Education alignment

This essay reviews recent developments in embedding data management and curation skills into information technology, library and information science, and research-based postgraduate courses in various national contexts. The essay also investigates means of joining up formal education with professional development training opportunities more coherently. The potential for using professional internships as a means of improving communication and understanding between disciplines is also explored. A key aim of this essay is to identify what level of complementarity is needed across various disciplines to most effectively and efficiently support the entire data curation lifecycle

Issues in digital preservation: towards a new research agenda

Digital Preservation has evolved into a specialized, interdisciplinary research discipline of its own, seeing significant increases in terms of research capacity, results, but also challenges. However, with this specialization and subsequent formation of a dedicated subgroup of researchers active in this field, limitations of the challenges addressed can be observed. Digital preservation research may seem to react to problems arising, fixing problems that exist now, rather than proactively researching new solutions that may be applicable only after a few years of maturing. Recognising the benefits of bringing together researchers and practitioners with various professional backgrounds related to digital preservation, a seminar was organized in Schloss Dagstuhl, at the Leibniz Center for Informatics (18-23 July 2010), with the aim of addressing the current digital preservation challenges, with a specific focus on the automation aspects in this field. The main goal of the seminar was to outline some research challenges in digital preservation, providing a number of "research questions" that could be immediately tackled, e.g. in Doctoral Thesis. The seminar intended also to highlight the need for the digital preservation community to reach out to IT research and other research communities outside the immediate digital preservation domain, in order to jointly develop solutions

Integrated methods and scenario development for urban groundwater management and protection during tunnel road construction: a case study of urban hydrogeology in the city of Basel, Switzerland

In the northwestern area of Basel, Switzerland, a tunnel highway connects the French highway A35 (Mulhouse-Basel) with the Swiss A2 (Basel-Gotthard-Milano). The subsurface highway construction was associated with significant impacts on the urban groundwater system. Parts of this area were formerly contaminated by industrial wastes, and groundwater resources are extensively used by industry. During some construction phases, considerable groundwater drawdown was necessary, leading to major changes in the groundwater flow regime. Sufficient groundwater supply for industrial users and possible groundwater pollution due to interactions with contaminated areas had to be taken into account. A groundwater management system is presented, comprising extensive groundwater monitoring, high-resolution numerical groundwater modeling, and the development and evaluation of different scenarios. This integrated approach facilitated the evaluation of the sum of impacts, and their interaction in time and space with changing hydrological boundary conditions. For all project phases, changes of the groundwater system had to be evaluated in terms of the various goals and requirements. Although the results of this study are case-specific, the overall conceptual approach and methodologies applied may be directly transferred to other urban area

Reinforcement Learning in Sparse-Reward Environments with Hindsight Policy Gradients

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable higher-level planning based on subgoals. In sparse-reward environments, the capacity to exploit information about the degree to which an arbitrary goal has been achieved while another goal was intended appears crucial to enabling sample efficient learning. However, reinforcement learning agents have only recently been endowed with such capacity for hindsight. In this letter, we demonstrate how hindsight can be introduced to policy gradient methods, generalizing this idea to a broad class of successful algorithms. Our experiments on a diverse selection of sparse-reward environments show that hindsight leads to a remarkable increase in sample efficiency

Recurrent Neural-Linear Posterior Sampling for Nonstationary Contextual Bandits

An agent in a nonstationary contextual bandit problem should balance between exploration and the exploitation of (periodic or structured) patterns present in its previous experiences. Handcrafting an appropriate historical context is an attractive alternative to transform a nonstationary problem into a stationary problem that can be solved efficiently. However, even a carefully designed historical context may introduce spurious relationships or lack a convenient representation of crucial information. In order to address these issues, we propose an approach that learns to represent the relevant context for a decision based solely on the raw history of interactions between the agent and the environment. This approach relies on a combination of features extracted by recurrent neural networks with a contextual linear bandit algorithm based on posterior sampling. Our experiments on a diverse selection of contextual and noncontextual nonstationary problems show that our recurrent approach consistently outperforms its feedforward counterpart, which requires handcrafted historical contexts, while being more widely applicable than conventional nonstationary bandit algorithms. Although it is very difficult to provide theoretical performance guarantees for our new approach, we also prove a novel regret bound for linear posterior sampling with measurement error that may serve as a foundation for future theoretical work

Hindsight policy gradients

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable higher-level planning based on subgoals. In sparse-reward environments, the capacity to exploit information about the degree to which an arbitrary goal has been achieved while another goal was intended appears crucial to enable sample efficient learning. However, reinforcement learning agents have only recently been endowed with such capacity for hindsight. In this paper, we demonstrate how hindsight can be introduced to policy gradient methods, generalizing this idea to a broad class of successful algorithms. Our experiments on a diverse selection of sparse-reward environments show that hindsight leads to a remarkable increase in sample efficiency.Comment: Accepted to ICLR 201

Sunset-calc: An R Shiny Application for Processing Thermo-Optical Analysis Data from Atmospheric Aerosol Measurements

Atmospheric aerosols are harmful to human health and affect the climate. We use radiocarbon for the source apportionment of carbonaceous aerosols to unequivocally separate fossil form non-fossil sources. We use thermal-optical analysis (TOA) for radiocarbon measurement of the organic carbon (OC) and elemental carbon (EC) fractions, which requires physical OC/EC separation. TOA relies on the changes in the optical behaviour of carbon when OC is thermally separated from EC. Thermal-optical OC/EC separation leads to partial EC-loss and the conversion of some OC to EC (charring). EC-loss and charring are artifacts which falsify the results of the quantification and must be corrected for. Furthermore, quantifications with custom TOA protocols are not supported with the provided device software. These calculations were previously performed with various spreadsheet style templates and other tools. With Sunset-calc, we aimed to bundle the data processing and develop an extendable and simple web application. With R Shiny, we found a powerful and simple language also for people with little prior programming skills to build rich web applications. We have deployed Sunset-calc on an on-premises R server (14c.unibe.ch/sunsetcalc), which is publicly accessible and particularly useful for our collaborators outside of the University. Sunset-calc is available on GitHub (github.com/martin-rauber/sunset-calc)

Spatial and temporal distribution of supercooled cloud liquid water during wintertime storms over the northern Colorado Rockies, The

August 1984.Includes bibliographical references (page 58).Sponsored by National Science Foundation ATM-78-19260.Sponsored by National Science Foundation ATM-81-09890

Influ?ncia do ?cido giber?lico sobre a germina??o de sementes de milho

Maize (Zea mays L.) is widely cultivated and consumed in Brazil, as well as in other countries. This culture has great adaptability in different growing environments, so when sowing is carried out, it is preferable that fast germination occur, because the seeds are exposed to pest attack, and can accelerate the deterioration process. The objective of the present work was to evaluate the germination process of maize seeds submitted to different concentrations of gibberellic acid, in order to visualize their influence on the germination of the seeds of this crop. The experiment was carried out at the Laboratory of Plant Physiology of the Federal University of the Southern Frontier - UFSS, Cerro Largo campus. In order to conduct the experiments, we used 7- treatments that refer to different concentrations of gibberellic acid, which vary between 0, 10, 50, 100, 200, 500 and 1000 ppm, with a completely randomized design (DIC). four replicates of 50 seeds, totaling 28 experimental units. The evaluated parameters were percentage of germination, of normal seedlings, abnormal seedlings and dead seeds, also the germination speed index test was performed. The results were submitted to analysis of variance (ANOVA), using the SASM-agri program, posterior, submitted to regression analysis. With the results obtained, it was observed that, in corn seeds, the application of gibberellic acid resulted in the reduction of germination percentage and normal seedlings, increase of abnormal seedlings and dead seeds. For the germination rate index (IVG), the higher the concentration of gibberellic acid the lower the IVG, therefore, it is concluded that the results found do not positively influence the application of gibberellic acid in maize seeds.O milho (Zea mays L.) ? amplamente cultivado e consumido no Brasil, assim como, em outros pa?ses. Essa cultura possui grande adaptabilidade em diferentes ambientes de cultivo, desse modo quando realizada a semeadura, ? prefer?vel que ocorra a r?pida germina??o, pois as sementes est?o expostas ao ataque de pragas, podendo acelerar o processo de deteriora??o das mesmas. Com isso, o objetivo do presente trabalho foi avaliar o processo germinativo de sementes de milho submetidas a diferentes concentra??es de ?cido giber?lico, buscando visualizar sua influ?ncia sobre a germina??o das sementes dessa cultura. O experimento foi realizado no Laborat?rio de Fisiologia Vegetal da Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul ? UFSS, campus Cerro Largo. Para a condu??o dos experimentos, utilizou-se o Delineamento Inteiramente Casualizado (DIC), foram utilizados 7 tratamentos que referem a diferentes concentra??es de ?cido giber?lico, as quais variam entre 0, 10, 50, 100, 200, 500 e 1000 ppm, com quatro repeti??es de 50 sementes, totalizando 28 unidades experimentais. Os par?metros avaliados foram porcentagem de germina??o, de pl?ntulas normais, pl?ntulas anormais e sementes mortas, realizou-se tamb?m o teste de ?ndice de velocidade de germina??o. Os resultados obtidos foram submetidos a an?lise de vari?ncia (ANOVA), utilizando o programa SASM-agri, posterior, submetidas a an?lise de regress?o. Com os resultados alcan?ados, observou-se que em sementes de milho, a aplica??o de ?cido giber?lico resultou, na redu??o da porcentagem de germina??o e de pl?ntulas normais, aumento de pl?ntulas anormais e sementes mortas. Para o ?ndice de velocidade de germina??o (IVG), quanto maior a concentra??o de ?cido giber?lico menor o IVG, portanto, conclui-se que os resultados encontrados n?o influenciam positivamente a aplica??o de ?cido giber?lico em sementes de milho