Reducing Opinion Echo-Chambers by Intelligent Placement of Moderate-Minded Agents

In the era of social media, people frequently share their own opinions online on various issues and also in the way, get exposed to others' opinions. Be it for selective exposure of news feed recommendation algorithms or our own inclination to listen to opinions that support ours, the result is that we get more and more exposed to opinions closer to ours. Further, any population is inherently heterogeneous i.e. people will hold a varied range of opinions regarding a topic and showcase a varied range of openness to get influenced by others. In this paper, we demonstrate the different behavior put forward by open- and close-minded agents towards an issue, when allowed to freely intermix and communicate. We have shown that the intermixing among people leads to formation of opinion echo chambers i.e. a small closed network of people who hold similar opinions and are not affected by opinions of people outside the network. Echo chambers are evidently harmful for a society because it inhibits free healthy communication among all and thus, prevents exchange of opinions, spreads misinformation and increases extremist beliefs. This calls for reduction in echo chambers, because a total consensus of opinion is neither possible nor is welcome. We show that the number of echo chambers depends on the number of close-minded agents and cannot be lessened by increasing the number of open-minded agents. We identify certain 'moderate'-minded agents, who possess the capability of manipulating and reducing the number of echo chambers. The paper proposes an algorithm for intelligent placement of moderate-minded agents in the opinion-time spectrum by which the opinion echo chambers can be maximally reduced. With various experimental setups, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm fares well when compared to placement of other agents (open- or close-minded) and random placement of 'moderate'-minded agents

Attention, Compilation, and Solver-based Symbolic Analysis are All You Need

In this paper, we present a Java-to-Python (J2P) and Python-to-Java (P2J) back-to-back code translation method, and an associated tool called CoTran, based on large language models (LLMs). Our method leverages the attention mechanism of LLMs, compilation, and symbolic execution-based test generation for equivalence testing between the input and output programs. More precisely, we modify the typical LLM training loop to incorporate compiler and symbolic execution loss. Via extensive experiments comparing CoTran with 12 other transpilers and LLM-based translation tools over a benchmark of more than 57,000 Java-Python equivalent pairs, we show that CoTran outperforms them on relevant metrics such as compilation and runtime equivalence accuracy. For example, our tool gets 97.43% compilation accuracy and 49.66% runtime equivalence accuracy for J2P translation, whereas the nearest competing tool only gets 92.84% and 40.95% respectively

Synthesis of Ether Backbone RNA NAnalogues and the Development of a Method for Carbohydrate Homologation

Carbohydrates having several chiral centers in their structures are potential starting materials for the synthesis of many natural as well as biologically active non-natural products. Monosaccharide is a single carbohydrate unit, and there are some higher-monosaccharide derivatives generally called higher sugars that are not naturally occurring and some of them are very important from biological point of view. This section of the work is primarily comprised of the synthesis of higher sugars (formally C7- C10) starting from lower-membered monosaccharide, D-glucose along with a short review on the reported synthesis of higher sugars. Basically, our synthetic strategy involves with two effective reactions i.e., cross metathesis reaction and Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation reaction. The small features of these two reactions have been described in the thesis

Chain Elongation of Monosaccharides by Sequential Cross Metathesis and Asymmetric Dihydroxylation: Expeditious Approach to Higher Sugars.

Glucose-derived alkenes were homologated via chain elongation to afford higher sugars by the application of cross metathesis with an alkene followed by Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation. Heptose, octose, nonose, and decose derivatives were expeditiously prepared by this method

Pd<SUP>0</SUP>/Sn<SUP>II</SUP> mediated three-component cascade coupling (3-C<SUP>3</SUP>) approaches

The 3-C3 strategy involves (i) Pd(0)/SnX2 (X=Cl, Br) mediated generation of allyltin(IV) from allyl bromide in anhydrous DCM, (ii) formation of homoallyloxytin(IV) intermediate I from allyltin(IV) and an aldehyde, and (iii) coupling of I with an aldehyde, an aryl epoxide or an arene as the third partner to afford tetrahydropyrans, benzyl tetrahydropyrans or 4,4-diarylbut-1-enes, respectively

A Short and Efficient Synthesis of 5-Hydroxymethylcyclopent-2-Enol from D-Glucose and its Elaboration to the Carbanucleoside (-)-Carbovir

Introduction of an allyl functionality at C-3 of 1,2:5,6-di-O-isopropylidene-a-D-glucofuranose followed by olefination at C-5 and C-6 provided 1,6-diene 5 which, upon ring closing metathesis and subsequent functional group manipulation, furnished the key cyclopentene diacetate 7, which was elaborated to carbanucleoside (-)-carbovir 1

Synthesis of Nonionic ether-Backbone Analogues of RNA from Pseudooligosaccharides

Uracil nucleosides with internucleosidic ether linkage as nonionic analogues of RNA were synthesized by glycosylation of ether-backbone pseudooligosaccharide

Exploitation of in Situ Generated Sugar-Based Olefin Keto-Nitrones: Synthesis of Carbocycles, Heterocycles, and Nucleoside Derivatives

Application of intramolecular 1,3-dipolar nitrone cycloaddition reaction on carbohydrate-derived precursors containing an olefin functionality at C-1 or C-3 or C-5 and a nitrone moiety at C-2 or C-3 as appropriate has resulted in the formation of structurally new cycloaddition products containing furanose-fused oxepane, thiepane, azepane, cyclopentane, cycloheptane, tetrahydrofuran, and pyranose-fused tetrahydrofuran rings. The structure and stereochemistry of these products have been characterized by spectral as well as single-crystal X-ray analyses. Two of the compounds have been transformed to the bicyclic nucleoside derivatives applying Vorbrüggen reaction conditions