Skyline Identification in Multi-Armed Bandits

We introduce a variant of the classical PAC multi-armed bandit problem. There is an ordered set of $n$ arms $A[1],\dots,A[n]$, each with some stochastic reward drawn from some unknown bounded distribution. The goal is to identify the $skyline$ of the set $A$, consisting of all arms $A[i]$ such that $A[i]$ has larger expected reward than all lower-numbered arms $A[1],\dots,A[i-1]$. We define a natural notion of an $\varepsilon$-approximate skyline and prove matching upper and lower bounds for identifying an $\varepsilon$-skyline. Specifically, we show that in order to identify an $\varepsilon$-skyline from among $n$ arms with probability $1-\delta$, $$\Theta\bigg(\frac{n}{\varepsilon^2} \cdot \min\bigg\{ \log\bigg(\frac{1}{\varepsilon \delta}\bigg), \log\bigg(\frac{n}{\delta}\bigg) \bigg\} \bigg)$$ samples are necessary and sufficient. When $\varepsilon \gg 1/n$, our results improve over the naive algorithm, which draws enough samples to approximate the expected reward of every arm; the algorithm of (Auer et al., AISTATS'16) for Pareto-optimal arm identification is likewise superseded. Our results show that the sample complexity of the skyline problem lies strictly in between that of best arm identification (Even-Dar et al., COLT'02) and that of approximating the expected reward of every arm.Comment: 18 pages, 2 Figures; an ALT'18/ISIT'18 submissio

State of the States 2005

Summarizes major state policy developments in 2004 and projects likely trends for 2005. Includes health care, education, homeland security, tax and budget policy, the same-sex marriage controversy, and profiles of governors elected in November 2004

Pivoting the player:a methodological toolkit for player character research in offline role-playing games

This thesis introduces an innovative method for the analysis of the player character (PC) in offline computer role-playing games (cRPGs). It derives from the assumption that the character constitutes the focal point of the game, around which all the other elements revolve. This underlying observation became the foundation of the Pivot Player Character Model, the framework illustrating the experience of gameplay as perceived through the PC’s eyes. Although VG characters have been scrutinised from many different perspectives, a uniform methodology has not been formed yet. This study aims to fill that methodological void by systematising the hitherto research and providing a method replicable across the cRPG genre. The proposed methodology builds upon the research of characters performed in video games, fiction, film, and drama. It has been largely inspired by Anne Ubersfeld’s semiological dramatic character research implemented in Reading Theatre I (1999). The developed theoretical model is applied to three selected cRPGs, which form an accurate methodological sample: The Witcher (CD Projekt RED 2007), Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studios 2008), and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Troika Games 2004). The choice of the game genre has been incited by the degree of attention it draws to the player character’s persona. No other genre features such a complex character development system as a computer role-playing game. <br/

Manifest Density: Decentering the Global Western Film

The Western is often seen as a uniquely American narrative form, one so deeply ingrained as to constitute a national myth. This perception persists despite its inherent shortcomings, among them its inapplicability to the many instances of filmmakers outside the United States appropriating the genre and thus undercutting this view of generic exceptionalism. As the Western has migrated across geographical boundaries, it has accrued potential significations that bring into question its direct alignment with national ideology and history. Rather than attempting to define the Western in terms of nation or myth, we should attend to how each new text reconfigures the genre. Because of the repetitive and accumulative nature of genre storytelling, each new use of a genre inevitably engages with previous uses, creating a densely intertextual network. Following Bakhtin’s theory of the utterance being comprised of prior, historically situated utterances, I argue that each new use of a generic convention carries with it the echo of past uses, which it also retroactively reframes. This phenomenon produces a transtemporal exchange of potential meanings between existing uses of a convention and each new use, through which the latter is able to alter and expand the potential readings of all prior uses. In this sense, Western films are neither exclusively about the past nor simply a reflection of contemporary contexts and concerns. Generic texts necessarily engage with their semiotic genealogies, belying the notion of genre as a static, ahistorical structure or as a series of symptomatic historical reflections subject to a linear process of evolution. Because genres are not monolithic, it is essential to attend to the peculiarities of each text in order to see how a genre’s various users employ and interpret generic elements in sometimes quite idiosyncratic ways. Analyzing a diverse range of films from Japan, Brazil and the United States, I show the need for a more expansive model of genre analysis, one that attends to the transgeographical, transtemporal, and transmedial elements of genre. I argue that the drawing of boundaries around a genre that is itself about interstitial spaces can lead to misreadings of the Western as a hegemonic formal structure rather than a dialogic relationship among generic media artifacts

BAKHTIN’S CARNIVALESQUE: A GAUGE OF DIALOGISM IN SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET CINEMA

This dissertation examines fifteen films produced in seven political eras from 1926 thru 2008 in Soviet / Post-Soviet Russia. Its aim is to determine if the cinematic presence of Bakhtin’s ten signifiers of the carnivalesque (parody, death, grotesque display, satirical humor, billingsgate, metaphor, fearlessness, madness, the mask, and the interior infinite) increase in their significance with the historical progression from a totalitarian State (e.g., USSR under Stalin) to a federal semi-residential constitutional republic (e.g., The Russian Federation under Yeltsin - Putin). In this study, the carnivalesque signifiers act as a gauge of dialogism, the presence of which is indicative of some cinematic freedom of expression. The implication being, that in totalitarian States, a progressive relaxation of censorship in cinema (and conversely, an increase in cinematic freedom of expression) is indicative of a move towards a more representative form of governance, (e.g., the collapse of the totalitarian State). The fifteen films analyzed in this study include: Battleship Potemkin (1925), End of St. Petersburg (1927), Chapaev (1934), Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946, released in 1958), Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Stalker (1979), Siberiade (1979), The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984), Repentance (1984, released in 1987), Cold Summer of 1953 (1987), Little Vera (1988), Burnt by the Sun (1994), House of Fools (2002) and Russian Ark (2002). All fifteen films were produced in the Soviet/Post-Soviet space and directed by Russian filmmakers; hence, the films portray a distinctly Russian perspective on reality. These films emphasize various carnivalesque features including the reversal of conventional hierarchies, usually promoting the disprivileged masses to the top, thus turning them into heroes at the expense of traditional power structures

It's Data All the Way Down: Exploring the Relationship Between Machine Learning and Data Management

Data is central to machine learning: models are trained with data, trained models infer their predictions over input data, and the resulting inferences are themselves data. This being the case, there should be a natural relationship between machine learning and data management techniques. Much of machine learning research, perhaps understandably, focusses strictly on algorithmic improvements, chasing ever-increasing state-of-the-art accuracy measurements on their task of choice. Likewise, data management research has been slow to incorporate recent machine learning breakthroughs, like deep learning, to classic data management tasks. In this dissertation, we will demonstrate this relationship between machine learning and data management with a series of projects that improve aspects of machine learning through data management or improve data management with the addition of machine learning. Specifically, we detail two systems that use database-style methods to improve runtime issues traditionally associated with machine learning and a third project that uses recent machine learning methods to solve data quality issues. Our system Zombie shows that novel data indexing methods can greatly reduce the time needed to evaluate the effectiveness of feature engineering, thereby reducing the time needed to train accurate machine learning models. With our system Tahoma, we show that by using particular physical representations of the images used as input into convolutional neural network classifier cascades, content can be quickly extracted to support binary predicates used in a video analytics database. And our system Grover demonstrates that universal embeddings, like those used in computer vision or natural language processing, can be created for relational data, with both column and table embeddings used to improve the performance of data integration tasks. Our work shows machine learning and data management go hand-in-hand, and taking a holistic view of both can lead to improvements in each field.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153458/1/mrander_1.pd

Beyond “Brutality”: understanding the Italian Filone’s violent excesses

“Brutality” has long been held up by critics to be one of the defining features of the Italian filoni; a body of popular genre film cycles (peplum mythological epics, horror films, giallo thrillers, poliziotteschi crime dramas, westerns and others) released during a frenzied period of film production between the late 1950s and mid 1980s. A disproportionate emphasis on scenes of often extreme violence and spectacle can be traced across all of the cycles, resulting in a habitual “weakening” of narrative and disruption of the filmic continuities fundamental to mainstream cinema. This emphasis and the uneasy pleasures that it provides have led to a distinct ghettoisation of the filoni within English-language film criticism, with historical accounts of Italian cinema ignoring the films completely, dismissing them as “trash” or portraying them as parasitic counterfeits of “authentic” Hollywood genre films. Furthermore, such accounts typically fail to address the question of what it is that makes these films so violent, limiting their descriptions to blanket terms such as “brutal”, “exploitative” and “sadistic”, in the process reaffirming the idea that the filoni are simply not worthy of further study. As a result, the suggestion that the films could provide pleasures which are distinctly different from those established by mainstream cinema remains largely unaddressed. This thesis seeks to reconcile the gap between my own personal engagement with the films and the lack of attention that has been devoted to them within critical Anglo-American discourses. Drawing on the “paracinematic” approach highlighted by Sconce (1995), I seek to demonstrate that it is precisely in the filoni’s often violent deviations from mainstream cinema’s established continuities where their most remarkable features lie, using Thompson’s (1986) concept of “cinematic excess” to illustrate the films’ overwhelming prioritisation of formal elements that exceed the limits of narrative motivation. Using narrative and close textual analysis of a representative body of filoni to identify patterns of violence, spectacle and excess across the films’ structures, I shall also illustrate the benefits of using film theories outwith their original context to shed light on non-mainstream films like the filoni, drawing in particular on the work of musical theorists Altman (1978) and Mellencamp (1977) to identify a “dual focus” in the films between scenes of narrative and more excessive violent “numbers”. Combining my analysis of specific filoni with an examination of representative mainstream films and Anglo-American genre theory, I shall demonstrate that while the regulation of cinematic excess is vital to the narrative pleasures engendered by the latter (suspense, characterisation, drama), in the filoni such pleasures are typically debunked in favour of the more immediate pleasures and curiosities provoked by viewing (and listening to) spectacular and violent acts that threaten the continuities surrounding them. As my analysis chapters will indicate, the filoni are far more productively analysed using theories derived from early cinema: by drawing on Gunning’s (1986) concept of cinematic “attractions” – non-narrative spectacles which exhibit a similar emphasis on the primacy of the image and the pleasures that it provides – I shall illustrate how a central viewing pleasure prioritised by the filoni arises from the frequent revelation of the filmic apparatus during scenes of spectacle and violence, where spatio-temporal continuities are frequently abandoned. By going beyond the blanket generalisations of “brutality” that have resulted in the filoni’s habitual marginalisation within film studies, this thesis shall exemplify a long-overdue “closer” approach to the films that seeks to highlight their distinctive features, study their structures and investigate the specific (dis)continuities and (dis)pleasures that they provide, at the same time exploring the possibilities of exactly what is meant by “violence” in cinema