«You Europeans, you are just like Fish!». Some sceptical relfections on Modernity and Democratisation in Africa

The author of this article proposes an extremely critical examination of some of the theoretical assumptions frequently ideological in nature, underlying the scientific and political discussion around the concepts of «modernisation», «development», and «democratisation». His conclusion is that African reality can only be adequately understood by means of approaches freed from a number of current ideas, and that only on this basis will it be possible to define valid strategies.O autor deste artigo procede a um exame extremamente crítico de alguns dos pressupostos teóricos, frequentemente de natureza ideológica, da discussão científica e política em tomo dos conceitos da «modernização», do «desenvolvimento» e da «democratização» em África. A sua conclusão é que a realidade africana só pode ser captada adequadamente por abordagens desembaraçadas de um conjunto de ideias feitas, e que só nesta base será possível conceber estratégias válidas.L'auteur de cet article procède à un examen extrêmement critique de certains sous-entendus théoriques, fréquemment de nature idéologique, de la discussion scientifique et politiques autour des concepts de «modernisation», «développement» et «démocratisation». Sa conclusion est que la réalité africaine ne peut être comprise de façon adéquate qu'au moyen d'approches libérées d'un ensemble d'idées cou­rantes, et que la définition de stratégies valables n'est possible que sur cette base-là

From Knowledge Augmentation to Multi-tasking: Towards Human-like Dialogue Systems

The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity of an artificial intelligence agent on the indistinguishability of its dialogues from humans'. It should come as no surprise that human-level dialogue systems are very challenging to build. But, while early effort on rule-based systems found limited success, the emergence of deep learning enabled great advance on this topic. In this thesis, we focus on methods that address the numerous issues that have been imposing the gap between artificial conversational agents and human-level interlocutors. These methods were proposed and experimented with in ways that were inspired by general state-of-the-art AI methodologies. But they also targeted the characteristics that dialogue systems possess.Comment: PhD thesi

On the Inconsistencies of Conditionals Learned by Masked Language Models

Learning to predict masked tokens in a sequence has been shown to be a powerful pretraining objective for large language models. After training, such masked language models can provide distributions of tokens conditioned on bidirectional context. In this paper, we show that contrary to popular assumptions, such bidirectional conditionals often demonstrate considerable inconsistencies, i.e., they cannot be derived from a coherent joint distribution when considered together. We empirically quantify such inconsistencies in the simple scenario of bigram comparison for two common styles of masked language models: T5-style and BERT-style. For example, we show that T5 models often confuse their own preference regarding two similar bigrams. We show that inconsistencies exist ubiquitously in masked language models of diverse sizes and configurations, from RoBERTa-base to GLM-130B. As an initial attempt to address this issue during the inference phase, we propose Ensemble of Conditionals, a self-ensemble algorithm that jointly considers many inconsistent conditionals directly produced by the MLM to synthesize a distribution that is used as the model's final output. Such ensembling improves open-source SOTA results on LAMBADA.Comment: Updated version; Added more experiments on "Ensemble of Conditionals

TriG - A GNSS Precise Orbit and Radio Occultation Space Receiver

The GPS radio occultation (RO) technique [1] produces measurements in the ionosphere and neutral atmosphere [2] that contribute to monitoring space weather and climate change; and improving operational weather prediction. The high accuracy of RO soundings, traceable to SI standards, makes them ideal climate benchmark observations. For weather applications, RO observations improve the accuracy of weather forecasts by providing temperature and moisture profiles of sub-km vertical resolution, over land and ocean and in the presence of clouds. JPL is currently flying a handful of RO instruments [3] on various satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Although these receivers have served to pioneer occultation measurements, various advances in technology and understanding of the RO technique along with availability of new signals from GPS and other GNSS satellites allow us to design an improved next generation space-based Precise Orbit Determination (POD) and RO receiver, the TriG receiver. The paper describes the architecture and implementation of the JPL TriG receiver as well as results obtained with a prototype receiver demonstrating key technologies necessary for a next-generation space science receiver

Genetic, environmental and gender influences on attachment disorder behaviours

Background Despite current interest in attachment disorder, there is concern about its discrimination from other disorders and an unproven assumption of an environmental aetiology. Aims To test whether behaviours suggestive of attachment disorder are distinct from other childhood behavioural and emotional problems and are solely environmentally determined. Method In a community sample of 13 472 twins, we carried out factor analysis of questionnaire items encompassing behaviours indicative of attachment disorder, conduct problems, hyperactivity and emotional difficulties. We used behavioural genetic model-fitting analysis to explore the contribution of genes and environment. Results Factor analysis showed clear discrimination between behaviours suggestive of attachment disorder, conduct problems, hyperactivity and emotional problems. Behavioural genetics analysis suggested a strong genetic influence to attachment disorder behaviour, with males showing higher heritability. Conclusions Behaviours suggestive of attachment disorder can be differentiated from common childhood emotional and behavioural problems and appear to be strongly genetically influenced, particularly in boys. INTRODUCTION TOP ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION METHOD RESULTS DISCUSSION REFERENCES There have been recent attempts to codify behaviours associated with early neglect and institutionalisation (Chisolm et al, 1995; Zeanah et al, 2004) into a psychiatric category. Both DSM–IV and ICD–10 describe reactive attachment disorder, with two subtypes encompassing inhibited and disinhibited behaviour (World Health Organization, 1992; American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Questions remain about the nosology of the syndrome beyond age 5 years (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2005), therefore we simply refer to ‘attachment disorder behaviours’. We seek to extend the extant literature by testing two hypotheses: first, that the two subtypes are distinct from one another and from other common behavioural and emotional problems in young children, and second that these behavioural patterns are environmentally mediated. We capitalise on a twin study, a design that provides particular leverage in testing environmental hypotheses

Managing variability in the summary and comparison of gait data

Variability in quantitative gait data arises from many potential sources, including natural temporal dynamics of neuromotor control, pathologies of the neurological or musculoskeletal systems, the effects of aging, as well as variations in the external environment, assistive devices, instrumentation or data collection methodologies. In light of this variability, unidimensional, cycle-based gait variables such as stride period should be viewed as random variables and prototypical single-cycle kinematic or kinetic curves ought to be considered as random functions of time. Within this framework, we exemplify some practical solutions to a number of commonly encountered analytical challenges in dealing with gait variability. On the topic of univariate gait variables, robust estimation is proposed as a means of coping with contaminated gait data, and the summary of non-normally distributed gait data is demonstrated by way of empirical examples. On the summary of gait curves, we discuss methods to manage undesirable phase variation and non-robust spread estimates. To overcome the limitations of conventional comparisons among curve landmarks or parameters, we propose as a viable alternative, the combination of curve registration, robust estimation, and formal statistical testing of curves as coherent units. On the basis of these discussions, we provide heuristic guidelines for the summary of gait variables and the comparison of gait curves