ESTSS at 20 years: "a phoenix gently rising from a lava flow of European trauma"

Roderick J. Ørner, who was President between 1997 and 1999, traces the phoenix-like origins of the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ESTSS) from an informal business meeting called during the 1st European Conference on Traumatic Stress (ECOTS) in 1987 to its emergence into a formally constituted society. He dwells on the challenges of tendering a trauma society within a continent where trauma has been and remains endemic. ESTSS successes are noted along with a number of personal reflections on activities that give rise to concern for the present as well as its future prospects. Denial of survivors' experiences and turning away from survivors' narratives by reframing their experiences to accommodate helpers' theory-driven imperatives are viewed with alarm. Arguments are presented for making human rights, memory, and ethics core elements of a distinctive European psycho traumatology, which will secure current ESTSS viability and future integrity

Spectral Sparsification and Regret Minimization Beyond Matrix Multiplicative Updates

In this paper, we provide a novel construction of the linear-sized spectral sparsifiers of Batson, Spielman and Srivastava [BSS14]. While previous constructions required $\Omega(n^4)$ running time [BSS14, Zou12], our sparsification routine can be implemented in almost-quadratic running time $O(n^{2+\varepsilon})$. The fundamental conceptual novelty of our work is the leveraging of a strong connection between sparsification and a regret minimization problem over density matrices. This connection was known to provide an interpretation of the randomized sparsifiers of Spielman and Srivastava [SS11] via the application of matrix multiplicative weight updates (MWU) [CHS11, Vis14]. In this paper, we explain how matrix MWU naturally arises as an instance of the Follow-the-Regularized-Leader framework and generalize this approach to yield a larger class of updates. This new class allows us to accelerate the construction of linear-sized spectral sparsifiers, and give novel insights on the motivation behind Batson, Spielman and Srivastava [BSS14]

Contextual Object Detection with a Few Relevant Neighbors

A natural way to improve the detection of objects is to consider the contextual constraints imposed by the detection of additional objects in a given scene. In this work, we exploit the spatial relations between objects in order to improve detection capacity, as well as analyze various properties of the contextual object detection problem. To precisely calculate context-based probabilities of objects, we developed a model that examines the interactions between objects in an exact probabilistic setting, in contrast to previous methods that typically utilize approximations based on pairwise interactions. Such a scheme is facilitated by the realistic assumption that the existence of an object in any given location is influenced by only few informative locations in space. Based on this assumption, we suggest a method for identifying these relevant locations and integrating them into a mostly exact calculation of probability based on their raw detector responses. This scheme is shown to improve detection results and provides unique insights about the process of contextual inference for object detection. We show that it is generally difficult to learn that a particular object reduces the probability of another, and that in cases when the context and detector strongly disagree this learning becomes virtually impossible for the purposes of improving the results of an object detector. Finally, we demonstrate improved detection results through use of our approach as applied to the PASCAL VOC and COCO datasets

Etching of random solids: hardening dynamics and self-organized fractality

When a finite volume of an etching solution comes in contact with a disordered solid, a complex dynamics of the solid-solution interface develops. Since only the weak parts are corroded, the solid surface hardens progressively. If the etchant is consumed in the chemical reaction, the corrosion dynamics slows down and stops spontaneously leaving a fractal solid surface, which reveals the latent percolation criticality hidden in any random system. Here we introduce and study, both analytically and numerically, a simple model for this phenomenon. In this way we obtain a detailed description of the process in terms of percolation theory. In particular we explain the mechanism of hardening of the surface and connect it to Gradient Percolation.Comment: Latex, aipproc, 6 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of 6th Granada Seminar on Computational Physic

Optimization in High Dimensions via Accelerated, Parallel, and Proximal Coordinate Descent

International audience<p>We propose a new randomized coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of convex functions each of which depends on a small number of coordinates only. Our method (APPROX) is simultaneously Accelerated, Parallel and PROXimal; this is the first time such a method is proposed. In the special case when the number of processors is equal to the number of coordinates, the method converges at the rate $2\bar{\omega}\bar{L} R^2/(k+1)^2$, where $k$ is the iteration counter, $\bar{\omega}$ is a data-weighted \emph{average} degree of separability of the loss function, $\bar{L}$ is the \emph{average} of Lipschitz constants associated with the coordinates and individual functions in the sum, and $R$ is the distance of the initial point from the minimizer. We show that the method can be implemented without the need to perform full-dimensional vector operations, which is the major bottleneck of accelerated coordinate descent, rendering it impractical. The fact that the method depends on the average degree of separability, and not on the maximum degree, can be attributed to the use of new safe large stepsizes, leading to improved expected separable overapproximation (ESO). These are of independent interest and can be utilized in all existing parallel randomized coordinate descent algorithms based on the concept of ESO. In special cases, our method recovers several classical and recent algorithms such as simple and accelerated proximal gradient descent, as well as serial, parallel and distributed versions of randomized block coordinate descent. \new{Due of this flexibility, APPROX had been used successfully by the authors in a graduate class setting as a modern introduction to deterministic and randomized proximal gradient methods. Our bounds match or improve on the best known bounds for each of the methods APPROX specializes to. Our method has applications in a number of areas, including machine learning, submodular optimization, linear and semidefinite programming.</p

Robustness and Generalization

We derive generalization bounds for learning algorithms based on their robustness: the property that if a testing sample is "similar" to a training sample, then the testing error is close to the training error. This provides a novel approach, different from the complexity or stability arguments, to study generalization of learning algorithms. We further show that a weak notion of robustness is both sufficient and necessary for generalizability, which implies that robustness is a fundamental property for learning algorithms to work

Radiographic Image Enhancement by Wiener Decorrelation

The primary focus of the application of image processing to radiography is the problem of segmentation. The general segmentation problem has been attacked on a broad front [1, 2], and thresholding, in particular, is a popular method [1, 3-6]. Unfortunately, geometric unsharpness destroys the crisp edges needed for unambiguous decisions, and this difficulty can be considered a problem in filtering in which the object is to devise a high-pass (sharpening) filter. This approach has been studied for more than 20 years [7-13]

Dyscalculia from a developmental and differential perspective

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) and its treatment are receiving increasing research attention. A PsychInfo search for peer-reviewed articles with dyscalculia as a title word reveals 31 papers published from 1991–2001, versus 74 papers published from 2002–2012. Still, these small counts reflect the paucity of research on DD compared to dyslexia, despite the prevalence of mathematical difficulties. In the UK, 22% of adults have mathematical difficulties sufficient to impose severe practical and occupational restrictions (Bynner and Parsons, 1997; National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). It is unlikely that all of these individuals with mathematical difficulties have DD, but criteria for defining and diagnosing dyscalculia remain ambiguous (Mazzocco and Myers, 2003). What is treated as DD in one study may be conceptualized as another form of mathematical impairment in another study. Furthermore, DD is frequently—but, we believe, mistakenly- considered a largely homogeneous disorder. Here we advocate a differential and developmental perspective on DD focused on identifying behavioral, cognitive, and neural sources of individual differences that contribute to our understanding of what DD is and what it is not