2,285 research outputs found
Best Practices in Mental Health at Corrections Facilities
Police, court personnel, and correctional staff interact with, stabilize, and treat more persons with mental illness than any other system in America—making criminal justice agencies the largest mental health provider in the United States. Yet a wide gap exists between the training of corrections staff and the enormous responsibility they have for day-to-day management of mental health issues. To narrow this gap in jail and prison settings, the best practices include training programs, screening procedures, communication between staff, and good documentation. Quality mental health services help maintain security by reducing inmate and staff stress levels and helping to facilitate offender participation in rehabilitative programming. They increase the likelihood of successful reintegration of mentally ill offenders into the community by promoting adequate community based mental health care follow-up, thereby contributing to reduced recidivism. By following these best practices, correctional organizations can also reduce the likelihood of expensive civil litigation or other legal actions that can result from inadequate correctional mental health services
The Price of Information in Combinatorial Optimization
Consider a network design application where we wish to lay down a
minimum-cost spanning tree in a given graph; however, we only have stochastic
information about the edge costs. To learn the precise cost of any edge, we
have to conduct a study that incurs a price. Our goal is to find a spanning
tree while minimizing the disutility, which is the sum of the tree cost and the
total price that we spend on the studies. In a different application, each edge
gives a stochastic reward value. Our goal is to find a spanning tree while
maximizing the utility, which is the tree reward minus the prices that we pay.
Situations such as the above two often arise in practice where we wish to
find a good solution to an optimization problem, but we start with only some
partial knowledge about the parameters of the problem. The missing information
can be found only after paying a probing price, which we call the price of
information. What strategy should we adopt to optimize our expected
utility/disutility?
A classical example of the above setting is Weitzman's "Pandora's box"
problem where we are given probability distributions on values of
independent random variables. The goal is to choose a single variable with a
large value, but we can find the actual outcomes only after paying a price. Our
work is a generalization of this model to other combinatorial optimization
problems such as matching, set cover, facility location, and prize-collecting
Steiner tree. We give a technique that reduces such problems to their non-price
counterparts, and use it to design exact/approximation algorithms to optimize
our utility/disutility. Our techniques extend to situations where there are
additional constraints on what parameters can be probed or when we can
simultaneously probe a subset of the parameters.Comment: SODA 201
Representation learning of drug and disease terms for drug repositioning
Drug repositioning (DR) refers to identification of novel indications for the
approved drugs. The requirement of huge investment of time as well as money and
risk of failure in clinical trials have led to surge in interest in drug
repositioning. DR exploits two major aspects associated with drugs and
diseases: existence of similarity among drugs and among diseases due to their
shared involved genes or pathways or common biological effects. Existing
methods of identifying drug-disease association majorly rely on the information
available in the structured databases only. On the other hand, abundant
information available in form of free texts in biomedical research articles are
not being fully exploited. Word-embedding or obtaining vector representation of
words from a large corpora of free texts using neural network methods have been
shown to give significant performance for several natural language processing
tasks. In this work we propose a novel way of representation learning to obtain
features of drugs and diseases by combining complementary information available
in unstructured texts and structured datasets. Next we use matrix completion
approach on these feature vectors to learn projection matrix between drug and
disease vector spaces. The proposed method has shown competitive performance
with state-of-the-art methods. Further, the case studies on Alzheimer's and
Hypertension diseases have shown that the predicted associations are matching
with the existing knowledge.Comment: Accepted to appear in 3rd IEEE International Conference on
Cybernetics (Spl Session: Deep Learning for Prediction and Estimation
Geodesic completeness and the lack of strong singularities in effective loop quantum Kantowski-Sachs spacetime
Resolution of singularities in the Kantowski-Sachs model due to
non-perturbative quantum gravity effects is investigated. Using the effective
spacetime description for the improved dynamics version of loop quantum
Kantowski-Sachs spacetimes, we show that even though expansion and shear
scalars are universally bounded, there can exist events where curvature
invariants can diverge. However, such events can occur only for very exotic
equations of state when pressure or derivatives of energy density with respect
to triads become infinite at a finite energy density. In all other cases
curvature invariants are proved to remain finite for any evolution in finite
proper time. We find the novel result that all strong singularities are
resolved for arbitrary matter. Weak singularities pertaining to above potential
curvature divergence events can exist. The effective spacetime is found to be
geodesically complete for particle and null geodesics in finite time evolution.
Our results add to a growing evidence for generic resolution of strong
singularities using effective dynamics in loop quantum cosmology by
generalizing earlier results on isotropic and Bianchi-I spacetimes.Comment: Revised version. Discussion in the proof on absence of strong
singularities expanded. References added. To appear in CQ
Generic absence of strong singularities in loop quantum Bianchi-IX spacetimes
We study the generic resolution of strong singularities in loop quantized
effective Bianchi-IX spacetime in two different quantizations - the connection
operator based `A' quantization and the extrinsic curvature based `K'
quantization. We show that in the effective spacetime description with
arbitrary matter content, it is necessary to include inverse triad corrections
to resolve all the strong singularities in the `A' quantization. Whereas in the
`K' quantization these results can be obtained without including inverse triad
corrections. Under these conditions, the energy density, expansion and shear
scalars for both of the quantization prescriptions are bounded. Notably, both
the quantizations can result in potentially curvature divergent events if
matter content allows divergences in the partial derivatives of the energy
density with respect to the triad variables at a finite energy density. Such
events are found to be weak curvature singularities beyond which geodesics can
be extended in the effective spacetime. Our results show that all potential
strong curvature singularities of the classical theory are forbidden in
Bianchi-IX spacetime in loop quantum cosmology and geodesic evolution never
breaks down for such events.Comment: 23 page
Resolution of strong singularities and geodesic completeness in loop quantum Bianchi-II spacetimes
Generic resolution of singularities and geodesic completeness in the loop
quantization of Bianchi-II spacetimes with arbitrary minimally coupled matter
is investigated. Using the effective Hamiltonian approach, we examine two
available quantizations: one based on the connection operator and second by
treating extrinsic curvature as connection via gauge fixing. It turns out that
for the connection based quantization, either the inverse triad modifications
or imposition of weak energy condition is necessary to obtain a resolution of
all strong singularities and geodesic completeness. In contrast, the extrinsic
curvature based quantization generically resolves all strong curvature
singularities and results in a geodesically complete effective spacetime
without inverse triad modifications or energy conditions. In both the
quantizations, weak curvature singularities can occur resulting from
divergences in pressure and its derivatives at finite densities. These are
harmless events beyond which geodesics can be extended. Our work generalizes
previous results on the generic resolution of strong singularities in the loop
quantization of isotropic, Bianchi-I and Kantowski-Sachs spacetimes.Comment: 24 pages. Revised version to appear in CQG. Clarifications on
quantization prescriptions and triad orientations adde
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