Hankel determinant and orthogonal polynomials for a Gaussian weight with a discontinuity at the edge

We compute asymptotics for Hankel determinants and orthogonal polynomials with respect to a discontinuous Gaussian weight, in a critical regime where the discontinuity is close to the edge of the associated equilibrium measure support. Their behavior is described in terms of the Ablowitz-Segur family of solutions to the Painlev\'e II equation. Our results complement the ones in [Xu,Zhao,2011]. As consequences of our results, we conjecture asymptotics for an Airy kernel Fredholm determinant and total integral identities for Painlev\'e II transcendents, and we also prove a new result on the poles of the Ablowitz-Segur solutions to the Painlev\'e II equation. We also highlight applications of our results in random matrix theory.Comment: 35 pages, 4 figure

Improving Prolog programs: Refactoring for Prolog

Refactoring is an established technique from the object-oriented (OO) programming community to restructure code: it aims at improving software readability, maintainability and extensibility. Although refactoring is not tied to the OO-paradigm in particular, its ideas have not been applied to Logic Programming until now. This paper applies the ideas of refactoring to Prolog programs. A catalogue is presented listing refactorings classified according to scope. Some of the refactorings have been adapted from the OO-paradigm, while others have been specifically designed for Prolog. The discrepancy between intended and operational semantics in Prolog is also addressed by some of the refactorings. In addition, ViPReSS, a semi-automatic refactoring browser, is discussed and the experience with applying ViPReSS to a large Prolog legacy system is reported. The main conclusion is that refactoring is both a viable technique in Prolog and a rather desirable one.Comment: To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP

A Future of Failure? The Flow of Technology Talent into Government and Civil Society

This report is an evaluation of the technology talent landscape shows a severe paucity of individuals with technical skills in computer science, data science, and the Internet or other information technology expertise in civil society and government. It investigates broadly the health of the talent pipeline that connects individuals studying or working in information technology-related disciplines to careers in public sector and civil society institutions. Barriers to recruitment and retention of individuals with the requisite skills include compensation, a perceived inability to pursue groundbreaking work, and cultural aversion to innovation

Virasoro Constraints for Toric Bundles

We show that the Virasoro conjecture in Gromov--Witten theory holds for the the total space of a toric bundle $E \to B$ if and only if it holds for the base $B$. The main steps are: (i) we establish a localization formula that expresses Gromov--Witten invariants of $E$, equivariant with respect to the fiberwise torus action, in terms of genus-zero invariants of the toric fiber and all-genus invariants of $B$; and (ii) we pass to the non-equivariant limit in this formula, using Brown's mirror theorem for toric bundles.Comment: 24 page