Automatic Lesser Kestrel’s Gender Identification using Video Processing

Traditionally, animal surveillance is a common task for biologists. However, this task is often accompanied by the inspection of huge amounts of video. In this sense, this paper proposes an automatic video processing algorithm to identify the gender of a kestrel species. It is based on optical flow and texture analysis. This algorithm makes it possible to identify the important information and therefore, minimizing the analysis time for biologists. Finally, to validate this algorithm, it has been tested against a set of videos, getting good classification results.Junta de Andalucía P10-TIC-570

Improving Sweden's Automatic Pension Adjustment Mechanism

The public pension world has seen two innovations in recent years. One is the emergence of notional defined contribution (NDC) plans. The other is the introduction of automatic adjustment mechanisms to help keep pension systems solvent when the economy weakens. This brief looks at the Swedish system to demonstrate how NDCs work and evaluates the work­ings of the automatic adjustment mechanism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Sweden passed reform legislation in 1994 that in­troduced a partially-funded NDC plan.1 The arrange­ment is conceptually similar to a defined contribution plan in that contributions are accumulated in indi­vidual accounts, but different in that the accounts are not fully funded and may be financed entirely on a pay-as-you-go basis. In this setting, the rate of return credited on the account assets is based on a rule rath­er than on actual returns. The Swedish system uses a notional interest rate equal to the rate of growth of average earnings. However, if a calculation suggests a potential deficit, the notional interest rate is auto­matically reduced through a “brake” mechanism. The recent financial crisis has highlighted ways in which the brake mechanism could be improved. This brief proceeds as follows. The first section describes Sweden’s NDC plan. The second describes the Swedish brake mechanism. The third describes two problems with the current adjustment procedure: 1) it creates the likelihood of large shocks for retir­ees; and 2) while disadvantaging retirees, it tends to advantage workers. The fourth section presents pos­sible fixes for the current problems. The final section concludes that the Swedish NDC plan could function more effectively with modest changes to the brake mechanism.

Automatic Software Repair: a Bibliography

This article presents a survey on automatic software repair. Automatic software repair consists of automatically finding a solution to software bugs without human intervention. This article considers all kinds of repairs. First, it discusses behavioral repair where test suites, contracts, models, and crashing inputs are taken as oracle. Second, it discusses state repair, also known as runtime repair or runtime recovery, with techniques such as checkpoint and restart, reconfiguration, and invariant restoration. The uniqueness of this article is that it spans the research communities that contribute to this body of knowledge: software engineering, dependability, operating systems, programming languages, and security. It provides a novel and structured overview of the diversity of bug oracles and repair operators used in the literature

Is Ramsey's theorem omega-automatic?

We study the existence of infinite cliques in omega-automatic (hyper-)graphs. It turns out that the situation is much nicer than in general uncountable graphs, but not as nice as for automatic graphs. More specifically, we show that every uncountable omega-automatic graph contains an uncountable co-context-free clique or anticlique, but not necessarily a context-free (let alone regular) clique or anticlique. We also show that uncountable omega-automatic ternary hypergraphs need not have uncountable cliques or anticliques at all

Automatic Hermiticity

We study a diagonalizable Hamiltonian that is not at first hermitian. Requirement that a measurement shall not change one Hamiltonian eigenstate into another one with a different eigenvalue imposes that an inner product must be defined so as to make the Hamiltonian normal with regard to it. After a long time development with the non-hermitian Hamiltonian, only a subspace of possible states will effectively survive. On this subspace the effect of the anti-hermitian part of the Hamiltonian is suppressed, and the Hamiltonian becomes hermitian. Thus hermiticity emerges automatically, and we have no reason to maintain that at the fundamental level the Hamiltonian should be hermitian. If the Hamiltonian is given in a local form, a conserved probability current density can be constructed with two kinds of wave functions. We also point out a possible misestimation of a past state by extrapolating back in time with the hermitian Hamiltonian. It is a seeming past state, not a true one.Comment: 8 pages, references added, typos etc. corrected, the final version to appear in Prog.Theor.Phy

Automatic transponder

A method and apparatus for the automatic, remote measurement of the internal delay time of a transponder at the time of operation is provided. A small portion of the transmitted signal of the transponder is converted to the receive signal frequency of the transponder and supplied to the input of the transponder. The elapsed time between the receive signal locally generated and the receive signal causing the transmission of the transmitted signal is measured, said time being representative of or equal to the internal delay time of the transponder at the time of operation

Model Theoretic Complexity of Automatic Structures

We study the complexity of automatic structures via well-established concepts from both logic and model theory, including ordinal heights (of well-founded relations), Scott ranks of structures, and Cantor-Bendixson ranks (of trees). We prove the following results: 1) The ordinal height of any automatic well- founded partial order is bounded by \omega^\omega ; 2) The ordinal heights of automatic well-founded relations are unbounded below the first non-computable ordinal; 3) For any computable ordinal there is an automatic structure of Scott rank at least that ordinal. Moreover, there are automatic structures of Scott rank the first non-computable ordinal and its successor; 4) For any computable ordinal, there is an automatic successor tree of Cantor-Bendixson rank that ordinal.Comment: 23 pages. Extended abstract appeared in Proceedings of TAMC '08, LNCS 4978 pp 514-52

Automatic differentiation in machine learning: a survey

Derivatives, mostly in the form of gradients and Hessians, are ubiquitous in machine learning. Automatic differentiation (AD), also called algorithmic differentiation or simply "autodiff", is a family of techniques similar to but more general than backpropagation for efficiently and accurately evaluating derivatives of numeric functions expressed as computer programs. AD is a small but established field with applications in areas including computational fluid dynamics, atmospheric sciences, and engineering design optimization. Until very recently, the fields of machine learning and AD have largely been unaware of each other and, in some cases, have independently discovered each other's results. Despite its relevance, general-purpose AD has been missing from the machine learning toolbox, a situation slowly changing with its ongoing adoption under the names "dynamic computational graphs" and "differentiable programming". We survey the intersection of AD and machine learning, cover applications where AD has direct relevance, and address the main implementation techniques. By precisely defining the main differentiation techniques and their interrelationships, we aim to bring clarity to the usage of the terms "autodiff", "automatic differentiation", and "symbolic differentiation" as these are encountered more and more in machine learning settings.Comment: 43 pages, 5 figure

The Rank of Tree-Automatic Linear Orderings

We generalise Delhomm\'e's result that each tree-automatic ordinal is strictly below \omega^\omega^\omega{} by showing that any tree-automatic linear ordering has FC-rank strictly below \omega^\omega. We further investigate a restricted form of tree-automaticity and prove that every linear ordering which admits a tree-automatic presentation of branching complexity at most k has FC-rank strictly below \omega^k.Comment: 20 pages, 3 figure