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.

Graphic design is everywhere — it’s used in traditional marketing efforts like billboards and fliers, and more importantly, it’s used in nearly every single digital marketing initiative from web design to social media marketing. If you’re a business that’s working with a digital marketing agency for any number of marketing campaigns (especially web design), it’s […]

The post 24 Must-Know Graphic Design Terms appeared first on WebFX Blog.

If you’re not already thinking about 2020 web design, the time is now. Already, web design trends for 2020 have started to emerge, and if you want to stay on-trend and engage site visitors, it’s crucial to pay attention. But what is the future of web design in 2020? Will everything change? Well — not […]

The post Pay Attention to These Web Design Trends for 2020 [7+ Trends] 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.

As a small or midsize business (SMB), your company website is often the first touchpoint for potential clients — and you want it to make a great first impression. The secret to hitting home with your audience is to have a sophisticated and lively website design that’s aesthetically pleasing and provides great user experience (UX). […]

The post 20 Company Website Designs to Inspire Your Small Business 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 →

Welcome back! In the first part of this series, we looked at a very "low-level" way to interact with a relational database by sending it raw SQL strings and retrieving the results. We created a very simple Express application that we can use as an example and deployed it on Heroku with a Postgres database.

In this part, we're going to examine a few libraries which build on top of that foundation, adding layers of abstraction that let you read and manipulate database data in a more "JavaScript-like" way.

.NET is indeed an important application development platform, as it's secure, robust, and quite easy to learn and implement. Developers are widely using the .NET framework to build web applications and even modernize legacy programming based applications into .NET-based ones. .NET developers also use many third-party tools to carry out development. These tools have proven to provide the best support for development.

Here are some of the top useful tools being used by many.NET development teams, .NET developers, individual .NET programmers, etc.

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This Pen uses: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and

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…

With a relatively successful 2019, I am hitting the ground running into 2020. This is the first year in a long time where I feel like I am at a good starting point. One of the big realizations from the past year…

I am back in the collecting game. After several months of work and keeping an eye on deals, I am now inching closer toward 100 titles and have built a pretty nice 4K UHD collection. It started with my first DVD…

Summer Camps 2020 "Regional Summer Camps Hope the Pandemic Doesn't Put Activities on Pause, But Have Backup Plans Ready if it Does" …

The transformation of marijuana — aka pot, weed, reefer, ganja, dope, herb, bud, grass, Mary Jane — has been nothing short of dramatic.…

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.…

And summer takes another hit. Strolling Spokane's Coeur d'Alene Park in Browne's Addition for the Northwest Museum of Art & Culture's annual ArtFest is one of the pleasures of early summer, typically.…

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.…

Noting that safety of its fans and vendors is always a priority, the folks behind Lilac City Comicon announced Friday that this year's event would move from its original June dates to Oct. 11-12 at the Spokane Convention Center. Anyone who bought tickets for the original June 6-7 comicon will be able to use those tickets at the rescheduled event, or refunds will be available from the businesses where tickets were bought, once those businesses are able to reopen.…

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

AMC River Park Square…

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At around 5:30 pm on Thursday, there were two camps of people set up in Coeur d'Alene Park in Browne's Addition.…

An object of the present invention is to provide a novel trans-2-decenoic acid derivative or a pharmaceutically acceptable salt thereof and to provide a pharmaceutical agent which contains said compound as an active ingredient and has a highly safe neurotrophic factor-like activity or an alleviating action for side effect induced by administration of anti-cancer agents. The trans-2-decenoic acid derivative or a pharmaceutically acceptable salt thereof which is the compound of the present invention is specifically represented by the formula (1): (In the formula, Y is —O—, —NR— or —S—, R is hydrogen atom, alkyl group, dialkylaminoalkyl group or the like and W is a substituent such as dialkylaminoalkyl group) and has a quite high usefulness as a pharmaceutical agent such as a preventive or therapeutic agent for dementia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, depression, etc., a treating or repairing agent for spinal cord injury.

The present invention relates to compounds of Formula (I): to pharmaceutically acceptable salts thereof, to methods of using them to treat bacterial infections, and to methods for their preparation.

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 invention pertains generally to the field of therapeutic compounds. More specifically the present invention pertains to certain pyridyl-amino-pyrazine carbonitrile compounds that, inter alia, inhibit Checkpoint Kinase 1 (CHK1) kinase function. The present invention also pertains to pharmaceutical compositions comprising such compounds, and the use of such compounds and compositions, both in vitro and in vivo, to inhibit CHK1 kinase function, and in the treatment of diseases and conditions that are mediated by CHK1, that are ameliorated by the inhibition of CHK1 kinase function, etc., including proliferative conditions such as cancer, etc., optionally in combination with another agent, for example, (a) a DNA topoisomerase I or II inhibitor; (b) a DNA damaging agent; (c) an antimetabolite or thymidylate synthase (TS) inhibitor; (d) a microtubule targeted agent; and (e) ionizing radiation.

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.

The invention relates to oxazolopyrimidine compounds of formula I, where A, R1 and R2 are defined as stated in the claims. The compounds of formula I are suitable, for example, for wound healing.

The present invention provides 2,4-pyrimidinediamine compounds that inhibit the IgE and/or IgG receptor signaling cascades that lead to the release of chemical mediators, intermediates and methods of synthesizing the compounds and methods of using the compounds in a variety of contexts, including in the treatment and prevention of diseases characterized by, caused by or associated with the release of chemical mediators via degranulation and other processes effected by activation of the IgE and/or IgG receptor signaling cascades.

The present invention provides a compound of formula I: a method for manufacturing the compounds of the invention, and its therapeutic uses. The present invention further provides a combination of pharmacologically active agents and a pharmaceutical composition.

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.

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.

Carbohydrate substituted dibenzo[d,g][1,3,2]dioxaphosphocin compounds of formula I ##STR1## where A is a carbohydrate residue are effective stabilizers for polymers processed at elevated temperatures and subject to thermal or oxidative degradation.

Carbohydrate substituted dibenzo[d,f][1,3,2]dioxaphosphepin compounds of formula I ##STR1## where A is a carbohydrate residue are effective stabilizers for polymers processed at elevated temperatures and subject to thermal or oxidative degradation.