Reasoning About Pragmatics with Neural Listeners and Speakers

We present a model for pragmatically describing scenes, in which contrastive behavior results from a combination of inference-driven pragmatics and learned semantics. Like previous learned approaches to language generation, our model uses a simple feature-driven architecture (here a pair of neural "listener" and "speaker" models) to ground language in the world. Like inference-driven approaches to pragmatics, our model actively reasons about listener behavior when selecting utterances. For training, our approach requires only ordinary captions, annotated _without_ demonstration of the pragmatic behavior the model ultimately exhibits. In human evaluations on a referring expression game, our approach succeeds 81% of the time, compared to a 69% success rate using existing techniques

Jihadism: What is a Terror Apparatus? Interview with Jacob Rogozinski

In the present interview, Jacob Rogozinski elucidates the main concepts and theses he developed in his latest book dedicated to the issue of modern jihadism. On this occasion, he explains his disagreements with other philosophical (Badiou, Baudrillard, Žižek) and anthropological (Girard) accounts of Islamic terrorism. Rogozinski also explains that although jihadism betrays Islam, it nonetheless has everything to do with Islam. Eventually, he describes his own philosophical journey which led him from a phenomenological study of the ego and the flesh to the study of past (witch-hunts, French Reign of Terror) and contemporary (jihadism) terror apparatuses

The Law of Cross-Border Securitization: Lex Juris

Denna uppsats kretsar kring beslutsfattande och metodik vid fastighetsinvesteringar i potentiella tillväxtnoder. Då fastighetssektorn är så omfattande har vi valt att avgränsa oss till en speciell typ av fastigheter, närmare bestämt logistikfastigheter. Ytterligare en fördjupning har skett, där vi valt ut en specifik investering i området, för att fördjupa oss om denna. Det specifika fall vi valt att ta mestadels av vår data från är Rosersbergs industriområde, även känt som Stockholm Nord Logistikcenter. Som en referenspunkt till Stockholm Nord Logistikcenter har vi i arbetet även skrivit översiktligt om Arenastaden, som är belägen i Solna. En del tidigare forskning har gjort på området Logistik, och somliga av dessa studier har vi även tagit del av för att utvinna information inom ämnet som även kunnat användas i vårt arbete. Dock har den studien vi främst använt oss av varit inriktad på logistik i sin helhet och inte ett specifikt fall. På cirka 9 år har området utanför Rosersberg villastad förvandlats från en skog, inom ett bullerområde utanför en mindre bostadsort, till en logistiknod där ett tiotal stora företag bedriver verksamhet i tusentals kvadratmeter lokaler. Allt detta i något som tros komma att bli ett av de största logistikcentrena i hela Sverige, och med tanke för de framtidsplaner som finns är det inte osannolikt. Den största drivkraften för projektet har varit Kilenkrysset, men detta med hjälp av gott samarbetsvilja från offentlig sektor. Vår studie kretsar kring vilka faktorer som påverkat till att denna investering blivit lyckad, samt vilken typ av företag det är som bedrivit arbetet. Vi har även gått in på hur orten Rosersberg, som tidigare legat i lä, påverkats av detta händelseförlopp. Innan projektet i Rosersberg initierades av Kilenkrysset har många frågor angående området diskuterats inom kommunen under många årtionden, dock har man aldrig kommit till skott på grund av bristande intresse och samhällsnytta. Utifrån det vi kunnat utläsa av den tillgängliga data vi samlat, har vi kunnat dra slutsatsen att utvecklingen bidragit till att göra platsen attraktiv för företag, men likväl för människor att numera bo i. Under arbetet har vi tagit kontakt med fyra respondenter som intervjuats, varav tre av dessa respondenter kommer från koncernen Kilenkrysset. Flera företag, bland annat NCC, har kontribuerat till utvecklingen i Rosersbergs industriområde, men Kilenkrysset är de som varit överlägset störst i området. Vi har även haft kontakt med en före detta anställd på bygg- och trafiknämnden i Sigtuna kommun för att få en objektiv, och mer överskådlig bild över hur samarbetet mellan offentlig sektor och investerare sett ut. För att bättre kunna förstå hur beslutsfattande skötts inom Kilenkrysset, både under och innan projektets fortgående, har vi studerat företaget mer grundligt. Information har framtagits kring företagets uppstart och dess historia, och hur det beslutsfattandet som till sist ledde dem till Rosersberg sett ut. Man kan klart se att både företaget i sin helhet och dess ledning är säregna, vilket man även ur materialet kan observera hur detta gynnat dem under projektets fortlöpande. Men även negativa aspekter har tagits upp angående deras beslutsfattande och tillvägagångssätt. Detta för att ge en rättvisande bild av vilka för- och nackdelar som i realiteten kretsar runt dessa metoder.This essay revolves around the desicion making process in real estate investments, where the investment contributes to the economic growth of the surrounding area. Due to the sheer size of the sector, we have chosen to limit our study to a specific type of real estate, which we decided to be logistic property. We have also chosen to study a specific case in more detail, to be able to understand how these projects develops. The case we chose was the investment of Rosersbergs Industrial park, also known as Stockholm Nord Logistic Centre. As a point of reference to this project we have chosen to briefly look into another, quite similar in size, project; Arenastaden in Solna. There have been studies made on Logistics in the past, some of which we have chosen to use as sources of information on our study. The study we used as the main source studied logistics on a different scale than ours, where the whole logistics market in Stockholm was studied. In merely 9 years the area surrounding Rosersberg has transformed, from unexploited land suffering from airport noise, into a rapidly growing logistics center where dozens of companies have chosen to exist. All this in an area many believe will be one of the biggest logistic centers in Sweden, which is not unlikely due to the future plans of the area. The company that initiated the project, which also has been the driving force is Kilenkrysset AB, with a lot of assistance from a supportive municipality. Before the company's initiative in the area, the municipality has been contemplating since the 60's what to do with the area, and how to make it grow. The issue before the company came along was almost solely economical; because there was no solid plan or investor to take care of the area and the infrastructure surrounding it. Based on the data we collected the area has improved its attraction both to companies, as well as to the residents in the area. Our study will attempt to determine which of the variables had the greatest importance on the end result of the project. As well as to study which type of company that decides to take on these kinds of projects. We have also studied how the surrounding area in Rosersberg has grown as a result of this specific investment. To gather information on the subject, we have contacted four respondents, which consists of three people from the Kilenkrysset organization. The reason why the majority of the interviewed respondents has been from one single company is because they have by far been the biggest investor in the area. The construction company NCC has also been part of the development in the area, but have sold most of their property to Kilenkrysset. The last respondent is from the building and traffic department within the municipality (Bygg- och trafiknämnden). Since we want to understand how decision making is handled within these types of organizations, we have chosen to study Kilenkrysset more thoroughly. Information about their history and the decision making process that eventually lead them to Rosersberg. From the information collected we can conclude that the company and its management have quite an extraordinary way of doing business. It is also obvious how their way of thinking has benefited them throughout their project in Rosersberg. But every technique has consequences, and we will also enlighten these consequences to try to observe both the pros and the cons about these methods

Learning with Latent Language

The named concepts and compositional operators present in natural language provide a rich source of information about the kinds of abstractions humans use to navigate the world. Can this linguistic background knowledge improve the generality and efficiency of learned classifiers and control policies? This paper aims to show that using the space of natural language strings as a parameter space is an effective way to capture natural task structure. In a pretraining phase, we learn a language interpretation model that transforms inputs (e.g. images) into outputs (e.g. labels) given natural language descriptions. To learn a new concept (e.g. a classifier), we search directly in the space of descriptions to minimize the interpreter's loss on training examples. Crucially, our models do not require language data to learn these concepts: language is used only in pretraining to impose structure on subsequent learning. Results on image classification, text editing, and reinforcement learning show that, in all settings, models with a linguistic parameterization outperform those without

Translating Neuralese

Several approaches have recently been proposed for learning decentralized deep multiagent policies that coordinate via a differentiable communication channel. While these policies are effective for many tasks, interpretation of their induced communication strategies has remained a challenge. Here we propose to interpret agents' messages by translating them. Unlike in typical machine translation problems, we have no parallel data to learn from. Instead we develop a translation model based on the insight that agent messages and natural language strings mean the same thing if they induce the same belief about the world in a listener. We present theoretical guarantees and empirical evidence that our approach preserves both the semantics and pragmatics of messages by ensuring that players communicating through a translation layer do not suffer a substantial loss in reward relative to players with a common language.Comment: Fixes typos and cleans ups some model presentation detail