In this paper, we continue our prior work on using imitation learning (IL) and model free reinforcement learning (RL) to learn driving policies for autonomous driving in urban scenarios, by introducing a model based RL method to drive the autonomous vehicle in the Carla urban driving simulator. Although IL and model free RL methods have been proved to be capable of solving lots of challenging tasks, including playing video games, robots, and, in our prior work, urban driving, the low sample efficiency of such methods greatly limits their applications on actual autonomous driving. In this work, we developed a model based RL algorithm of guided policy search (GPS) for urban driving tasks. The algorithm iteratively learns a parameterized dynamic model to approximate the complex and interactive driving task, and optimizes the driving policy under the nonlinear approximate dynamic model. As a model based RL approach, when applied in urban autonomous driving, the GPS has the advantages of higher sample efficiency, better interpretability, and greater stability. We provide extensive experiments validating the effectiveness of the proposed method to learn robust driving policy for urban driving in Carla. We also compare the proposed method with other policy search and model free RL baselines, showing 100x better sample efficiency of the GPS based RL method, and also that the GPS based method can learn policies for harder tasks that the baseline methods can hardly learn.

We develop a categorical compositional distributional semantics for Lambek Calculus with a Relevant Modality !L*, which has a limited edition of the contraction and permutation rules. The categorical part of the semantics is a monoidal biclosed category with a coalgebra modality, very similar to the structure of a Differential Category. We instantiate this category to finite dimensional vector spaces and linear maps via "quantisation" functors and work with three concrete interpretations of the coalgebra modality. We apply the model to construct categorical and concrete semantic interpretations for the motivating example of !L*: the derivation of a phrase with a parasitic gap. The effectiveness of the concrete interpretations are evaluated via a disambiguation task, on an extension of a sentence disambiguation dataset to parasitic gap phrase one, using BERT, Word2Vec, and FastText vectors and Relational tensors.

An approach is given for solving large linear systems that combines Krylov methods with use of two different grid levels. Eigenvectors are computed on the coarse grid and used to deflate eigenvalues on the fine grid. GMRES-type methods are first used on both the coarse and fine grids. Then another approach is given that has a restarted BiCGStab (or IDR) method on the fine grid. While BiCGStab is generally considered to be a non-restarted method, it works well in this context with deflating and restarting. Tests show this new approach can be very efficient for difficult linear equations problems.

The increasing ubiquity of low-cost wireless sensors in smart homes and buildings has enabled users to easily deploy systems to remotely monitor and control their environments. However, this raises privacy concerns for third-party occupants, such as a hotel room guest who may be unaware of deployed clandestine sensors. Previous methods focused on specific modalities such as detecting cameras but do not provide a generalizable and comprehensive method to capture arbitrary sensors which may be "spying" on a user. In this work, we seek to determine whether one can walk in a room and detect any wireless sensor monitoring an individual. As such, we propose SnoopDog, a framework to not only detect wireless sensors that are actively monitoring a user, but also classify and localize each device. SnoopDog works by establishing causality between patterns in observable wireless traffic and a trusted sensor in the same space, e.g., an inertial measurement unit (IMU) that captures a user's movement. Once causality is established, SnoopDog performs packet inspection to inform the user about the monitoring device. Finally, SnoopDog localizes the clandestine device in a 2D plane using a novel trial-based localization technique. We evaluated SnoopDog across several devices and various modalities and were able to detect causality 96.6% percent of the time, classify suspicious devices with 100% accuracy, and localize devices to a sufficiently reduced sub-space.

Dialogue engines that incorporate different types of agents to converse with humans are popular.

However, conversations are dynamic in the sense that a selected response will change the conversation on-the-fly, influencing the subsequent utterances in the conversation, which makes the response selection a challenging problem.

We model the problem of selecting the best response from a set of responses generated by a heterogeneous set of dialogue agents by taking into account the conversational history, and propose a emph{Neural Response Selection} method.

The proposed method is trained to predict a coherent set of responses within a single conversation, considering its own predictions via a curriculum training mechanism.

Our experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately select the most appropriate responses, thereby significantly improving the user experience in dialogue systems.

Making changes to a program to optimize its performance is an unscalable task that relies entirely upon human intuition and experience. In addition, companies operating at large scale are at a stage where no single individual understands the code controlling its systems, and for this reason, making changes to improve performance can become intractably difficult. In this paper, a learning system is introduced that provides AI assistance for finding recommended changes to a program. Specifically, it is shown how the evaluative feedback, delayed-reward performance programming domain can be effectively formulated via the Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) framework. It is then shown that established methods from computational games for using learning to expedite tree-search computation can be adapted to speed up computing recommended program alterations. Estimates of expected utility from MCTS trees built for previous problems are used to learn a sampling policy that remains effective across new problems, thus demonstrating transferability of optimization knowledge. This formulation is applied to the Apache Spark distributed computing environment, and a preliminary result is observed that the time required to build a search tree for finding recommendations is reduced by up to a factor of 10x.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) is highly contagious with limited treatment options. Early and accurate diagnosis of Covid-19 is crucial in reducing the spread of the disease and its accompanied mortality. Currently, detection by reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is the gold standard of outpatient and inpatient detection of Covid-19. RT-PCR is a rapid method, however, its accuracy in detection is only ~70-75%. Another approved strategy is computed tomography (CT) imaging. CT imaging has a much higher sensitivity of ~80-98%, but similar accuracy of 70%. To enhance the accuracy of CT imaging detection, we developed an open-source set of algorithms called CovidCTNet that successfully differentiates Covid-19 from community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and other lung diseases. CovidCTNet increases the accuracy of CT imaging detection to 90% compared to radiologists (70%). The model is designed to work with heterogeneous and small sample sizes independent of the CT imaging hardware. In order to facilitate the detection of Covid-19 globally and assist radiologists and physicians in the screening process, we are releasing all algorithms and parametric details in an open-source format. Open-source sharing of our CovidCTNet enables developers to rapidly improve and optimize services, while preserving user privacy and data ownership.

An interesting and frequent type of multi-word expression (MWE) is the headless MWE, for which there are no true internal syntactic dominance relations; examples include many named entities ("Wells Fargo") and dates ("July 5, 2020") as well as certain productive constructions ("blow for blow", "day after day"). Despite their special status and prevalence, current dependency-annotation schemes require treating such flat structures as if they had internal syntactic heads, and most current parsers handle them in the same fashion as headed constructions. Meanwhile, outside the context of parsing, taggers are typically used for identifying MWEs, but taggers might benefit from structural information. We empirically compare these two common strategies--parsing and tagging--for predicting flat MWEs. Additionally, we propose an efficient joint decoding algorithm that combines scores from both strategies. Experimental results on the MWE-Aware English Dependency Corpus and on six non-English dependency treebanks with frequent flat structures show that: (1) tagging is more accurate than parsing for identifying flat-structure MWEs, (2) our joint decoder reconciles the two different views and, for non-BERT features, leads to higher accuracies, and (3) most of the gains result from feature sharing between the parsers and taggers.

Motivated by the current demand of clinical governance, surgical simulation is now a well-established modality for basic skills training and assessment. The practical deployment of the technique is a multi-disciplinary venture encompassing areas in engineering, medicine and psychology. This paper provides an overview of the key topics involved in surgical simulation and associated technical challenges. The paper discusses the clinical motivation for surgical simulation, the use of virtual environments for surgical training, model acquisition and simplification, deformable models, collision detection, tissue property measurement, haptic rendering and image synthesis. Additional topics include surgical skill training and assessment metrics as well as challenges facing the incorporation of surgical simulation into medical education curricula.

Different state-of-the-art methods of the detection of schizophrenia symptoms based on the estimation of text coherence have been analyzed. The analysis of a text at the level of phrases has been suggested. The method based on the graph of the consistency of phrases has been proposed to evaluate the semantic coherence and the cohesion of a text. The semantic coherence, cohesion, and other linguistic features (lexical diversity, lexical density) have been taken into account to form feature vectors for the training of a model-classifier. The training of the classifier has been performed on the set of English-language interviews. According to the retrieved results, the impact of each feature on the output of the model has been analyzed. The results obtained can indicate that the proposed method based on the graph of the consistency of phrases may be used in the different tasks of the detection of mental illness.

In this paper, we present a novel MaxSAT-based technique to compute Maximum Probability Minimal Cut Sets (MPMCSs) in fault trees. We model the MPMCS problem as a Weighted Partial MaxSAT problem and solve it using a parallel SAT-solving architecture. The results obtained with our open source tool indicate that the approach is effective and efficient.

Homomorphic encryption (HE) allows direct computations on encrypted data. Despite numerous research efforts, the practicality of HE schemes remains to be demonstrated. In this regard, the enormous size of ciphertexts involved in HE computations degrades computational efficiency. Near-memory Processing (NMP) and Computing-in-memory (CiM) - paradigms where computation is done within the memory boundaries - represent architectural solutions for reducing latency and energy associated with data transfers in data-intensive applications such as HE. This paper introduces CiM-HE, a Computing-in-memory (CiM) architecture that can support operations for the B/FV scheme, a somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme for general computation. CiM-HE hardware consists of customized peripherals such as sense amplifiers, adders, bit-shifters, and sequencing circuits. The peripherals are based on CMOS technology, and could support computations with memory cells of different technologies. Circuit-level simulations are used to evaluate our CiM-HE framework assuming a 6T-SRAM memory. We compare our CiM-HE implementation against (i) two optimized CPU HE implementations, and (ii) an FPGA-based HE accelerator implementation. When compared to a CPU solution, CiM-HE obtains speedups between 4.6x and 9.1x, and energy savings between 266.4x and 532.8x for homomorphic multiplications (the most expensive HE operation). Also, a set of four end-to-end tasks, i.e., mean, variance, linear regression, and inference are up to 1.1x, 7.7x, 7.1x, and 7.5x faster (and 301.1x, 404.6x, 532.3x, and 532.8x more energy efficient). Compared to CPU-based HE in a previous work, CiM-HE obtain 14.3x speed-up and >2600x energy savings. Finally, our design offers 2.2x speed-up with 88.1x energy savings compared to a state-of-the-art FPGA-based accelerator.

Breadcrumbs are a subtle element of a website that helps improve usability and navigation. They’re a utility that often receives little acknowledgment; however, breadcrumbs can have a large impact and provide a plethora of benefits, such as lowering bounce rate, increasing conversions, and improving user satisfaction.   Imagine you’re in a regular grocery store, except […]

The post 5 Best Practices for Breadcrumb Navigation  appeared first on WebFX Blog.

In this article, we'll explore 10 quick and easy ways to improve your site's accessibility.

The post 10 Helpful Tips for How to Make Your Website More Accessible appeared first on WebFX Blog.

WordPress powers 35% of all websites, which makes WordPress sites a go-to target for hackers. If you’re like most WordPress site owners, you’re probably asking the same question: Is my WordPress site secure? While you can’t guarantee site security, you can take several steps to improve and maximize your WordPress security. Keep reading to learn […]

The post Is My WordPress Site Secure? 13 Tips for Locking Down Your WordPress Site appeared first on WebFX Blog.

Web design is responsible for nearly 95% of a visitor’s first impression of your business. That’s why it’s more important than ever to incorporate modern web design into your marketing strategy. But what modern web design trends are on the horizon for 2020 — and how can you use them to freshen up your site? […]

The post 10 Modern Web Design Trends for 2020 appeared first on WebFX Blog.

Are you looking to start 2020 with a fresh web design for your business? If so, you must know what you need to do in 2020 to have a website that drives success for your business. With website statistics for 2020, you can see what to do and what to avoid, which will help you […]

The post Website Statistics for 2020: 10 Critical Stats to Know for Web Design appeared first on WebFX Blog.

By Jon Queally Common Dreams Greenpeace says world leaders must not let the fossil fuel industry stand in the way of the necessary—and attainable—transition to a clean and safe energy future With scientists and experts from around the world telling … Continue reading →

By Andrea Germanos Common Dreams On the heels of clean fuel milestones in Germany and Portugal , a new report finds that the renewable energy industry employed over 8.1 million people worldwide in 2015. According to the International Renewable Energy … Continue reading →

Lambda functions are quite an intuitive concept of Modern C++ introduced in C++11, so there are already tons of articles on lambda function tutorials over the internet. But still, there are some untold things (like IIFE, types of lambda, etc.) left, which nobody talks about. Therefore, here I am to not only show you lambda function in C++, but we'll also cover how it works internally and other aspects of Lambda.

The title of this article is a bit misleading. Because lambda doesn't always synthesize to function pointer. It's an expression (precisely unique closure). But I have kept it that way for simplicity. So from now on, I will use lambda function and expression interchangeably.

It’s that time of the year again. A new TV season is upon us. With some shows beginning to air this week, I thought it best to post my “to watch” schedule for the fall. Unlike last year, I…

It has been a whirlwind of a year. Looking back at where I ended 2018 and started 2019, I was not fully prepared for everything that happened. The big items from 2019 were: Yours truly turned 35. Shut down the business side of Theme…

Coronavirus Family Tree The University of Washington Virology lab, which is testing samples for coronavirus, tweeted last night.…

After Governor Jay Inslee announced a prohibition on gatherings of 250 people or more in three Washington counties (Snohomish, King, Pierce) on Wednesday, and with public health concerns growing over the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations in Spokane are following suit. The Inlander will be frequently updating its online calendar of events to reflect local cancelations as we hear of them.…

We at the Inlander are committed to keeping people informed and connected throughout the coronavirus outbreak. We'll continue to update this page with the latest headlines.…

Sam Mendes' 1917, which took Best Picture and Best Director awards at the Golden Globes earlier this week, looks like a standard period piece.…

As COVID-19 fears grew, public officials and sports execs contemplated health risks — and debated a PR message — but let 33,000 fans into a Seattle Sounders soccer match, emails show. By Ken Armstrong, ProPublica, and David Gutman and Lewis Kamb, The Seattle Times On March 6, at 2:43 p.m., the health officer for Public Health — Seattle & King County, the hardest-hit region in the first state to be slammed by COVID-19, sent an email to a half-dozen colleagues, saying, “I want to cancel large group gatherings now.”…

As the threat of the Coronavirus spreads throughout the country, public events everywhere are being canceled and postponed for public safety concerns. The Fox Theater is the latest venue to follow suit, closing its doors and canceling all events through April 10.…

Jenny Don't and the Spurs were right in the middle of recording their third full-length album when a vocal polyp put a halt to the process.…

Calling all fearless freaks! Mark your calendars: The Flaming Lips have rescheduled their now-canceled April gig at the Fox Theater for March 19, 2021.…

Tours are on hold.…

We've known that Hamilton was going to be part of the 2020-21 STCU Best of Broadway season for a while, but now we finally know the exact dates, as well as the rest of the featured shows for the season. Granted, the whole world has changed since WestCoast Entertainment announced Hamilton was coming to town back when they announced their 2019-20 season — a season that's been roiled, along with the rest of our lives, by the coronavirus pandemic.…

You’re out of a job. You’ve been stuck inside for weeks.…

ON INLANDER.COM WORLD: Roughly two weeks after Canada's deadliest mass shooting, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced an immediate ban on what he called “military-style assault weapons.”…

ON INLANDER.COM NATION: Even as U.S. President Donald Trump urges states to reopen their economies, his own administration projects that the death toll from COVID-19 will spike to 3,000 people per day.…

At every level of America's food system, mandated closures and outbreaks of COVID-19 have interrupted the finely tuned network that normally gets food from farmers and food processors to restaurants, grocery stores and food banks.…

ON INLANDER.COM NATION: For workers, there's no sign of what "normal is going to look like" in the pandemic economy.…

If you go to check how many people are hospitalized with COVID-19 in Spokane, the Spokane County Regional Health District website will give you an answer. Right now, it lists eight people as currently hospitalized with COVID-19, and that number has been trending downward.…

Q: I recently read that a combination of the drugs hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin might be effective against COVID-19. I have diabetes and I am at risk for this viral infection.…

A method for preparing 13C labeled plasmalogens as represented by Formula B: The method involves producing a 13C labeled cyclic plasmalogen precursor of Formula A: and conversion of the precursor to a plasmalogen of Formula B.

The present invention provides compounds of the formula: which are useful as inhibitors of PHD and pharmaceutical compositions thereof.

Provided are triazine compounds for inhibiting of Syk kinase, intermediates used in making such compounds, methods for their preparation, pharmaceutical compositions thereof, methods for inhibiting Syk kinase activity, and methods for treating conditions mediated at least in part by Syk kinase activity.

The invention discloses quinoxaline derivatives or salts thereof having PDE9-inhibiting activity and being useful as treating agent of dysuria and the like, which are represented by the formula (I) in the formula, R1 and R2 each independently stands for hydrogen, halogen, alkyl, alkoxy, acyl, amino and the like,R3 stands for alkyl, aryl, saturated carbocyclic group, saturated heterocyclic group, acyl and the like,R4 stands for hydrogen, hydroxy, alkyl or amino,R5 and R8 each independently stands for hydrogen, halogen, alkyl, alkenyl, alkoxy, cyano or nitro,R6 and R7 each independently stands for hydrogen, halogen, alkyl, alkenyl, alkynyl, alkoxy, cyano, amino, carbocyclic group, heterocyclic group, COR9 or SO2R9,R9 stands for hydrogen, hydroxy, alkyl, amino, pyrrolidin-1-yl, piperidin-1-yl, pyperazin-1-yl or the like,X stands for S or O, andA1, A2 and A3 each independently stands for N or C.

The present application is directed to solid forms of compounds of formula I: and pharmaceutically acceptable salts thereof, that inhibit bacterial gyrase and/or Topo IV and pharmaceutical compositions comprising said compounds and salts. These compounds and salts are useful in treating bacterial infections.

This invention relates to novel 5-[(hydroxymethyl)aryl]-substituted pyrrolo[2,1-f][1,2,4]triazin-4-amines of formula (I), to processes for the preparation of such compounds, to pharmaceutical compositions containing such compounds, and to the use of such compounds or compositions for treating angiogenesis-related disorders, in particular angiogenesis-related ocular disorders.

Derivatives of 2,5-piperazinedione of formula (I) are apoptotic peptidase activating factor 1 (Apaf-1) inhibitors, therefore they are useful as active pharmaceutical ingredients for the prophylaxis and/or treatment of a pathological and/or physiological condition associated with an increase of apoptosis.

A rubber composition for manufacturing tyres is based on one or more diene elastomers, one or more reinforcing fillers, and a vulcanization system. The vulcanization system includes one or more 1,2,4-triazine compounds chosen from compounds of formula I and compounds of formula II: Certain specific 1,2,4-triazine derivatives are described.

A 1,3-diketoamide functional monomer represented by the following formula (1): wherein R and Y are independently selected from the group consisting of hydrogen, an alkyl group having from 1 to 10 carbon atoms, an aryl group having from 6 to 20 carbon atoms, and an aralkyl group having from 7 to 20 carbon atoms; and wherein X and Z are independently selected from the group consisting of an alkyl group having from 1 to 10 carbon atoms, an aryl group having from 6 to 20 carbon atoms, and an aralkyl group having from 7 to 20 carbon atoms. Also disclosed are emulsion, suspension, and solution polymers comprising residues from the 1,3-diketoamide functional monomer of formula 1 and, optionally, one or more additional ethylenically unsaturated monomers. Both latex and self-curing coating compositions described herein exhibit excellent hydrolytic stability, including increased retention of 1,3-diketo functionality.

The invention relates 6-acyl-(6H)-dibenz[c,e][1,2]oxaphosphorin-6-oxides of the formula ##STR1## wherein each of R1, R2 and R3 may be present one or more times and R1, R2 and R3 represent halogen having an atomic number of from 9 to 35, alkyl or alkoxy each having from 1 to 6 carbon atoms and wherein Ar represents an aromatic hydrocarbon group having from 6 to 10 carbon atoms.The invention further relates to a process for the preparation of the afore-mentioned compounds and polymerizable compositions containing them as an essential ingredient as a photo-initiator. Finally the invention relates to 6-alkoxy-(6H)-dibenz[c,e][1,2]oxaphosphorin of the formula II ##STR2## wherein each of R1 and R2 may be present once or more times and R1 and R2 represent halogen having an atomic number of from 9 to 35, alkyl or alkoxy each having from 1 to 6 carbon atoms, at least one R1 being, however, halogen and wherein R4 represents alkyl having from 1 to 6 carbon atoms.

1,4-Dihydropyridine-3-carboxylate derivatives are produced having vasodilating and hypotensive action.