Content-boosted Matrix Factorization Techniques for Recommender Systems

Many businesses are using recommender systems for marketing outreach. Recommendation algorithms can be either based on content or driven by collaborative filtering. We study different ways to incorporate content information directly into the matrix factorization approach of collaborative filtering. These content-boosted matrix factorization algorithms not only improve recommendation accuracy, but also provide useful insights about the contents, as well as make recommendations more easily interpretable

Understanding Mental Models of AI through Player-AI Interaction

Designing human-centered AI-driven applications require deep understandings of how people develop mental models of AI. Currently, we have little knowledge of this process and limited tools to study it. This paper presents the position that AI-based games, particularly the player-AI interaction component, offer an ideal domain to study the process in which mental models evolve. We present a case study to illustrate the benefits of our approach for explainable AI

Inequality in health care persists at the state level, especially in red states with diverse populations

In March 2010, President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which marked the most comprehensive reform of the American health care system since the Johnson Administration. This federal legislation makes the American states key political stakeholders for achieving major goals of the reform, one of which is to make health insurance coverage more inclusive and equal. Focusing on the state-level picture, Ling Zhu and Jennifer H. Clark examine how partisan politics produce far-reaching distributional consequences in health care. They show that inequality in health insurance coverage persists at the state level, especially in conservative states with diverse populations

Spectrum of malignancies among the population of adults living with HIV infection in China: A nationwide follow-up study, 2008-2011.

BackgroundAlthough increasingly studied in high-income countries, there is a paucity of data from the Chinese population on the patterns of cancer among people living with HIV (PLHIV).MethodsWe conducted a nationwide follow-up study using routinely collected data for adult PLHIV diagnosed on or before 31 December 2011 and alive and in care as of 1 January 2008. Participants were observed from 1 January 2008 (study start) to 30 June 2012 (study end). Main outcome measures were gender-stratified age-standardized incidence rates for China (ASIRC) and standardized incidence ratios (SIR) for all malignancy types/sites observed.ResultsAmong 399,451 subjects, a majority was aged 30-44 years (49.3%), male (69.8%), and Han Chinese (67.9%). A total of 3,819 reports of cancer were identified. Overall, ASIRC was 776.4 per 100,000 for males and 486.5 per 100,000 for females. Malignancy sites/types with highest ASIRC among males were lung (226.0 per 100,000), liver (145.7 per 100,000), and lymphoma (63.1 per 100,000), and among females were lung (66.8 per 100,000), lymphoma (48.0 per 100,000), stomach (47.8 per 100,000), and cervix (47.6 per 100,000). Overall SIR for males was 3.4 and for females was 2.6. Highest SIR was observed for Kaposi sarcoma (2,639.8 for males, 1,593.5 for females) and lymphoma (13.9 for males, 16.0 for females).ConclusionsThese results provide evidence of substantial AIDS-defining and non-AIDS-defining cancer burden among adult Chinese PLHIV between 2008 and 2011. Although further study is warranted, China should take action to improve cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment for this vulnerable population

Functional enrichment of utopian distribution of plant life-forms

Adaptive fuzzy neural inference systems are used to illustrate the primary nodal number of plant life-forms. Categorization of two candidate areas is carried out using the water-energy dynamic (for Ecuador, South America) and Macedonia, Southern Europe), within which the life-form spectra are distributed. Genetic optimization methods are used to expand the primary nodal number to the complete number of life-form categories. The distribution of the elements exhibits a stochastic, binomial distribution and the utopia line and curve are summarized which enhance accuracy of the climatic data and of the consequent numbers of plant species occurrences. Expansion of the distribution of each life-form category is approximated within the Z utopia hyperplane with use of the functional approximation algorithm. This process gives additional structure and informative value to the Z plane, enhancing our ability to make informed policy decisions concerning species and ecosystem conservation

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus for ENV 1004 (Fundamentals of Ecology-lab)

Fundamentals of Ecological Research is a hands-on course designed to teach students the basic concepts and methodologies used in the field of ecology. The significance of ecological research to current environmental issues, both local and global, will be stressed throughout the course. By the end of this course, you should be able discuss the complex linkages among biotic and abiotic factors that impact natural communities, explain how these factors may be measured, and predict impacts of change

Binding of Chlorinated Phenylacrylonitriles to the Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor: Computational Docking and Molecular Dynamics Simulations

The development of ligands capable of binding to the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) and hijacking its signaling pathway is of potential use for the design of novel agents against breast cancer. To guide the synthesis of new compounds and characterize their binding to the AhR, we employed homology modeling, ligand docking, and molecular dynamics simulations. As there is currently no crystallographic information available for the structure of the AhR’s ligand-binding PAS-B domain, a homology model was developed. The location of the binding site was identified by scanning the model for concave areas and comparing them to known ligand-binding sites in proteins related to the AhR, such as the CLOCK:BMAL1 transcriptional activator complex and the hypoxia-inducible factor-2α (HIF-2α). Docking of several chlorinated phenylacrylonitriles was performed with the modeling suite MOE, identifying π-π stacking, hydrophobic, and van der Waals interactions as the driving forces for binding, an observation consistent with the hydrophobic nature of the site. Molecular dynamics simulations with one of the compounds for 100 ns verified the overall stability of a docking-predicted pose and revealed the presence of interacting water molecules in the vicinity of the ligand. Given the buried location of the ligand in the core of the receptor, this observation was somewhat unexpected, but it explained a slight shift of the ligand pose seen during the simulation

The Structured Hedging of Financial Value: With Applications to Foreign Exchange Risk Management

The objective of the thesis is to develop a structured financial hedging framework that is empirically implementable and consistent with a corporate finance perspective. Value at risk provides a suitable framework for this purpose. The aversion implied in the value at risk and its generalised theory arises from a firm's concerns about contingent financial distress costs, which can be considered as the payoff of a put option written by stockholders of firms in favour of third parties. This enables the development of a hedging framework to explore how a firm's welfare might be enhanced by replacing natural exposures with hedged outcomes. An ideal hedging decision is to maximise the financial value in good times at minimal cost in terms of the generalised value at risk penalty function. In an efficient market, a fully hedged policy using forwards is generally the optimal decision, while alternatives should be taken into account where markets are not efficient. In such cases, the underlying empirical methodology should be able to detect inefficiencies and feed into the objective functions for maximising firm value. The empirical implementation is explored with a variety of econometric methodologies. These include the development of new semi-parametric or nonparametric techniques based upon wavelet analysis, as well as an incomplete forecasting algorithm. Such methods have been preferred to classical linear and stationary models, because they have broader application in an inefficient market where information is technically fuzzy and financial data may exhibit non-linearity or non-stationarity. Further decision dimensions concern exposure duration or path risk, in which individuals' perspectives of risk is time-dependent and linked to the evolution of value at risk through time. The proposed approaches find their main application in foreign exchange risk management, a topic of considerable importance and sensitivity in New Zealand. A statistically well-adapted hedge object for an exporter such as the dairy industry is the corporate terms of trade, which balances up output and expense prices as a single index related to the net profit margin. Further applications are to strategic fund management where the objective is to derive optimal foreign exchange forwards based hedges