11,991 research outputs found

    Offline and Online Models for Learning Pairwise Relations in Data

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    Pairwise relations between data points are essential for numerous machine learning algorithms. Many representation learning methods consider pairwise relations to identify the latent features and patterns in the data. This thesis, investigates learning of pairwise relations from two different perspectives: offline learning and online learning.The first part of the thesis focuses on offline learning by starting with an investigation of the performance modeling of a synchronization method in concurrent programming using a Markov chain whose state transition matrix models pairwise relations between involved cores in a computer process.Then the thesis focuses on a particular pairwise distance measure, the minimax distance, and explores memory-efficient approaches to computing this distance by proposing a hierarchical representation of the data with a linear memory requirement with respect to the number of data points, from which the exact pairwise minimax distances can be derived in a memory-efficient manner. Then, a memory-efficient sampling method is proposed that follows the aforementioned hierarchical representation of the data and samples the data points in a way that the minimax distances between all data points are maximally preserved. Finally, the thesis proposes a practical non-parametric clustering of vehicle motion trajectories to annotate traffic scenarios based on transitive relations between trajectories in an embedded space.The second part of the thesis takes an online learning perspective, and starts by presenting an online learning method for identifying bottlenecks in a road network by extracting the minimax path, where bottlenecks are considered as road segments with the highest cost, e.g., in the sense of travel time. Inspired by real-world road networks, the thesis assumes a stochastic traffic environment in which the road-specific probability distribution of travel time is unknown. Therefore, it needs to learn the parameters of the probability distribution through observations by modeling the bottleneck identification task as a combinatorial semi-bandit problem. The proposed approach takes into account the prior knowledge and follows a Bayesian approach to update the parameters. Moreover, it develops a combinatorial variant of Thompson Sampling and derives an upper bound for the corresponding Bayesian regret. Furthermore, the thesis proposes an approximate algorithm to address the respective computational intractability issue.Finally, the thesis considers contextual information of road network segments by extending the proposed model to a contextual combinatorial semi-bandit framework and investigates and develops various algorithms for this contextual combinatorial setting

    Corporate Social Responsibility: the institutionalization of ESG

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    Understanding the impact of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on firm performance as it relates to industries reliant on technological innovation is a complex and perpetually evolving challenge. To thoroughly investigate this topic, this dissertation will adopt an economics-based structure to address three primary hypotheses. This structure allows for each hypothesis to essentially be a standalone empirical paper, unified by an overall analysis of the nature of impact that ESG has on firm performance. The first hypothesis explores the evolution of CSR to the modern quantified iteration of ESG has led to the institutionalization and standardization of the CSR concept. The second hypothesis fills gaps in existing literature testing the relationship between firm performance and ESG by finding that the relationship is significantly positive in long-term, strategic metrics (ROA and ROIC) and that there is no correlation in short-term metrics (ROE and ROS). Finally, the third hypothesis states that if a firm has a long-term strategic ESG plan, as proxied by the publication of CSR reports, then it is more resilience to damage from controversies. This is supported by the finding that pro-ESG firms consistently fared better than their counterparts in both financial and ESG performance, even in the event of a controversy. However, firms with consistent reporting are also held to a higher standard than their nonreporting peers, suggesting a higher risk and higher reward dynamic. These findings support the theory of good management, in that long-term strategic planning is both immediately economically beneficial and serves as a means of risk management and social impact mitigation. Overall, this contributes to the literature by fillings gaps in the nature of impact that ESG has on firm performance, particularly from a management perspective

    Redefining quality interpersonal communication and communication activities in marriage from divorcees’ perspectives

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    Quality interpersonal communication is essential in the development and maintenance of any relationship, including marriage. As society adapts to new avenues of communication, married couples often underestimate the relevance of interpersonal communication in their relationship due to their lack of understanding of quality interpersonal communication. Therefore, this study investigated the conceptualisation of quality interpersonal communication through the lens of Relational Dialectic Theory and communication activities in marriage from the perspectives of divorcees. This study also explored the antecedents of poor-quality interpersonal communication and its repercussions on married couples. The present study also extended Knapp’s Relational Development Model by incorporating communication technology as a medium of communication. In-depth interviews were conducted on 20 divorcees from different states in Malaysia, chosen through a purposive sampling technique. The gathered data was then evaluated and combined in a thematic data analysis using the NVivo 12 software. This study discovers that the definitions of quality interpersonal communication are divided into seven (7) categories, with communication skills, intimacy, and characters identified as the top three significant traits. Results of this study also indicate that spouses use various medium of communication based on their circumstances but prefer face-to-face communication. However, communication occurrences between spouses are low and mostly negative, with the majority of them mainly involving households and children. The other antecedents of poor-quality interpersonal communication are communication skills, attitudes, third-party involvement, and emotional condition. The current study concludes that emotional condition is one of the protuberant effects of poor-quality interpersonal communication. All in all, the current study provides a new paradigm in Knapp’s Relational Development Model through the incorporation of the effects of poor-quality interpersonal communication into the deterioration stages of the model

    DeFeeNet: Consecutive 3D Human Motion Prediction with Deviation Feedback

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    Let us rethink the real-world scenarios that require human motion prediction techniques, such as human-robot collaboration. Current works simplify the task of predicting human motions into a one-off process of forecasting a short future sequence (usually no longer than 1 second) based on a historical observed one. However, such simplification may fail to meet practical needs due to the neglect of the fact that motion prediction in real applications is not an isolated ``observe then predict'' unit, but a consecutive process composed of many rounds of such unit, semi-overlapped along the entire sequence. As time goes on, the predicted part of previous round has its corresponding ground truth observable in the new round, but their deviation in-between is neither exploited nor able to be captured by existing isolated learning fashion. In this paper, we propose DeFeeNet, a simple yet effective network that can be added on existing one-off prediction models to realize deviation perception and feedback when applied to consecutive motion prediction task. At each prediction round, the deviation generated by previous unit is first encoded by our DeFeeNet, and then incorporated into the existing predictor to enable a deviation-aware prediction manner, which, for the first time, allows for information transmit across adjacent prediction units. We design two versions of DeFeeNet as MLP-based and GRU-based, respectively. On Human3.6M and more complicated BABEL, experimental results indicate that our proposed network improves consecutive human motion prediction performance regardless of the basic model.Comment: accepted by CVPR202

    Interactive System-wise Anomaly Detection

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    Anomaly detection, where data instances are discovered containing feature patterns different from the majority, plays a fundamental role in various applications. However, it is challenging for existing methods to handle the scenarios where the instances are systems whose characteristics are not readily observed as data. Appropriate interactions are needed to interact with the systems and identify those with abnormal responses. Detecting system-wise anomalies is a challenging task due to several reasons including: how to formally define the system-wise anomaly detection problem; how to find the effective activation signal for interacting with systems to progressively collect the data and learn the detector; how to guarantee stable training in such a non-stationary scenario with real-time interactions? To address the challenges, we propose InterSAD (Interactive System-wise Anomaly Detection). Specifically, first, we adopt Markov decision process to model the interactive systems, and define anomalous systems as anomalous transition and anomalous reward systems. Then, we develop an end-to-end approach which includes an encoder-decoder module that learns system embeddings, and a policy network to generate effective activation for separating embeddings of normal and anomaly systems. Finally, we design a training method to stabilize the learning process, which includes a replay buffer to store historical interaction data and allow them to be re-sampled. Experiments on two benchmark environments, including identifying the anomalous robotic systems and detecting user data poisoning in recommendation models, demonstrate the superiority of InterSAD compared with state-of-the-art baselines methods

    The place where curses are manufactured : four poets of the Vietnam War

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    The Vietnam War was unique among American wars. To pinpoint its uniqueness, it was necessary to look for a non-American voice that would enable me to articulate its distinctiveness and explore the American character as observed by an Asian. Takeshi Kaiko proved to be most helpful. From his novel, Into a Black Sun, I was able to establish a working pair of 'bookends' from which to approach the poetry of Walter McDonald, Bruce Weigl, Basil T. Paquet and Steve Mason. Chapter One is devoted to those seemingly mismatched 'bookends,' Walt Whitman and General William C. Westmoreland, and their respective anthropocentric and technocentric visions of progress and the peculiarly American concept of the "open road" as they manifest themselves in Vietnam. In Chapter, Two, I analyze the war poems of Walter McDonald. As a pilot, writing primarily about flying, his poetry manifests General Westmoreland's technocentric vision of the 'road' as determined by and manifest through technology. Chapter Three focuses on the poems of Bruce Weigl. The poems analyzed portray the literal and metaphorical descent from the technocentric, 'numbed' distance of aerial warfare to the world of ground warfare, and the initiation of a 'fucking new guy,' who discovers the contours of the self's interior through a set of experiences that lead from from aerial insertion into the jungle to the degradation of burning human feces. Chapter Four, devoted to the thirteen poems of Basil T. Paquet, focuses on the continuation of the descent begun in Chapter Two. In his capacity as a medic, Paquet's entire body of poems details his quotidian tasks which entail tending the maimed, the mortally wounded and the dead. The final chapter deals with Steve Mason's JohnnY's Song, and his depiction of the plight of Vietnam veterans back in "The World" who are still trapped inside the interior landscape of their individual "ghettoes" of the soul created by their war-time experiences

    Supernatural crossing in Republican Chinese fiction, 1920s–1940s

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    This dissertation studies supernatural narratives in Chinese fiction from the mid-1920s to the 1940s. The literary works present phenomena or elements that are or appear to be supernatural, many of which remain marginal or overlooked in Sinophone and Anglophone academia. These sources are situated in the May Fourth/New Culture ideological context, where supernatural narratives had to make way for the progressive intellectuals’ literary realism and their allegorical application of supernatural motifs. In the face of realism, supernatural narratives paled, dismissed as impractical fantasies that distract one from facing and tackling real life. Nevertheless, I argue that the supernatural narratives do not probe into another mystical dimension that might co-exist alongside the empirical world. Rather, they imagine various cases of the characters’ crossing to voice their discontent with contemporary society or to reflect on the notion of reality. “Crossing” relates to characters’ acts or processes of trespassing the boundary that separates the supernatural from the conventional natural world, thus entailing encounters and interaction between the natural and the supernatural. The dissertation examines how crossing, as a narrative device, disturbs accustomed and mundane situations, releases hidden tensions, and discloses repressed truths in Republican fiction. There are five types of crossing in the supernatural narratives. Type 1 is the crossing into “haunted” houses. This includes (intangible) human agency crossing into domestic spaces and revealing secrets and truths concealed by the scary, feigned ‘haunting’, thus exposing the hidden evil and the other house occupiers’ silenced, suffocated state. Type 2 is men crossing into female ghosts’ apparitional residences. The female ghosts allude to heart-breaking, traumatic experiences in socio-historical reality, evoking sympathetic concern for suffering individuals who are caught in social upheavals. Type 3 is the crossing from reality into the characters’ delusional/hallucinatory realities. While they physically remain in the empirical world, the characters’ abnormal perceptions lead them to exclusive, delirious, and quasi-supernatural experiences of reality. Their crossings blur the concrete boundaries between the real and the unreal on the mental level: their abnormal perceptions construct a significant, meaningful reality for them, which may be as real as the commonly regarded objective reality. Type 4 is the crossing into the netherworld modelled on the real world in the authors’ observation and bears a spectrum of satirised objects of the Republican society. The last type is immortal visitors crossing into the human world. This type satirises humanity’s vices and destructive potential. The primary sources demonstrate their writers’ witty passion to play with super--natural notions and imagery (such as ghosts, demons, and immortals) and stitch them into vivid, engaging scenes using techniques such as the gothic, the grotesque, and the satirical, in order to evoke sentiments such as terror, horror, disgust, dis--orientation, or awe, all in service of their insights into realist issues. The works also creatively tailor traditional Chinese modes and motifs, which exemplifies the revival of Republican interest in traditional cultural heritage. The supernatural narratives may amaze or disturb the reader at first, but what is more shocking, unpleasantly nudging, or thought-provoking is the problematic society and people’s lives that the supernatural (misunderstandings) eventually reveals. They present a more compre--hensive treatment of reality than Republican literature with its revolutionary consciousness surrounding class struggle. The critical perspectives of the supernatural narratives include domestic space, unacknowledged history and marginal individuals, abnormal mentality, and pervasive weaknesses in humanity. The crossing and supernatural narratives function as a means of better understanding the lived reality. This study gathers diverse primary sources written by Republican writers from various educational and political backgrounds and interprets them from a rare perspective, thus filling a research gap. It promotes a fuller view of supernatural narratives in twentieth-century Chinese literature. In terms of reflecting the social and personal reality of the Republican era, the supernatural narratives supplement the realist fiction of the time

    A Framework to Support Continuous Range Queries over Multi-Attribute Trajectories

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    Annals [...].

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    Pedometrics: innovation in tropics; Legacy data: how turn it useful?; Advances in soil sensing; Pedometric guidelines to systematic soil surveys.Evento online. Coordenado por: Waldir de Carvalho Junior, Helena Saraiva Koenow Pinheiro, Ricardo SimĂŁo Diniz Dalmolin
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