VALIDATING OPERATIONAL FOOD SECURITY INDICATORS AGAINST A DYNAMIC BENCHMARK

Food security indicators used in practice are static in nature, thereby foregoing the key dimension of food security. This study develops an explicitly forward-looking food insecurity indicator and relative to this dynamic benchmark, we evaluate the performance of three readily available indicators: an agricultural production, a dietary diversity, and a coping strategy index. Calculation of our "gold standard" indicator, using panel data of 274 households from Mali, shows that neglecting the future may lead to substantial underestimation of a population's food insecurity. However, when compared to our "gold standard", the alternative indicators all identify most of the food insecure, with the coping strategy index displaying the most predictive power. This is an important result, given the great demand for operational, inexpensive and reliable food insecurity indicators.Food Security and Poverty,

Validating operational food insecurity indicators against a dynamic benchmark : evidence from Mali

The authors develop an explicitly forward-looking indicator of food insecurity that takes into account both current dietary inadequacy and vulnerability to dietary inadequacy in the future. Application of this measure to data from northern Mali shows that neglecting the future dimension of food insecurity causes serious underestimation of food insecurity in this area. The authors evaluate the performance, relative to their dynamic bemchmark, of three readily available alternative indicators: an agricultural production index, a dietary diversity index, and a coping strategy index. Despite the uneven performance of these indexes relative to the individual components of the dynamic food insecurity indicator developed in the paper, they all demonstrate strong associations with that indicator. This is a promising result, given the urgent demand for reliable indicators of food insecurity.Livestock&Animal Husbandry,Poverty Assessment,Food&Beverage Industry,Food&Nutrition Policy,Poverty Lines

Options of Interest: Temporal Abstraction with Interest Functions

Temporal abstraction refers to the ability of an agent to use behaviours of controllers which act for a limited, variable amount of time. The options framework describes such behaviours as consisting of a subset of states in which they can initiate, an internal policy and a stochastic termination condition. However, much of the subsequent work on option discovery has ignored the initiation set, because of difficulty in learning it from data. We provide a generalization of initiation sets suitable for general function approximation, by defining an interest function associated with an option. We derive a gradient-based learning algorithm for interest functions, leading to a new interest-option-critic architecture. We investigate how interest functions can be leveraged to learn interpretable and reusable temporal abstractions. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach through quantitative and qualitative results, in both discrete and continuous environments.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20

La régulation des comportements des citoyens lors de la crise sanitaire COVID : la perception du milieu policier : note de recherche

Ce projet, mené en partenariat avec l’Association des directeurs de police du Québec (ADPQ), s’est intéressé aux stratégies régulatoires adoptées par les autorités publiques québécoises, dans le contexte particulier de l’état d’urgence sanitaire. Pour cette recherche, nous nous sommes penchés de façon plus particulière sur le rôle qu’ont été appelés à jouer les services policiers municipaux et leurs patrouilleurs dans la mise en œuvre des consignes sanitaires gouvernementales

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements