809 research outputs found
Discovering Influencers in Opinion Formation over Social Graphs
The adaptive social learning paradigm helps model how networked agents are
able to form opinions on a state of nature and track its drifts in a changing
environment. In this framework, the agents repeatedly update their beliefs
based on private observations and exchange the beliefs with their neighbors. In
this work, it is shown how the sequence of publicly exchanged beliefs over time
allows users to discover rich information about the underlying network topology
and about the flow of information over graph. In particular, it is shown that
it is possible (i) to identify the influence of each individual agent to the
objective of truth learning, (ii) to discover how well informed each agent is,
(iii) to quantify the pairwise influences between agents, and (iv) to learn the
underlying network topology. The algorithm derived herein is also able to work
under non-stationary environments where either the true state of nature or the
network topology are allowed to drift over time. We apply the proposed
algorithm to different subnetworks of Twitter users, and identify the most
influential and central agents merely by using their public tweets (posts)
Reducing Cascading Failure Risk by Increasing Infrastructure Network Interdependency
Increased coupling between critical infrastructure networks, such as power
and communication systems, will have important implications for the reliability
and security of these systems. To understand the effects of power-communication
coupling, several have studied interdependent network models and reported that
increased coupling can increase system vulnerability. However, these results
come from models that have substantially different mechanisms of cascading,
relative to those found in actual power and communication networks. This paper
reports on two sets of experiments that compare the network vulnerability
implications resulting from simple topological models and models that more
accurately capture the dynamics of cascading in power systems. First, we
compare a simple model of topological contagion to a model of cascading in
power systems and find that the power grid shows a much higher level of
vulnerability, relative to the contagion model. Second, we compare a model of
topological cascades in coupled networks to three different physics-based
models of power grids coupled to communication networks. Again, the more
accurate models suggest very different conclusions. In all but the most extreme
case, the physics-based power grid models indicate that increased
power-communication coupling decreases vulnerability. This is opposite from
what one would conclude from the coupled topological model, in which zero
coupling is optimal. Finally, an extreme case in which communication failures
immediately cause grid failures, suggests that if systems are poorly designed,
increased coupling can be harmful. Together these results suggest design
strategies for reducing the risk of cascades in interdependent infrastructure
systems
A new method to determine viscosity of liquids using vibration principles
A new method for determining viscosity of liquids is examined. The method employs the principles of vibration and measures the viscous damping due to the motion of a liquid placed in a cylindrical tube. The apparatus and the test liquid are treated as a dynamic system and the measured mechanical impedances are used to calculate energy dissipation due to the viscous damping. The newly designed apparatus is able to generate shear deformations in the liquid without using moving solid surfaces. A harmonic varying force with a frequency close to the resonance frequency of the system is applied through a piston and the resulting velocities of the oscillations generated in the system are measured. Liquids with higher viscosities result in lower velocities due to the higher damping. Analytical equations are provided to relate the viscous damping of the dynamic system to the viscosity of the liquids. The viscosities obtained from the proposed method are in good agreement with the ones obtained from standard rotational viscometry using a cone and plate geometry
Incumbency advantage is not restricted to established majoritarian systems
To date, most scholarly works have focused on incumbency advantage in the US and consider how it operates in majoritarian contexts. In a recent paper, Mert Moral, H. Ege Ozen and Efe Tokdemir drew on the case of Turkey to explore whether the incumbency operates in multi member district systems. They found that although it is not as marked as in the US context, considerable incumbency advantage persisted in the more proportional system
Dif-MAML: Decentralized Multi-Agent Meta-Learning
The objective of meta-learning is to exploit the knowledge obtained from
observed tasks to improve adaptation to unseen tasks. As such, meta-learners
are able to generalize better when they are trained with a larger number of
observed tasks and with a larger amount of data per task. Given the amount of
resources that are needed, it is generally difficult to expect the tasks, their
respective data, and the necessary computational capacity to be available at a
single central location. It is more natural to encounter situations where these
resources are spread across several agents connected by some graph topology.
The formalism of meta-learning is actually well-suited to this decentralized
setting, where the learner would be able to benefit from information and
computational power spread across the agents. Motivated by this observation, in
this work, we propose a cooperative fully-decentralized multi-agent
meta-learning algorithm, referred to as Diffusion-based MAML or Dif-MAML.
Decentralized optimization algorithms are superior to centralized
implementations in terms of scalability, avoidance of communication
bottlenecks, and privacy guarantees. The work provides a detailed theoretical
analysis to show that the proposed strategy allows a collection of agents to
attain agreement at a linear rate and to converge to a stationary point of the
aggregate MAML objective even in non-convex environments. Simulation results
illustrate the theoretical findings and the superior performance relative to
the traditional non-cooperative setting
U.S. Dental School Deansā Attitudes About MidāLevel Providers
Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153725/1/jddj0022033720137711tb05623x.pd
A study of the soil-plant interactions of Pistacia lentiscus L. distributed in the western Anatolian part of Turkey
This study was undertaken with the aim of illuminating the soil-plant interactions of Pistacia lentiscus L., which is a Mediterranean sclerophylleous coastal zone plant in the Western Anatolian part of Turkey. The soil analysis data showed that this plant grows on
different kinds of soils such as sandy-clayey-loam, clayey-loam, sandy-loam and loamy texture. Soils are not saline, with pH moderately and slightly alkaline. This species prefers soils with low phosphorus and potassium contents, but with different calcium carbonate and nitrogen contents. Three negative linear correlations were observed between plant calcium and soil pH, plant nitrogen and soil calcium carbonate, plant potassium and soil calcium carbonate
Zero-shot Learning of Individualized Task Contrast Prediction from Resting-state Functional Connectomes
Given sufficient pairs of resting-state and task-evoked fMRI scans from
subjects, it is possible to train ML models to predict subject-specific
task-evoked activity using resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) scans.
However, while rsfMRI scans are relatively easy to collect, obtaining
sufficient task fMRI scans is much harder as it involves more complex
experimental designs and procedures. Thus, the reliance on scarce paired data
limits the application of current techniques to only tasks seen during
training. We show that this reliance can be reduced by leveraging group-average
contrasts, enabling zero-shot predictions for novel tasks. Our approach, named
OPIC (short for Omni-Task Prediction of Individual Contrasts), takes as input a
subject's rsfMRI-derived connectome and a group-average contrast, to produce a
prediction of the subject-specific contrast. Similar to zero-shot learning in
large language models using special inputs to obtain answers for novel natural
language processing tasks, inputting group-average contrasts guides the OPIC
model to generalize to novel tasks unseen in training. Experimental results
show that OPIC's predictions for novel tasks are not only better than simple
group-averages, but are also competitive with a state-of-the-art model's
in-domain predictions that was trained using in-domain tasks' data.Comment: Accepted at DALI@MICCAI 202
Studija o biljkama uz rub cesta (Zapadna Anatolija, Turska)
In this study, roadside plants distributed throughout the link roads of all the cities in West Anatolia in Turkey were investigated. The length of the selected 17 roads is around 2700 km. The total number of samples collected from the study area is 271 taxa belonging to 57 families. Among them, Asteraceae, Fabaceae, Poaceae are the families that have the largest number of taxa, and Bromus L., Rumex L. and Silene L. are the genera that have the largest number of taxa. The most frequently found taxon throughout the selected roads is Valerianella coronata (L.) DC. and therophytes are the most frequently found life form.Istraživane su biljke uz rub svih cesta koje povezuju gradove u Zapadnoj Anatoliji u Turskoj. Duljina 17 izabranih cesta je iznosila oko 2700 km. Prikupljeni uzorci pripadali su 271 svojti, odnosno 57 biljnih porodica. MeÄu njima su najzastupljenije bile porodice Asteraceae, Fabaceae i Poaceae, a meÄu rodovima to su bili Bromus L., Rumex L. i Silene L. NajÄeÅ”Äe naÄena svojta uz istraživane ceste bila je Valerianella coronata (L.) DC., a najÄeÅ”Äi biljni oblik su bili terofiti
- ā¦