Foreword: The Political Geography of Race Data in the Criminal Justice System

Several months ago, there was a heated discussion on CrimProf, the listserv for criminal law professors, about the disproportionate representation of minorities in the criminal justice system. Few participants in this online discussion contested the reality that racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans, make up a far larger percentage of those arrested and incarcerated than should be expected from their percentage of the country\u27s total population

Semantic distillation: a method for clustering objects by their contextual specificity

Techniques for data-mining, latent semantic analysis, contextual search of databases, etc. have long ago been developed by computer scientists working on information retrieval (IR). Experimental scientists, from all disciplines, having to analyse large collections of raw experimental data (astronomical, physical, biological, etc.) have developed powerful methods for their statistical analysis and for clustering, categorising, and classifying objects. Finally, physicists have developed a theory of quantum measurement, unifying the logical, algebraic, and probabilistic aspects of queries into a single formalism. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first to show that when formulated at an abstract level, problems from IR, from statistical data analysis, and from physical measurement theories are very similar and hence can profitably be cross-fertilised, and, secondly, to propose a novel method of fuzzy hierarchical clustering, termed \textit{semantic distillation} -- strongly inspired from the theory of quantum measurement --, we developed to analyse raw data coming from various types of experiments on DNA arrays. We illustrate the method by analysing DNA arrays experiments and clustering the genes of the array according to their specificity.Comment: Accepted for publication in Studies in Computational Intelligence, Springer-Verla

Toll Based Measures for Dynamical Graphs

Biological networks are one of the most studied object in computational biology. Several methods have been developed for studying qualitative properties of biological networks. Last decade had seen the improvement of molecular techniques that make quantitative analyses reachable. One of the major biological modelling goals is therefore to deal with the quantitative aspect of biological graphs. We propose a probabilistic model that suits with this quantitative aspects. Our model combines graph with several dynamical sources. It emphazises various asymptotic statistical properties that might be useful for giving biological insightsComment: 11 page

Artificial intelligence: opportunities and implications for the future of decision making

Artificial intelligence has arrived. In the online world it is already a part of everyday life, sitting invisibly behind a wide range of search engines and online commerce sites. It offers huge potential to enable more efficient and effective business and government but the use of artificial intelligence brings with it important questions about governance, accountability and ethics. Realising the full potential of artificial intelligence and avoiding possible adverse consequences requires societies to find satisfactory answers to these questions. This report sets out some possible approaches, and describes some of the ways government is already engaging with these issues

On the gap between deterministic and probabilistic joint spectral radii for discrete-time linear systems

Given a discrete-time linear switched system $\Sigma(\mathcal A)$ associated with a finite set $\mathcal A$ of matrices, we consider the measures of its asymptotic behavior given by, on the one hand, its deterministic joint spectral radius $\rho_{\mathrm d}(\mathcal A)$ and, on the other hand, its probabilistic joint spectral radii $\rho_{\mathrm p}(\nu,P,\mathcal A)$ for Markov random switching signals with transition matrix $P$ and a corresponding invariant probability $\nu$. Note that $\rho_{\mathrm d}(\mathcal A)$ is larger than or equal to $\rho_{\mathrm p}(\nu,P,\mathcal A)$ for every pair $(\nu, P)$. In this paper, we investigate the cases of equality of $\rho_{\mathrm d}(\mathcal A)$ with either a single $\rho_{\mathrm p}(\nu,P,\mathcal A)$ or with the supremum of $\rho_{\mathrm p}(\nu,P,\mathcal A)$ over $(\nu,P)$ and we aim at characterizing the sets $\mathcal A$ for which such equalities may occur