine learning, state abstraction, variational inference, tensor theory).
In summary, the contributions in this thesis significantly advance progress towards making RL agents ready for large scale, real world applications
Trueing
Even in areas of philosophy of science that don’t involve formal treatments of truth, one’s background view of truth still centrally shapes views on other issues. I offer an informal way to think about truth as trueing, like trueing a bicycle wheel. This holist approach to truth provides a way to discuss knowledge products like models in terms of how well-trued they are to their target. Trueing emphasizes: the process by which models are brought into true; how the idealizations in models are not false but rather like spokes in appropriate tension to achieve a better-trued fit to target; and that this process is not accomplished once and done forever, but instead requires upkeep and ongoing fine-tuning. I conclude by emphasizing the social importance of being a pragmatist about truth in order to accurately answer questions about science such as, “but do we really know that…
KYT2022 Finnish Research Programme on Nuclear Waste Management 2019–2022 : Final Report
KYT2022 (Finnish Research Programme on Nuclear Waste Management 2019–2022), organised by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment, was a national research programme with the objective to ensure that the authorities have sufficient levels of nuclear expertise and preparedness that are needed for safety of nuclear waste management.
The starting point for public research programs on nuclear safety is that they create the conditions for maintaining the knowledge required for the continued safe and economic use of nuclear energy, developing new know-how and participating in international collaboration.
The content of the KYT2022 research programme was composed of nationally important research topics, which are the safety, feasibility and acceptability of nuclear waste management.
KYT2022 research programme also functioned as a discussion and information-sharing forum for the authorities, those responsible for nuclear waste management and the research organizations, which helped to make use of the limited research resources. The programme aimed to develop national research infrastructure, ensure the continuing availability of expertise, produce high-level scientific research and increase general knowledge of nuclear waste management
A Walk Down Memory Lane: Racial Injustice in Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds
Using as a stepping stone Mating Birds by the late South African novelist Lewis Nkosi, I take a trip down memory lane to grapple with the issue of justice in apartheid era South Africa. The paper argues that the scales of the judiciary under the system of institutionalized racism was heavily weighted in favour of the white minority who ruled the roost in South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Underpinned by a racist ideology that foregrounded the supposed purity of Afrikanerdom, the steamroller of the judicial system under apartheid denied any rights to South African blacks and coloured alike to the point of forefending love across the colour bar. The lead character in Mating Birds, to wit Sibiya, knows only too well the strictures of an unfair administration of justice. Sentenced to death by hanging for allegedly raping a white girl, his dogged impassioned denials fails to pack a punch as the laws of his country make it a crime for a black man to even have designs (no matter how sincere) on a white girl. Tapping into a methodology based on philosophical, sociological, psychoanalytic, psychological perspectives, the paper brings to light the multifaceted cruelty of race-spiked injustice as evidenced by Sidiya’s plight
Examples of works to practice staccato technique in clarinet instrument
Klarnetin staccato tekniğini güçlendirme aşamaları eser çalışmalarıyla uygulanmıştır. Staccato
geçişlerini hızlandıracak ritim ve nüans çalışmalarına yer verilmiştir. Çalışmanın en önemli amacı
sadece staccato çalışması değil parmak-dilin eş zamanlı uyumunun hassasiyeti üzerinde de
durulmasıdır. Staccato çalışmalarını daha verimli hale getirmek için eser çalışmasının içinde etüt
çalışmasına da yer verilmiştir. Çalışmaların üzerinde titizlikle durulması staccato çalışmasının ilham
verici etkisi ile müzikal kimliğe yeni bir boyut kazandırmıştır. Sekiz özgün eser çalışmasının her
aşaması anlatılmıştır. Her aşamanın bir sonraki performans ve tekniği güçlendirmesi esas alınmıştır.
Bu çalışmada staccato tekniğinin hangi alanlarda kullanıldığı, nasıl sonuçlar elde edildiği bilgisine
yer verilmiştir. Notaların parmak ve dil uyumu ile nasıl şekilleneceği ve nasıl bir çalışma disiplini
içinde gerçekleşeceği planlanmıştır. Kamış-nota-diyafram-parmak-dil-nüans ve disiplin
kavramlarının staccato tekniğinde ayrılmaz bir bütün olduğu saptanmıştır. Araştırmada literatür
taraması yapılarak staccato ile ilgili çalışmalar taranmıştır. Tarama sonucunda klarnet tekniğin de
kullanılan staccato eser çalışmasının az olduğu tespit edilmiştir. Metot taramasında da etüt
çalışmasının daha çok olduğu saptanmıştır. Böylelikle klarnetin staccato tekniğini hızlandırma ve
güçlendirme çalışmaları sunulmuştur. Staccato etüt çalışmaları yapılırken, araya eser çalışmasının
girmesi beyni rahatlattığı ve istekliliği daha arttırdığı gözlemlenmiştir. Staccato çalışmasını yaparken
doğru bir kamış seçimi üzerinde de durulmuştur. Staccato tekniğini doğru çalışmak için doğru bir
kamışın dil hızını arttırdığı saptanmıştır. Doğru bir kamış seçimi kamıştan rahat ses çıkmasına
bağlıdır. Kamış, dil atma gücünü vermiyorsa daha doğru bir kamış seçiminin yapılması gerekliliği
vurgulanmıştır. Staccato çalışmalarında baştan sona bir eseri yorumlamak zor olabilir. Bu açıdan
çalışma, verilen müzikal nüanslara uymanın, dil atış performansını rahatlattığını ortaya koymuştur.
Gelecek nesillere edinilen bilgi ve birikimlerin aktarılması ve geliştirici olması teşvik edilmiştir.
Çıkacak eserlerin nasıl çözüleceği, staccato tekniğinin nasıl üstesinden gelinebileceği anlatılmıştır.
Staccato tekniğinin daha kısa sürede çözüme kavuşturulması amaç edinilmiştir. Parmakların
yerlerini öğrettiğimiz kadar belleğimize de çalışmaların kaydedilmesi önemlidir. Gösterilen azmin ve
sabrın sonucu olarak ortaya çıkan yapıt başarıyı daha da yukarı seviyelere çıkaracaktır
Fake news: characterization of different individual profiles in relation to different news topics
Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementThe existence of fake news is an extremely topical concern which calls into question the veracity of the broadcasted information. Since nowadays the search and production of news is mainly done online, the costs with content production are low and the content’s reach and speed of propagation is very high. These factors facilitate the dissemination of fake news in social platforms that are not specialized means of communication, namely in online social networks. Therefore, this study aims to characterize different profiles of Portuguese individuals based on their susceptibility to several news topics. The attainment of the mentioned profiles is going to be a valuable contribution to information management and it is going to allow future definition of measures to mitigate the propagation of fake news in social platforms. To achieve this, critical literature review was done and accompanied by the creation of a survey to analyze how academic background and topic of the news pieces influence the accuracy of individuals identifying false news. This dissertation intents to understand if there is anyone immune to fake news, or if individuals can be more or less immune depending on the topic
Psychographic And Behavioral Segmentation Of Food Delivery Application Customers To Increase Intention To Use
Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceThis study presents a framework for segmenting Food Delivery Application (FDA) customers based on
psychographic and behavioral variables as an alternative to existing segmentation. Customer segments
are proposed by applying clustering methods to primary data from an electronic survey. Psychographic
and behavioral constructs are formulated as hypotheses based on existing literature, and then
evaluated as segmentation variables regarding their discriminatory power for customer segmentation.
Detected relevant variables are used in the application of clustering techniques to find adequate
boundaries within customer groupings for segmentation purposes. Characterization of customer
segments is performed and enriched with implications of findings in FDA marketing strategies. This
paper contributes to theory by providing new findings on segmentation that are relevant for an online
context. In addition, it contributes to practice by detailing implications of customer segments in an
online sales strategy, allowing marketing managers and FDA businesses to capitalize knowledge in their
conversion funnel designs
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