Ergodicity of the Airy line ensemble

In this paper, we establish the ergodicity of the Airy line ensemble. This shows that it is the only candidate for Conjecture 3.2 in [3], regarding the classification of ergodic line ensembles satisfying a certain Brownian Gibbs property after a parabolic shift.Comment: argument for Proposition 1.13 is revised, the structure of the introduction is rearrange

Morphological annotation of Korean with Directly Maintainable Resources

This article describes an exclusively resource-based method of morphological annotation of written Korean text. Korean is an agglutinative language. Our annotator is designed to process text before the operation of a syntactic parser. In its present state, it annotates one-stem words only. The output is a graph of morphemes annotated with accurate linguistic information. The granularity of the tagset is 3 to 5 times higher than usual tagsets. A comparison with a reference annotated corpus showed that it achieves 89% recall without any corpus training. The language resources used by the system are lexicons of stems, transducers of suffixes and transducers of generation of allomorphs. All can be easily updated, which allows users to control the evolution of the performances of the system. It has been claimed that morphological annotation of Korean text could only be performed by a morphological analysis module accessing a lexicon of morphemes. We show that it can also be performed directly with a lexicon of words and without applying morphological rules at annotation time, which speeds up annotation to 1,210 word/s. The lexicon of words is obtained from the maintainable language resources through a fully automated compilation process

Arab Americans’ confidence in the police has been stable and favorable over the past decade

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks nearly 14 years ago, Arab Americans came under heightened suspicion and greater counter-terrorism surveillance. Has this changing relationship with law enforcement affected Arab Americans’ levels of confidence in the police? In new study which looks at attitudes of Arab Americans in Detroit, Ivan Sun & Yuning Wu find that their attitudes towards police have been mostly unchanged, with more than 40 percent expressing a ‘great deal’ or ‘a lot’ of confidence in the police. They argue that local police departments’ efforts to establish solid rapport with Arab communities may have contributed to maintaining these high levels, and illustrate the importance of building these types of links in order to establish and maintain public confidence in policing

The role of 3D printed heart models in immediate and long-term knowledge acquisition in medical education

Background: The long-term effect of three-dimensional printed heart model (3DPHM) on knowledge acquisition of congenital heart disease (CHD) remains unknown. This prospective cohort study aims to investigate the role of 3DPHM in improving immediate knowledge gain and long-term knowledge retention on CHD among the medical students. Methods: Fifty-three second and third year medical students were assigned into two groups to compare their immediate knowledge acquisition and knowledge retention after an education session on anatomy and pathophysiology of CHD. During the 1.5 hour-long education session, both the control (n = 25) and study groups (n = 28) had access to identical teaching materials: digital 3D heart models, 2D diagrams, and medical images, except for 3DPHM which were only used in the study group. The immediate knowledge gain was assessed via an online quiz, whereas the long-term knowledge retention was assessed using another quiz in 6-weeks’ time post-intervention. A survey was also conducted to evaluate the participants’ learning experience. Results: There is no significant difference in the immediate knowledge acquisition and long-term knowledge retention between the groups (U = 272, p = 0.16 and r = –0.143, p = 0.15 respectively). Majority of the students (96% in control group and 85% in 3DPHM group) responded that the 3DPHM would have/had improved their learning experience. Despite that, there is no significant difference in the self-perceived knowledge improvement between the groups. Conclusions: This study concludes that the 3DPHM do not significantly improve both immediate knowledge acquisition and knowledge retention among the medical students. However, further research with larger sample size, as well as categorizing the type of questions in the quiz, is needed to better assess the role of 3DPHM in different educational components

Optimization of FPGA Based Neural Network Processor

Neural information processing is an emerging new field, providing an alternative form of computation for demanding tasks such as pattern recognition problems which are usually reserved for human attention. Neural network computation i s sought after where classification of input data is difficult to be worked out using equations or sets of rules. Technological advances in integrated circuits such as Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) systems have made it easier to develop and implement hardware devices based on these neural network architectures. The motivation in hardware implementation of neural networks is its fast processing speed and suitability in parallel and pipelined processing. The project revolves around the design of an optimized neural network processor. The processor design is based on the feedforward network architecture type with BackPropagation trained weights for the Exclusive-OR non-linear problem. Among the highlights of the project is the improvement in neural network architecture through reconfigurable and recursive computation of a single hidden layer for multiple layer applications. Improvements in processor organization were also made which enables the design to parallel process with similar processors. Other improvements include design considerations to reduce the amount of logic required for implementation without much sacrifice of processing speed

3D printed models of congenital heart disease: How accurate and how useful are they?

Three-dimensional (3D) printing in the domain of congenital heart disease (CHD) is still in its infancy. The aim of this editorial is to highlight the key findings of a recently published systematic review and meta-analysis on the accuracy and clinical value of 3D printed heart models (3DPHM). The analysis found that 3DPHM can be generated with high accuracy and the most reported application of 3DPHM is to facilitate pre-operative planning

Model-Based and Graph-Based Priors for Group Testing

The goal of the group testing problem is to identify a set of defective items within a larger set of items, using suitably-designed tests whose outcomes indicate whether any defective item is present. In this paper, we study how the number of tests can be significantly decreased by leveraging the structural dependencies between the items, i.e., by incorporating prior information. To do so, we pursue two different perspectives: (i) As a generalization of the uniform combinatorial prior, we consider the case that the defective set is uniform over a \emph{subset} of all possible sets of a given size, and study how this impacts the information-theoretic limits on the number of tests for approximate recovery; (ii) As a generalization of the i.i.d.~prior, we introduce a new class of priors based on the Ising model, where the associated graph represents interactions between items. We show that this naturally leads to an Integer Quadratic Program decoder, which can be converted to an Integer Linear Program and/or relaxed to a non-integer variant for improved computational complexity, while maintaining strong empirical recovery performance.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin