Fr\'echet ChemNet Distance: A metric for generative models for molecules in drug discovery

The new wave of successful generative models in machine learning has increased the interest in deep learning driven de novo drug design. However, assessing the performance of such generative models is notoriously difficult. Metrics that are typically used to assess the performance of such generative models are the percentage of chemically valid molecules or the similarity to real molecules in terms of particular descriptors, such as the partition coefficient (logP) or druglikeness. However, method comparison is difficult because of the inconsistent use of evaluation metrics, the necessity for multiple metrics, and the fact that some of these measures can easily be tricked by simple rule-based systems. We propose a novel distance measure between two sets of molecules, called Fr\'echet ChemNet distance (FCD), that can be used as an evaluation metric for generative models. The FCD is similar to a recently established performance metric for comparing image generation methods, the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID). Whereas the FID uses one of the hidden layers of InceptionNet, the FCD utilizes the penultimate layer of a deep neural network called ChemNet, which was trained to predict drug activities. Thus, the FCD metric takes into account chemically and biologically relevant information about molecules, and also measures the diversity of the set via the distribution of generated molecules. The FCD's advantage over previous metrics is that it can detect if generated molecules are a) diverse and have similar b) chemical and c) biological properties as real molecules. We further provide an easy-to-use implementation that only requires the SMILES representation of the generated molecules as input to calculate the FCD. Implementations are available at: https://www.github.com/bioinf-jku/FCDComment: Implementations are available at: https://www.github.com/bioinf-jku/FC

Ergebnisse der Besucherbefragung zur „Nacht der Museen“ in Hannover am 16. Juni 2012

Empirische Kulturnutzerforschung ist ein Instrument des Kulturmanagements mit dem das Erreichen von strategischen und operativen Marketingzielen überprüft werden kann. Das Institut für Kulturpolitik der Universität Hildesheim erhielt vom Kulturbüro der Stadt Hannover den Auftrag, eine Besucherbefragung anlässlich der „Nacht der Museen 2012“ durchzuführen. Ziel der Untersuchung war zum einen eine Evaluation der im Vorfeld durchgeführten Marketing-Maßnahmen

Die Evaluation der Kulturloge Berlin

Es wird die Arbeit der Kulturloge Berlin mit dem Schwerpunkt der Befragung derer Gäste evaluiert. Die Kulturloge Berlin ist eine ehrenamtlich betriebene Organisation, welche nicht verkaufte Karten von Kulturveranstaltern sammelt und finanziell Bedürftigen kostenlos vermittelt. Stellt die Arbeit der Kulturloge ein Instrument des Audience Developments dar, welches die erfolgreiche Mobilisierung von bisher kultur- und bildungsfernen Menschen ermöglicht? Welche Motive haben die Gäste der Kulturloge? Unterscheiden sich diese vom klassischen Publikum? Was sind die Erfolgsfaktoren der Kulturloge

Amateur theatre in Lower Saxony.A study on the conditions and procedures of amateur theaters.

In zahlreichen Städten und Gemeinden in Niedersachsen wird Theater gespielt. Die Mitglieder dieser Amateurtheater wählen gemeinsam Stücke aus, proben regelmäßig nach Feierabend, bauen selbst das Bühnenbild, schneidern die Kostüme und führen schließlich mit vielen Helfern in Dorfgemeinschaftshäusern oder Gaststätten ihre überwiegend heiteren Stücke auf. Im Publikum sitzen vor allem Menschen aus dem gleichen Ort oder der näheren Umgebung. Nach dem Kulturmonitoring Niedersachsen praktizieren 9 % der Bevölkerung in Niedersachsen ‚Theater spielen‘ als künstlerisch-kreative Freizeitbeschäftigung. Obgleich die Theaterlandschaft in Niedersachsen – und vermutlich auch in den anderen Bundesländern – sehr stark von dieser Art des Theaters geprägt ist, existieren kaum wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse darüber, in welchen Strukturen Amateurtheater stattfindet und wie sich dieses weiterentwickeln kann. Auch sind Amateurtheater nur selten Gegenstand kulturpolitischer Diskussionen. Erstmalig wurden mit dieser Studie systematisch und landesweit empirisch repräsentative Daten zu Strukturen, Theaterarbeit, finanzieller Situation und zukünftigen Herausforderungen von Amateurtheatern erhoben

Scalable Probabilistic Similarity Ranking in Uncertain Databases (Technical Report)

This paper introduces a scalable approach for probabilistic top-k similarity ranking on uncertain vector data. Each uncertain object is represented by a set of vector instances that are assumed to be mutually-exclusive. The objective is to rank the uncertain data according to their distance to a reference object. We propose a framework that incrementally computes for each object instance and ranking position, the probability of the object falling at that ranking position. The resulting rank probability distribution can serve as input for several state-of-the-art probabilistic ranking models. Existing approaches compute this probability distribution by applying a dynamic programming approach of quadratic complexity. In this paper we theoretically as well as experimentally show that our framework reduces this to a linear-time complexity while having the same memory requirements, facilitated by incremental accessing of the uncertain vector instances in increasing order of their distance to the reference object. Furthermore, we show how the output of our method can be used to apply probabilistic top-k ranking for the objects, according to different state-of-the-art definitions. We conduct an experimental evaluation on synthetic and real data, which demonstrates the efficiency of our approach

Decentralized Coordination in Self-Organizing Systems based on Peer-to-Peer Coordination Spaces

Coordination is an important aspect to realize Self-organizing Systemsusually implemented as part of the functional properties of the system. This paper promotes a separation of concerns via a declarative approach to realize decentralized coordination in Self-organizing Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). In previous work the concept of Coordination Spaces was developed which provides explicit support for the task of coordination in MAS. Coordination Spaces are part of the agent environment and handle a declarative description of the coordination process. Thereby, this approach allows developers rather focusing on what to coordinate than on how to  coordinate. Also by releasing the developer from programming coordination manually, the approach offers benefits like reusability and interoperability of coordination processes. This paper extends the approach by a distribution concept for coordination spaces. By using different techniques like remote service calls, group communicationand publish/subscribe models the distribution of information among multiple platforms in a peer-to-peer like approach is achieved