1,117 research outputs found
Search Interfaces for Mathematicians
Access to mathematical knowledge has changed dramatically in recent years,
therefore changing mathematical search practices. Our aim with this study is to
scrutinize professional mathematicians' search behavior. With this
understanding we want to be able to reason why mathematicians use which tool
for what search problem in what phase of the search process. To gain these
insights we conducted 24 repertory grid interviews with mathematically inclined
people (ranging from senior professional mathematicians to non-mathematicians).
From the interview data we elicited patterns for the user group
"mathematicians" that can be applied when understanding design issues or
creating new designs for mathematical search interfaces.Comment: conference article "CICM'14: International Conference on Computer
Mathematics 2014", DML-Track: Digital Math Libraries 17 page
Consumer Perception, Attitudes, Liking and Preferences for Olive Oil
The consumption of healthful olive oil (OO) has grown considerably over the past 20 years, particularly in areas outside of Europe. To meet this demand, worldwide production of OO has doubled over this time period. Greece, Italy and Spain remain the major producers of this commodity; however, significant growth in production has also occurred in countries such as Australia and the US. OO consumption is closely associated with the traditional Mediterranean diet. It is likely that the potential health benefits of using OO as a primary dietary fat have been a driver of increased intake, but undoubtedly other factors will be involved. An understanding of the factors that influence consumers’ perceptions, attitudes, liking and preferences for OO will be of benefit to the OO sector. Olive growers, OO manufacturers, packaging specialists and marketers, etc. can utilize these insights to aid in the development and delivery of OO products in line with consumer needs and wants, and help drive further growth in this sector particularly with regard to new and emerging markets. The following chapter details information on the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that have demonstrated an influence on consumer perception, attitudes, liking and preferences for OO
Optimistic Agents are Asymptotically Optimal
We use optimism to introduce generic asymptotically optimal reinforcement
learning agents. They achieve, with an arbitrary finite or compact class of
environments, asymptotically optimal behavior. Furthermore, in the finite
deterministic case we provide finite error bounds.Comment: 13 LaTeX page
Trying again to fail-first
For constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), Haralick and Elliott [1] introduced the Fail-First Principle and defined in it terms of minimizing branch depth. By devising a range of variable ordering heuristics, each in turn trying harder to fail first, Smith and Grant [2] showed that adherence to this strategy does not guarantee reduction in search effort. The present work builds on Smith and Grant. It benefits from the development of a new framework for characterizing heuristic performance that defines two policies, one concerned with enhancing the likelihood of correctly extending a partial solution, the other with minimizing the effort to prove insolubility. The Fail-First Principle can be restated as calling for adherence to the second, fail-first policy, while discounting the other, promise policy. Our work corrects some deficiencies in the work of Smith and Grant, and goes on to confirm their finding that the Fail-First Principle, as originally defined, is insufficient. We then show that adherence to the fail-first policy must be measured in terms of size of insoluble subtrees, not branch depth. We also show that for soluble problems, both policies must be considered in evaluating heuristic performance. Hence, even in its proper form the Fail-First Principle is insufficient. We also show that the “FF” series of heuristics devised by Smith and Grant is a powerful tool for evaluating heuristic performance, including the subtle relations between heuristic features and adherence to a policy
The geology of zinc in coals of the Illinois Basin
Final report to the U.S. Geological Survey, Branch of Eastern Mineral Resources, U.S. Department of Interior. June 1975 to September 1977.U.S. Department of Interior Grant 14-08-0001-G-249Ope
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Coherent synchrotron radiation experiments for the LCLS
The authors describe a coherent synchrotron radiation experiment planned at Los Alamos to support the design of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) x-ray FEL. Preliminary simulations of the LCLS compressors show that a clever tuning strategy can be used to minimize the electron`s beam emittance growth due to noninertial space-charge forces by employing a delicate cancellation of these forces. The purpose of the Los Alamos experiment, using a sub-picosecond chicane compressor, is to benchmark these simulations tools. In this paper, the authors present detailed numerical simulations of the experiment, and point out unique signatures of this effect that are measurable. As predicted previously, the largest emittance growths and induced energy spreads result from the nonradiative components of this space-charge force
Fermionic Molecular Dynamics for nuclear dynamics and thermodynamics
A new Fermionic Molecular Dynamics (FMD) model based on a Skyrme functional
is proposed in this paper. After introducing the basic formalism, some first
applications to nuclear structure and nuclear thermodynamics are presentedComment: 5 pages, Proceedings of the French-Japanese Symposium, September
2008. To be published in Int. J. of Mod. Phys.
Exploring Minimal Scenarios to Produce Transversely Bright Electron Beams Using the Eigen-Emittance Concept
Next generation hard X-ray free electron lasers require electron beams with
low transverse emittance. One proposal to achieve these low emittances is to
exploit the eigen-emittance values of the beam. The eigen-emittances are
invariant under linear beam transport and equivalent to the emittances in an
uncorrelated beam. If a correlated beam with two small eigen-emittances can be
produced, removal of the correlations via appropriate optics will lead to two
small emittance values, provided non-linear effects are not too large. We study
how such a beam may be produced using minimal linear correlations. We find it
is theoretically possible to produce such a beam, however it may be more
difficult to realize in practice. We identify linear correlations that may lead
to physically realizable emittance schemes and discuss promising future
avenues.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, to appear in NIM
Extreme State Aggregation Beyond MDPs
We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an
environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP)
assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature
reinforcement learning is concerned with mapping histories/raw-states to
reduced/aggregated states. The idea behind both is that the resulting reduced
process (approximately) forms a small stationary finite-state MDP, which can
then be efficiently solved or learnt. We considerably generalize existing
aggregation results by showing that even if the reduced process is not an MDP,
the (q-)value functions and (optimal) policies of an associated MDP with same
state-space size solve the original problem, as long as the solution can
approximately be represented as a function of the reduced states. This implies
an upper bound on the required state space size that holds uniformly for all RL
problems. It may also explain why RL algorithms designed for MDPs sometimes
perform well beyond MDPs.Comment: 28 LaTeX pages. 8 Theorem
Exploiting the Hierarchical Structure of Rule-Based Specifications for Decision Planning
Rule-based specifications have been very successful as a declarative approach in many domains, due to the handy yet solid foundations offered by rule-based machineries like term and graph rewriting. Realistic problems, however, call for suitable techniques to guarantee scalability. For instance, many domains exhibit a hierarchical structure that can be exploited conveniently. This is particularly evident for composition associations of models. We propose an explicit representation of such structured models and a methodology that exploits it for the description and analysis of model- and rule-based systems. The approach is presented in the framework of rewriting logic and its efficient implementation in the rewrite engine Maude and is illustrated with a case study.
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