App-based feedback on safety to novice drivers: learning and monetary incentives

An over-proportionally large number of car crashes is caused by novice drivers. In a field experiment, we investigated whether and how car drivers who had recently obtained their driving license reacted to app-based feedback on their safety-relevant driving behavior (speeding, phone usage, cornering, acceleration and braking). Participants went through a pre-measurement phase during which they did not receive app-based feedback but driving behavior was recorded, a treatment phase during which they received app-based feedback, and a post-measurement phase during which they did not receive app-based feedback but driving behavior was recorded. Before the start of the treatment phase, we randomly assigned participants to two possible treatment groups. In addition to receiving app-based feedback, the participants of one group received monetary incentives to improve their safety-relevant driving behavior, while the participants of the other group did not. At the beginning and at the end of experiment, each participant had to fill out a questionnaire to elicit socio-economic and attitudinal information. We conducted regression analyses to identify socio-economic, attitudinal, and driving-behavior-related variables that explain safety-relevant driving behavior during the pre-measurement phase and the self-chosen intensity of app usage during the treatment phase. For the main objective of our study, we applied regression analyses to identify those variables that explain the potential effect of providing app-based feedback during the treatment phase on safety-relevant driving behavior. Last, we applied statistical tests of differences to identify self-selection and attrition biases in our field experiment. For a sample of 130 novice Austrian drivers, we found moderate improvements in safety-relevant driving skills due to app-based feedback. The improvements were more pronounced under the treatment with monetary incentives, and for participants choosing higher feedback intensities. Moreover, drivers who drove relatively safer before receiving app-based feedback used the app more intensely and, ceteris paribus, higher app use intensity led to improvements in safety-related driving skills. Last, we provide empirical evidence for both self-selection and attrition biases

The Vadalog System: Datalog-based Reasoning for Knowledge Graphs

Over the past years, there has been a resurgence of Datalog-based systems in the database community as well as in industry. In this context, it has been recognized that to handle the complex knowl\-edge-based scenarios encountered today, such as reasoning over large knowledge graphs, Datalog has to be extended with features such as existential quantification. Yet, Datalog-based reasoning in the presence of existential quantification is in general undecidable. Many efforts have been made to define decidable fragments. Warded Datalog+/- is a very promising one, as it captures PTIME complexity while allowing ontological reasoning. Yet so far, no implementation of Warded Datalog+/- was available. In this paper we present the Vadalog system, a Datalog-based system for performing complex logic reasoning tasks, such as those required in advanced knowledge graphs. The Vadalog system is Oxford's contribution to the VADA research programme, a joint effort of the universities of Oxford, Manchester and Edinburgh and around 20 industrial partners. As the main contribution of this paper, we illustrate the first implementation of Warded Datalog+/-, a high-performance Datalog+/- system utilizing an aggressive termination control strategy. We also provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation.Comment: Extended version of VLDB paper <https://doi.org/10.14778/3213880.3213888

Mercer County: Better Together: Community-Based Planning for Economic Development

Mercer County is home to approximately 16,000 residents in rural, northwestern Illinois and is currently in the midst of a community-driven planning process with the goal of establishing a countywide economic development organization. Countywide unity and inclusive engagement are major drivers of this process. Mercer County has had a history of working toward economic development initiatives that failed to see sustained commitment and simply did not succeed. Local leaders realize that two crucial components were missing: widespread public support and continuous and dedicated funding. The Mercer County: Better Together (MCBT) planning process is designed to avoid past mistakes while strengthening the local economy and improving quality of life. This project was completed for the University of Illinois Extension and in partnership with MCBT. It is intended to serve as a resource for the residents of Mercer County and local leaders there as they continue their important efforts to bring in new opportunities and improve the lives of residents across the country.University of Illinois Extension Community and Economic Development TeamOpe

Broadway Starts to Rock: Musical Theater Orchestrations and Character, 1968-1975

In 1968, the sound of the Broadway pit was forever changed with the rock ensemble that accompanied Hair. The musical backdrop for the show was appropriate for the countercultural subject matter, taking into account the popular genres of the time that were connected with such figures, and marrying them to other musical styles to help support the individual characters. Though popular styles had long been part of Broadway scores, it took more than a decade for rock to become a major influence in the commercial theater. The associations an audience had with rock music outside of a theater affected perception of the plot and characters in new ways and allowed for shows to be marketed toward younger demographics, expanding the audience base. Other shows contemporary to Hair began to include rock music and approaches as well; composers and orchestrators incorporated instruments such as electric guitar, bass, and synthesizer, amplification in the pit, and backup singers as components of their scores. Some shows were first released as concept albums, allowing the audience to learn the music before the show was staged; others supplied hit songs for the charts, recorded by known popular artists. In the decades since Hair premiered, nearly all new musicals have had rock instruments and styles included in their scores in some capacity, and rock often plays a major role in the storytelling. As orchestration is a seldom-researched topic in musical studies, and one without a specific path of inquiry, this turning point in the soundscape of the theater and its effects requires attention. How an arranger approaches orchestrating a musical is ripe with possibilities for a discussion of the impact their decisions have on audiences, particularly in relation to how characters in a given show are perceived. This dissertation surveys a selection of shows from 1968-1975 whose orchestrators employed rock instrumentation, either as the entirety of the pit or alongside more traditionally orchestral instruments, and how their approaches affect characterization. These shows, which include Hair, Promises, Promises (1968), Company (1970), Jesus Christ Superstar (1971), Grease (1972), Pippin (1972), A Chorus Line (1975) and The Wiz (1975), demonstrate the work of an array of composers and orchestrators and were derived from different subject matter and source material. Taking into account the backgrounds of the creative teams with particular attention to the orchestrators, the plots of the shows, and the figures presented in each musical, the chapters that follow each provide a discussion of musical numbers. Special attention will be paid to how the orchestration serves to support reception of the characters, as well the legacies of the orchestrators’ work and techniques found in these shows. These studies reveal the inclusion of rock on Broadway to be a moment of fundamental change to many aspects of the genre and to the ways in which composers and orchestrators describe characters and dramatic situations, new ideas that continue to influence the musical theater to the present day

Temporal datalog with existential quantification

Existential rules, also known as tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) or Datalog± rules, are heavily studied in the communities of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Semantic Web, and Databases, due to their rich modelling capabilities. In this paper we consider TGDs in the temporal setting, by introducing and studying DatalogMTL∃—an extension of metric temporal Datalog (DatalogMTL) obtained by allowing for existential rules in programs. We show that DatalogMTL∃ is undecidable even in the restricted cases of guarded and weakly-acyclic programs. To address this issue we introduce uniform semantics which, on the one hand, is well-suited for modelling temporal knowledge as it prevents from unintended value invention and, on the other hand, provides decidability of reasoning; in particular, it becomes 2-ExpSpace-complete for weakly-acyclic programs but remains undecidable for guarded programs. We provide an implementation for the decidable case and demonstrate its practical feasibility. Thus we obtain an expressive, yet decidable, rule-language and a system which is suitable for complex temporal reasoning with existential rules

Cendrarsiana

Schema mappings have been extensively studied in the context of data exchange and data integration, where they have turned out to be the right level of abstraction for formalizing data interoperability tasks. Up to now and for the most part, schema mappings have been studied as static objects, in the sense that each time the focus has been on a single schema mapping of interest or, in the case of composition, on a pair of schema mappings of interest. In this paper, we adopt a dynamic viewpoint and embark on a study of sequences of schema mappings and of the limiting behavior of such sequences. To this effect, we first introduce a natural notion of distance on sets of finite target instances that expresses how "Close" two sets of target instances are as regards the certain answers of conjunctive queries on these sets. Using this notion of distance, we investigate pointwise limits and uniform limits of sequences of schema mappings, as well as the companion notions of pointwise Cauchy and uniformly Cauchy sequences of schema mappings. We obtain a number of results about the limits of sequences of GAV schema mappings and the limits of sequences of LAV schema mappings that reveal striking differences between these two classes of schema mappings. We also consider the completion of the metric space of sets of target instances and obtain concrete representations of limits of sequences of schema mappings in terms of generalized schema mappings, that is, schema mappings with infinite target instances as solutions to (finite) source instances

The Space-Efficient Core of Vadalog

Vadalog is a system for performing complex reasoning tasks such as those required in advanced knowledge graphs. The logical core of the underlying Vadalog language is the warded fragment of tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs). This formalism ensures tractable reasoning in data complexity, while a recent analysis focusing on a practical implementation led to the reasoning algorithm around which the Vadalog system is built. A fundamental question that has emerged in the context of Vadalog is the following: can we limit the recursion allowed by wardedness in order to obtain a formalism that provides a convenient syntax for expressing useful recursive statements, and at the same time achieves space-efficiency? After analyzing several real-life examples of warded sets of TGDs provided by our industrial partners, as well as recent benchmarks, we observed that recursion is often used in a restricted way: the body of a TGD contains at most one atom whose predicate is mutually recursive with a predicate in the head. We show that this type of recursion, known as piece-wise linear in the Datalog literature, is the answer to our main question. We further show that piece-wise linear recursion alone, without the wardedness condition, is not enough as it leads to the undecidability of reasoning. We finally study the relative expressiveness of the query languages based on (piece-wise linear) warded sets of TGDs