Phase Space Tomography of Classical and Nonclassical Vibrational States of Atoms in an Optical Lattice

Atoms trapped in optical lattice have long been a system of interest in the AMO community, and in recent years much study has been devoted to both short- and long-range coherence in this system, as well as to its possible applications to quantum information processing. Here we demonstrate for the first time complete determination of the quantum phase space distributions for an ensemble of $^{85}Rb$ atoms in such a lattice, including a negative Wigner function for atoms in an inverted state.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Optics B: Quantum and Semiclassical Optics. Special issue in connection with the 9th International Conference on Squeezed States and Uncertainty Relations, to be held in Besancon, France, on 2-6 May 200

Human preferences and risky choices

There are different views on what preferences for risks are and whether they are indicators of stable, underlying generic cognitive systems. Preferences could be conceived as an attitude towards a set of properties of context, memory and affect - a gauge of how much uncertainty one is willing to tolerate. This special issue aims to initiate a discussion on the stability of preferences for risks - as research has shown that different decision domains, response modes, and framing facilitate preference reversals. A consistent claim from behavioural decision researchers is that, contrary to the assumptions of classical economics, preferences are not stable and inherent constructs in individuals but are modified by levels of accessibility in memory, context, decision complexity, and type of psychological processing (e.g., sampling or computational “tradeoffs” in processing). For example, in a sampling-based decision-making paradigm it is argued that preferences are not essential for making risky decisions. The existing theoretical and empirical evidence reveals that human preferences are relative and unstable, undermining the predictions of normative theory. Recent theoretical accounts in psychology have expanded the debate further by offering evolutionary models of decision-making under risk. While most of the researcher has explored optimisation goals (traditionally assumed in economics), evolutionary psychology has promoted adaptation-driven processes for risky choices. Moreover, we have witnessed a renaissance of preferences as affect rather than as a construct with psycho-economical properties. Although behavioural decision research is still engaged in challenging the foundation of economic theory, at present, opinions seem less unified as to whether preferences reflect common psychological constructs

Scientific Uncertainty in Media Content: Some Reflections on This Special Issue

It was an honor to be called upon to be the anchor reviewer for this special issue of Public Understanding of Science devoted to new perspectives on media presentations of scientific uncertainty. But more than that, it was for me a pleasure and an education. It is always rewarding when, as one of the reviewers of submitted manuscripts, you get so engaged by the content and quality of the research in the articles before you that you have to remind yourself that your task is that of the critic. That happened repeatedly with all of the research articles in this issue. Rather than summarize each of the articles, which Peters and Dunwoody (2016) have done so well in their introduction, and rather than repeat all the valuable roadmaps for further research already contained in the articles, please allow me to share a handful of sometimes oblique observations inspired, directly or indirectly, by all of the articles in this special issue. The following reflections may refer to some articles more than others, but that should not signal any differences in the high-quality and valuable contributions of each

Information Based Hierarchical Brain Organization/Evolution from the Perspective of the Informational Model of Consciousness

Introduction: This article discusses the brain hierarchical organization/evolution as a consequence of the information-induced brain development, from the perspective of the Informational Model of Consciousness. Analysis: In the frame of the Informational Model of Consciousness, a detailed info-neural analysis ispresented, concerning the specific properties/functions of the informational system of the human body composed by the Center of Acquisition and Storing of Information, Center of Decision and Command, Info-Emotional Center, Maintenance Informational System, Genetic Transmission System, Info Genetic Generator and Info- Connection center, in relation with the neuro-connected brain areas, with a special attention to the Info-Connection and its specific properties. Besides a meticulous analysis of the info-connections/neuro-functions of these centers, a special attention was paid to limbic/cingulate cortex activities. Defined as a trust/confidence center, additional features are highlighted in correlation with the activity of the anterior cingulate cortex, consisting in the intervention/moderation of amygdala emotional signals, conflicting opposite YES/NO data and error elimination in the favor of the organism adaptation/survival, the intervention in the certainty/uncertainty balance to select a suitable pro-life information (antientropic effect), in moderation of pain and in the stimulation of the empathic inter-human relations/communication. Representing the correspondence between the informational subsystems and the brain area map, itis shown that the up/down integration of information by epigenetic mechanisms and the down/ up evolution are correlated. Results: The analysis of the functions of the anterior cingulate opens new gates of investigations concerning the involved intimate mechanisms at the level of cell microstructure, specifically on the compatibility with quantum assisted processes admitted by the Informational Model of Consciousness and the quantum-based models The discussion on the information integration/codification by epigenetic mechanisms shows that this process starts from the superior levels of brain conscious info-processing areas and progressively advances to the automatic/autonomic inferior levels ofthe informational system, under insistent/repetitive cues/stress conditions, pointing out an hierarchical functional/anatomical structure of the brain organization. Additional arguments are discussed, indicating thatthe down/up progressive scale representation is a suggestive illustration of the brain evolution, induced/assisted/determined by information, accelerated at humans by the antientropic functions of the Info-Connection center. Conclusions: The hierarchical organization of the brain is a consequence of the integration process of information, defining its development accordingly to the adaptation requirements for survival during successive evolution stages of the organism, information playing a determinant/key role

Controlling Risk of Web Question Answering

Web question answering (QA) has become an indispensable component in modern search systems, which can significantly improve users' search experience by providing a direct answer to users' information need. This could be achieved by applying machine reading comprehension (MRC) models over the retrieved passages to extract answers with respect to the search query. With the development of deep learning techniques, state-of-the-art MRC performances have been achieved by recent deep methods. However, existing studies on MRC seldom address the predictive uncertainty issue, i.e., how likely the prediction of an MRC model is wrong, leading to uncontrollable risks in real-world Web QA applications. In this work, we first conduct an in-depth investigation over the risk of Web QA. We then introduce a novel risk control framework, which consists of a qualify model for uncertainty estimation using the probe idea, and a decision model for selectively output. For evaluation, we introduce risk-related metrics, rather than the traditional EM and F1 in MRC, for the evaluation of risk-aware Web QA. The empirical results over both the real-world Web QA dataset and the academic MRC benchmark collection demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieva