Balls-in-boxes duality for coalescing random walks and coalescing Brownian motions

We present a duality relation between two systems of coalescing random walks and an analogous duality relation between two systems of coalescing Brownian motions. Our results extends previous work in the literature and we apply it to the study of a system of coalescing Brownian motions with Poisson immigration.Comment: 13 page

Predicting ConceptNet Path Quality Using Crowdsourced Assessments of Naturalness

In many applications, it is important to characterize the way in which two concepts are semantically related. Knowledge graphs such as ConceptNet provide a rich source of information for such characterizations by encoding relations between concepts as edges in a graph. When two concepts are not directly connected by an edge, their relationship can still be described in terms of the paths that connect them. Unfortunately, many of these paths are uninformative and noisy, which means that the success of applications that use such path features crucially relies on their ability to select high-quality paths. In existing applications, this path selection process is based on relatively simple heuristics. In this paper we instead propose to learn to predict path quality from crowdsourced human assessments. Since we are interested in a generic task-independent notion of quality, we simply ask human participants to rank paths according to their subjective assessment of the paths' naturalness, without attempting to define naturalness or steering the participants towards particular indicators of quality. We show that a neural network model trained on these assessments is able to predict human judgments on unseen paths with near optimal performance. Most notably, we find that the resulting path selection method is substantially better than the current heuristic approaches at identifying meaningful paths.Comment: In Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW) 201

Differential Privacy of Aggregated DC Optimal Power Flow Data

We consider the problem of privately releasing aggregated network statistics obtained from solving a DC optimal power flow (OPF) problem. It is shown that the mechanism that determines the noise distribution parameters are linked to the topology of the power system and the monotonicity of the network. We derive a measure of "almost" monotonicity and show how it can be used in conjunction with a linear program in order to release aggregated OPF data using the differential privacy framework.Comment: Accepted by 2019 American Control Conference (ACC

FOXP3 interacts with hnRNPF to modulate pre-mRNA alternative splicing

FOXP3 promotes the development and function of regulatory T cells mainly through regulating the transcription of target genes. RNA alternative splicing has been implicated in a wide range of physiological and pathophysiological processes. We report here that FOXP3 associates with heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein (hnRNP) F through the exon 2-encoded region of FOXP3 and the second quasi-RNA recognition motif (qRRM) of hnRNPF. FOXP3 represses the ability of hnRNPF to bind to its target pre-mRNA and thus modulates RNA alternative splicing. Furthermore, overexpression of mouse hnRNPF in in vitro-differentiated regulatory T cells (Tregs) reduced their suppressive function. Thus, our studies identify a novel mechanism by which FOXP3 regulates mRNA alternative splicing to modulate the function of regulatory T cells

Spiritual Formation as a Method of Leadership Training: A Case Study at Pepperdine University

Dallas Willard, Professor of Philosophy and Christian spiritual formation at USC, was known to define spiritual formation not as the summation of one’s good works and talents, but rather as a continual pursuit in modeling the character of Jesus Christ. This understanding of spiritual formation was applied to a group of first year students at Pepperdine University who were selected as students with high potential of becoming future leaders at Pepperdine. Most training programs on campus, such as Resident Life Formation and Volunteer Center training, currently focus on teaching students lessons of what to do in their job. In Spring of 2016, a pilot training program with 12 first year students was conducted to train students to lead not from their abilities but from their identity as sons and daughters of Jesus Christ. The goal of the program was to test the theory that asking questions about identity, or who we are, is more effective in developing future leaders than asking questions about ability, or what we can do. The 12 first year students were taken through an eight-week training program with presenters from various Spiritual Life departments on campus, such as the Office of the Chaplain and the Religion Division. Students and presenters were surveyed before and after the program and asked to provide feedback on the curriculum. Ultimately, the results demonstrate the viability of a new form of training programs rooted in questions of spiritual formation

Cultural Diversity in Student Ministry Leadership

In an attempt to contribute to how ministries and Christian academia is addressing issues of diversity, I am conducting a study to analyze correlations between ethnicity and styles/values of leadership. The goal is to uncover whether or not a particular ethnicity generally prefers one style of leadership over another. Past research on the subject has already seen that, in the business world, certain practices work better than others. For example, those from an Asian culture are more likely to prefer formality and authority as opposed to the collaborative and relationship-oriented style of leadership found in America. I will contribute to the data on these correlations by testing a sample of students from Pepperdine and asking for (a) their race and ethnicity, (b) their preferred leadership style out of the 3 most common leadership styles, and (c) their preferred leadership values out of a list of 5 Christian leadership values. Testing for correlations between these three scales, all reported anonymously, would help inform future ministry leaders or Christian higher education professionals if certain leadership styles or values would work better with certain cultures

Prostitution as a Business

This presentation is based on a book project providing an interdisciplinary introduction to the topic of prostitution. Steven Zhou will present on prostitution as a business enterprise, describing the social stigmatization of sex work as well as how prostitution functions as an industry involving entrepreneurial risks and rewards, stakeholders, a market structure, and occupational hazards

Cultural diversity and ministry leadership: a case study at Pepperdine University

Each person will relate to God in a different way, and God has a unique relationship with each created person. As a result, there is simply no way for ministers to prescribe a panacea for how to conduct ministry. This is complicated even further by the globalized world that Christian ministers face today. Christian ministers must somehow balance the fact that the Christian God both transcends culture and uses culture to communicate. In order to truly minister to a multiethnic population, Christian ministers must learn ways of speaking another language, both literally and figuratively. Whether it is by learning a new language or learning new customs, Christian ministers must respond to this global society by learning the art of using the vast array of tools and skills at their disposal to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This thesis is one of many that seek to, through academic research, identify patterns in ministry that can help predict the effectiveness of a method in one situation versus another. In the case of leadership among a multi-ethnic population, research is unlikely to ever conclusively prove that one form of leadership is more effective than another. However, at the very least, research can demonstrate that styles of leadership do in fact matter. Research in the intersection of leadership and culture, both from a secular and religious point of view, has demonstrated that there is in fact some degree of correlation. Given a multi-ethnic population to which a Christian leader is likely to minister to in this modern age, the research suggests that a given ethnic group might prefer one leadership style or behavior over another. The data presented in this thesis attempts to add to this body of knowledge by correlating ethnicity with preference for transformational, transactional, or passive leadership. The results of the present research suggest that there are some significant correlations, but the limitations on the study prevent a clear identification of what variables and factors are contributing to these correlations. That being said, these results are generally in agreement with the body of literature on the topic so far, many of which demonstrate that there is significant correlation, but it is unclear where the correlation lies and what factors are involved in it. The conclusion from all of this research is that leadership matters when ministering to a multi-ethnic population. In some contexts, one form of leadership is more effective than another, and in other contexts, it is the other way around. For Christian ministers to truly be trained to be well-rounded leaders, especially if they are entering ministry with a multi-ethnic population, they can and should be taught to use different leadership styles depending on the context of the people they are ministering to. It is my hope that this thesis will first of all provoked and rallied ministers to realize that they can and should change their leadership style depending on the context, and second of all inspire ministers to do their own testing and research in what leadership style might be most effective for their own context

Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations

This paper presents Prototypical Contrastive Learning (PCL), an unsupervised representation learning method that addresses the fundamental limitations of instance-wise contrastive learning. PCL not only learns low-level features for the task of instance discrimination, but more importantly, it implicitly encodes semantic structures of the data into the learned embedding space. Specifically, we introduce prototypes as latent variables to help find the maximum-likelihood estimation of the network parameters in an Expectation-Maximization framework. We iteratively perform E-step as finding the distribution of prototypes via clustering and M-step as optimizing the network via contrastive learning. We propose ProtoNCE loss, a generalized version of the InfoNCE loss for contrastive learning, which encourages representations to be closer to their assigned prototypes. PCL outperforms state-of-the-art instance-wise contrastive learning methods on multiple benchmarks with substantial improvement in low-resource transfer learning. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/salesforce/PCL