A generalization of Steinberg's cross-section

Let G be a semisimple group over an algebraically closed field. Steinberg has associated to a Coxeter element w of minimal length r a subvariety V of G isomorphic to an affine space of dimension r which meets the regular unipotent class Y in exactly one point. In this paper this is generalized to the case where w is replaced by any elliptic element in the Weyl group of minimal length d in its conjugacy class, V is replaced by a subvariety V' of G isomorphic to an affine space of dimension d and Y is replaced by a unipotent class Y' of codimension d in such a way that the intersection of V' and Y' is finite.Comment: 21 page

Variational recurrent sequence-to-sequence retrieval for stepwise illustration

We address and formalise the task of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) cross-modal retrieval. Given a sequence of text passages as query, the goal is to retrieve a sequence of images that best describes and aligns with the query. This new task extends the traditional cross-modal retrieval, where each image-text pair is treated independently ignoring broader context. We propose a novel variational recurrent seq2seq (VRSS) retrieval model for this seq2seq task. Unlike most cross-modal methods, we generate an image vector corresponding to the latent topic obtained from combining the text semantics and context. This synthetic image embedding point associated with every text embedding point can then be employed for either image generation or image retrieval as desired. We evaluate the model for the application of stepwise illustration of recipes, where a sequence of relevant images are retrieved to best match the steps described in the text. To this end, we build and release a new Stepwise Recipe dataset for research purposes, containing 10K recipes (sequences of image-text pairs) having a total of 67K image-text pairs. To our knowledge, it is the first publicly available dataset to offer rich semantic descriptions in a focused category such as food or recipes. Our model is shown to outperform several competitive and relevant baselines in the experiments. We also provide qualitative analysis of how semantically meaningful the results produced by our model are through human evaluation and comparison with relevant existing methods

Changes in Perceptions of Web-Based learning Materials

This paper is a research in progress to assess changes in perceptions of the academic value of creating web-based learning materials. A survey was conducted in 2002 that assessed perceptions of faculty and administrators concerning the value of creating web-based learning materials, especially as it pertained to tenure decisions. A second survey was completed in 2008 (approximately one “tenure generation” later) to see if perceptions concerning academic value of web-based had changed. The use of web-based materials has increased in the years since the first survey as well as the arrival of new ways to create web-based materials. While some may feel that the passing years and increased use of information technology in the classroom should have changed perceptions, initial results between the two surveys were generally similar. This paper is a presentation of the basic survey results and a more detailed analysis will be presented at the SAIS Conference. Survey collection ended in November and a detailed analysis of 2008 data has not yet been completed. Specifically, we wish to pursue a deeper analysis based on the respondents’ tenure status and gender

Chemicals having estrogenic activity can be released from some bisphenol a-free, hard and clear, thermoplastic resins

Background: Chemicals that have estrogenic activity (EA) can potentially cause adverse health effects in mammals including humans, sometimes at low doses in fetal through juvenile stages with effects detected in adults. Polycarbonate (PC) thermoplastic resins made from bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that has EA, are now often avoided in products used by babies. Other BPA-free thermoplastic resins, some hypothesized or advertised to be EA-free, are replacing PC resins used to make reusable hard and clear thermoplastic products such as baby bottles. Methods: We used two very sensitive and accurate in vitro assays (MCF-7 and BG1Luc human cell lines) to quantify the EA of chemicals leached into ethanol or water/saline extracts of fourteen unstressed or stressed (autoclaving, microwaving, UV radiation) thermoplastic resins. Estrogen receptor (ER)-dependent agonist responses were confirmed by their inhibition with the ER antagonist ICI 182,780. Results: Our data showed that some (4/14) unstressed and stressed BPA-free thermoplastic resins leached chemicals having significant levels of EA, including one polystyrene (PS), and three Tritan™ resins, the latter reportedly EA-free. Exposure to UV radiation in natural sunlight resulted in an increased release of EA from Tritan™ resins. Triphenyl-phosphate (TPP), an additive used to manufacture some thermoplastic resins such as Tritan™, exhibited EA in both MCF-7 and BG1Luc assays. Ten unstressed or stressed glycol-modified polyethylene terephthalate (PETG), cyclic olefin polymer (COP) or copolymer (COC) thermoplastic resins did not release chemicals with detectable EA under any test condition. Conclusions: This hazard survey study assessed the release of chemicals exhibiting EA as detected by two sensitive, widely used and accepted, human cell line in vitro assays. Four PC replacement resins (Tritan™ and PS) released chemicals having EA. However, ten other PC-replacement resins did not leach chemicals having EA (EA-free-resins). These results indicate that PC-replacement plastic products could be made from EA-free resins (if appropriate EA-free additives are chosen) that maintain advantages of re-usable plastic items (price, weight, shatter resistance) without releasing chemicals having EA that potentially produce adverse health effects on current or future generations.This work was supported by the following NIH/NIEHS grants: R44 ES011469, 01–03 (CZY); 1R43/44 ES014806, 01–03 (CZY); subcontract (CZY, PI) on an NIH Grant 01–03 43/44ES018083-01. This work was also supported by NIH grants to MSD (P42 ES004699), and DJK and SIY (1R43ES018083-01-03, NIEHS 1R44ES019442-01-03 and NIEHS 2R44ES016964-01-03).Neuroscienc

Dual Long Short-Term Memory Networks for Sub-Character Representation Learning

Characters have commonly been regarded as the minimal processing unit in Natural Language Processing (NLP). But many non-latin languages have hieroglyphic writing systems, involving a big alphabet with thousands or millions of characters. Each character is composed of even smaller parts, which are often ignored by the previous work. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture employing two stacked Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) to learn sub-character level representation and capture deeper level of semantic meanings. To build a concrete study and substantiate the efficiency of our neural architecture, we take Chinese Word Segmentation as a research case example. Among those languages, Chinese is a typical case, for which every character contains several components called radicals. Our networks employ a shared radical level embedding to solve both Simplified and Traditional Chinese Word Segmentation, without extra Traditional to Simplified Chinese conversion, in such a highly end-to-end way the word segmentation can be significantly simplified compared to the previous work. Radical level embeddings can also capture deeper semantic meaning below character level and improve the system performance of learning. By tying radical and character embeddings together, the parameter count is reduced whereas semantic knowledge is shared and transferred between two levels, boosting the performance largely. On 3 out of 4 Bakeoff 2005 datasets, our method surpassed state-of-the-art results by up to 0.4%. Our results are reproducible, source codes and corpora are available on GitHub.Comment: Accepted & forthcoming at ITNG-201

Gender and Tenure Issues Relating to Faculty

This paper addresses whether or not gender and/or tenure status can affect a faculty member’s perception of web-based learning materials. Specifically, perceptions about the effectiveness of web-based materials and whether creating these materials affects a faculty member’s chances for promotion and tenure. The survey was conducted in 2002 and again in 2008 to measure perceptions and also to see if perceptions have changed over time. One dimension of creating web-based learning materials is the search for and integration of web resources into the course content. There has been a considerable increase in the array of Internet resources since the 2002 survey and many of them can affect instruction/learning. You Tube was created in 2005 and has already become a virtual guest lecture source with videos including everything from Thomas Friedman presenting lectures on “The World is Flat” to Gordon Moore speaking on his view of the next 40 years of “Moore’s Law.” Many universities have created Second Life sites for arning communities and individual courses. It could be argued that the increase in the availability of such web-based resources would lead to a view of increased impact on instruction/learning and that faculty utilizing such resources and incorporating them into their course materials would be rewarded with greater chances of promotion and tenure. Our analysis shows that, as a whole, there was no statistically significant change in faculty perceptions between 2002 and 2008 on either the effectiveness of Web-based learning materials or the impact that the creation and use of those materials on the tenure process. However, when we categorize faculty by tenure status and gender the perceptions of tenured, male faculty on the effectiveness of Web-based materials did fall significantly