Evaluating the benefits of key-value databases for scientific applications

The convergence of Big Data applications with High-Performance Computing requires new methodologies to store, manage and process large amounts of information. Traditional storage solutions are unable to scale and that results in complex coding strategies. For example, the brain atlas of the Human Brain Project has the challenge to process large amounts of high-resolution brain images. Given the computing needs, we study the effects of replacing a traditional storage system with a distributed Key-Value database on a cell segmentation application. The original code uses HDF5 files on GPFS through an intricate interface, imposing synchronizations. On the other hand, by using Apache Cassandra or ScyllaDB through Hecuba, the application code is greatly simplified. Thanks to the Key-Value data model, the number of synchronizations is reduced and the time dedicated to I/O scales when increasing the number of nodes.This project/research has received funding from the European Unions Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under the Speci c Grant Agreement No. 720270 (Human Brain Project SGA1) and the Speci c Grant Agreement No. 785907 (Human Brain Project SGA2). This work has also been supported by the Spanish Government (SEV2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract TIN2015-65316-P), and by Generalitat de Catalunya (contract 2017-SGR-1414).Postprint (author's final draft

Evaluating Innovation

In their pursuit of the public good, foundations face two competing forces -- the pressure to do something new and the pressure to do something proven. The epigraph to this paper, "Give me something new and prove that it works," is my own summary of what foundations often seek. These pressures come from within the foundations -- their staff or boards demand them, not the public. The aspiration to fund things that work can be traced to the desire to be careful, effective stewards of resources. Foundations' recognition of the growing complexity of our shared challenges drives the increased emphasis on innovation. Issues such as climate change, political corruption, and digital learning andwork environments have enticed new players into the social problem-solving sphere and have con-vinced more funders of the need to find new solutions. The seemingly mutually exclusive desires for doing something new and doing something proven are not new, but as foundations have grown in number and size the visibility of the paradox has risen accordingly.Even as foundations seek to fund innovation, they are also seeking measurements of those investments success. Many people's first response to the challenge of measuring innovation is to declare the intention oxymoronic. Innovation is by definition amorphous, full of unintended consequences, and a creative, unpredictable process -- much like art. Measurements, assessments, evaluation are -- also by most definitions -- about quantifying activities and products. There is always the danger of counting what you can count, even if what you can count doesn't matter.For all our awareness of the inherent irony of trying to measure something that we intend to be unpredictable, many foundations (and others) continue to try to evaluate their innovation efforts. They are, as John Westley, Brenda Zimmerman, and Michael Quinn Patton put it in "Getting to Maybe", grappling with "....intentionality and complexity -- (which) meet in tension." It is important to see the struggles to measure for what they are -- attempts to evaluate the success of the process of innovation, not necessarily the success of the individual innovations themselves. This is not a semantic difference.What foundations are trying to understand is how to go about funding innovation so that more of it can happenExamples in this report were chosen because they offer a look at innovation within the broader scope of a foundation's work. This paper is the fifth in a series focused on field building. In this context I am interested in where evaluation fits within an innovation strategy and where these strategies fit within a foundation's broader funding goals. I will present a typology of innovation drawn from the OECD that can be useful inother areas. I lay the decisions about evaluation made by Knight, MacArthur, and the Jewish NewMedia Innovation Funders against their program-matic goals. Finally, I consider how evaluating innovation may improve our overall use of evaluation methods in philanthropy

Evaluating probability forecasts

Probability forecasts of events are routinely used in climate predictions, in forecasting default probabilities on bank loans or in estimating the probability of a patient's positive response to treatment. Scoring rules have long been used to assess the efficacy of the forecast probabilities after observing the occurrence, or nonoccurrence, of the predicted events. We develop herein a statistical theory for scoring rules and propose an alternative approach to the evaluation of probability forecasts. This approach uses loss functions relating the predicted to the actual probabilities of the events and applies martingale theory to exploit the temporal structure between the forecast and the subsequent occurrence or nonoccurrence of the event.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOS902 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Evaluating Matrix Circuits

The circuit evaluation problem (also known as the compressed word problem) for finitely generated linear groups is studied. The best upper bound for this problem is $\mathsf{coRP}$, which is shown by a reduction to polynomial identity testing. Conversely, the compressed word problem for the linear group $\mathsf{SL}_3(\mathbb{Z})$ is equivalent to polynomial identity testing. In the paper, it is shown that the compressed word problem for every finitely generated nilpotent group is in $\mathsf{DET} \subseteq \mathsf{NC}^2$. Within the larger class of polycyclic groups we find examples where the compressed word problem is at least as hard as polynomial identity testing for skew arithmetic circuits

Evaluating Social Innovation

The philanthropic sector has been experimenting with innovative grantmaking in the hopes of triggering significant and sustainable change. FSG's latest research report, collaboratively written with the Center for Evaluation Innovation, challenges grantmakers to explore the use of Developmental Evaluation when evaluating complex, dynamic, and emergent initiatives

Evaluating Oral Communication

著者は，学生の英会話技能において一定期間でどれだけ上達したかを確実に測ることを目的として，独自の試験形式を考案し，それを実施，彼らの成績を評価している。その結果，英会話能力の確実な測定は，なかなかやりがいのある（ある意味，困難な）研究領域にあると考える。正確に学生の会話能力を測るには，試験の内容が正当性を持ち，確実なものでなければならない。この論文では，確実な評価につながる試験とはどのようなものなのかを説明している。又，試験の形式が正当であると言い切る理由と，試験内容の考案から作成，実施に至るまでの過程についても言及している