International Research Ethics Education

This paper assesses the state of research ethics in low- and middle-income countries and the achievements of the Fogarty International Center's bioethics training program since 2000. The vision of FIC for the next decade of research ethics education is encapsulated in four proposed goals: (1) Ensure sufficient expertise in ethics review by having someone with long-term training on every high-workload REC; (2) Develop LMIC capacity to conduct original research on critical ethical issues by supporting doctoral and postdoctoral training and career paths for research ethicists; (3) Make research training and review at LMIC institutions sustainable by identifying additional funding mechanisms and models; (4) Make institutional research systems more ethical and efficient through context-specific training integrated into all levels of scientific training

Predicting Anchor Links between Heterogeneous Social Networks

People usually get involved in multiple social networks to enjoy new services or to fulfill their needs. Many new social networks try to attract users of other existing networks to increase the number of their users. Once a user (called source user) of a social network (called source network) joins a new social network (called target network), a new inter-network link (called anchor link) is formed between the source and target networks. In this paper, we concentrated on predicting the formation of such anchor links between heterogeneous social networks. Unlike conventional link prediction problems in which the formation of a link between two existing users within a single network is predicted, in anchor link prediction, the target user is missing and will be added to the target network once the anchor link is created. To solve this problem, we use meta-paths as a powerful tool for utilizing heterogeneous information in both the source and target networks. To this end, we propose an effective general meta-path-based approach called Connector and Recursive Meta-Paths (CRMP). By using those two different categories of meta-paths, we model different aspects of social factors that may affect a source user to join the target network, resulting in the formation of a new anchor link. Extensive experiments on real-world heterogeneous social networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method against the recent methods.Comment: To be published in "Proceedings of the 2016 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)

Differential Distributed Space-Time Coding with Imperfect Synchronization

Differential distributed space-time coding (D-DSTC) has been considered to improve both diversity and data-rate in cooperative communications in the absence of channel information. However, conventionally, it is assumed that relays are perfectly synchronized in the symbol level. In practice, this assumption is easily violated due to the distributed nature of the relay networks. This paper proposes a new differential encoding and decoding process for D-DSTC systems with two relays. The proposed method is robust against synchronization errors and does not require any channel information at the destination. Moreover, the maximum possible diversity and symbol-by-symbol decoding are attained. Simulation results are provided to show the performance of the proposed method for various synchronization errors and the fact that our algorithm is not sensitive to synchronization error.Comment: to appear in IEEE Globecom, 201

The Relation between Approximation in Distribution and Shadowing in Molecular Dynamics

Molecular dynamics refers to the computer simulation of a material at the atomic level. An open problem in numerical analysis is to explain the apparent reliability of molecular dynamics simulations. The difficulty is that individual trajectories computed in molecular dynamics are accurate for only short time intervals, whereas apparently reliable information can be extracted from very long-time simulations. It has been conjectured that long molecular dynamics trajectories have low-dimensional statistical features that accurately approximate those of the original system. Another conjecture is that numerical trajectories satisfy the shadowing property: that they are close over long time intervals to exact trajectories but with different initial conditions. We prove that these two views are actually equivalent to each other, after we suitably modify the concept of shadowing. A key ingredient of our result is a general theorem that allows us to take random elements of a metric space that are close in distribution and embed them in the same probability space so that they are close in a strong sense. This result is similar to the Strassen-Dudley Theorem except that a mapping is provided between the two random elements. Our results on shadowing are motivated by molecular dynamics but apply to the approximation of any dynamical system when initial conditions are selected according to a probability measure.Comment: 21 pages, final version accepted in SIAM Dyn Sy

The main transition in the Pink membrane model: finite-size scaling and the influence of surface roughness

We consider the main transition in single-component membranes using computer simulations of the Pink model [D. Pink {\it et al.}, Biochemistry {\bf 19}, 349 (1980)]. We first show that the accepted parameters of the Pink model yield a main transition temperature that is systematically below experimental values. This resolves an issue that was first pointed out by Corvera and co-workers [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 47}, 696 (1993)]. In order to yield the correct transition temperature, the strength of the van der Waals coupling in the Pink model must be increased; by using finite-size scaling, a set of optimal values is proposed. We also provide finite-size scaling evidence that the Pink model belongs to the universality class of the two-dimensional Ising model. This finding holds irrespective of the number of conformational states. Finally, we address the main transition in the presence of quenched disorder, which may arise in situations where the membrane is deposited on a rough support. In this case, we observe a stable multi-domain structure of gel and fluid domains, and the absence of a sharp transition in the thermodynamic limit.Comment: submitted to PR