406 research outputs found
ALPS evaluation in financial portfolio optimisation
No full textclaims to reduce premature convergence in Evolutionary Al-gorithms. We provide the first evaluation of ALPS on a real-world problem — the evolution of non-linear factor models for financial portfolio optimisation. We incorporate ALPS into our GP system, coupled to an investment simulator, and provide a head-to-head comparison between ALPS GP and Standard GP. By investigating the performance of ALPS both during train-ing and during out-of-sample validation, we provide empirical evidence of the benefits of ALPS; we show that it really does reduce convergence, and provides fitter individuals, in our problem domain. The ALPS GP system evolves non-linear factor models that out-perform not only the Standard GP system, but also the market index by a significant amount. I
AACR2 and catalogue production technology: The relevance of cataloguing principles to the online environment
No full textMore than thirty five years have passed since the Paris Conference and cataloguers have witnessed profound changes in many aspects of catalogue production technology and also in bibliographic control and access during this period of time. In comparison to the past, cataloguers are less involved in the design and production of catalogues and bibliographic databases particularly in terms of the interfaces, the types of indexes and the ways in which records and retrieval results are displayed. These changes and developments (see Appendix one) have presented cataloguers with some basic questions about the fundamental principles of record creation and catalogue construction.
Although present online catalogues are benefiting from more advanced hardware and software, there are still considerable, serious problems in searching, retrieval, and display of bibliographic information in present systems, which influence their functions and usefulness. This, as has been highlighted in the literature, may be because some of the present cataloguing principles and rules are inadequate, less relevant or irrelevant to the new electronic environment. A review of the literature of the last two decades indicates that, parallel to the increasing developments in online catalogues, the cataloguing community has been addressing the need for a re-thinking of cataloguing principles and rules in light of the new environment. It is often claimed that AACR2’s rules are based on concepts and principles from the pre-machine period and that they do not serve us well in giving guidance in the construction of electronic catalogues.
Given the influence of all the changes and developments in the world of catalogues and cataloguing, a fundamental re-examination of our cataloguing principles seems very necessary. In this paper some of the basic principles of AACR2 which have been highlighted in the literature as those most likely to be influenced by the new technology will be re-examined in the light of both the present and the potential characteristics and capabilities of the online environment. The aim is to examine the extent to which AACR2 matches or fails to match the capabilities of present systems and those of the near future, for searching, retrieval and display of bibliographic information. In other words, to address how catalogue form and production affects, or is in turn influenced by, the principles upon which AACR2 is based.
The approach used in this paper is to match individual capabilities of online catalogues with the basic principles of AACR2R. A major focus will be the basic concepts of the code’s principles, the logic of their application and the relationship of these principles to the logic of the online catalogue, as well as an examination of the types of principles and rules that are likely to change when moving from a manual catalogue to an online catalogue. In this regard, the needs and expectations of the different catalogue users are also taken into consideration
Advantages of voice reproduction and the development of a biomimetic self-regulating double-clack valve for a prosthesis of the larynx
No full textS.827-830The human larynx is a versatile organ. Main functions are phonation, protection and regulation of the air ways. Patients suffer severely from the diagnosis of a laryngeal carcinoma of the stages T3 and T4. In most cases this diagnosis will lead to a total laryngectomy, which is usually dissatisfying in the sense of postoperative rehabilitation. The postoperative consequences include the loss of the native voice, the loss of regular air ways via mouth and nose, sense of smell, and the inability to build up an abdominal pressure. In this paper we focus on the feasibility of a modular larynx prosthesis which enables the laryngectomee to talk with his native voice, to breathe via the regular air ways, and to build up abdominal pressure. In particular we will give insights for a postoperative solution - a modular prosthesis based on a biomimetic self-regulating double clack-valve and on a voice reconstruction module, a so called vocoder. The vocoder is a device to reproduce the natural human voice. Most important for the use is an additional device required to analyze, conserve and manage voice characteristics of the patient before surgery. The self-regulating double clack-valve is designed to build up an abdominal pressure e.g. to cough. Therefore, our valve-system is working in both directions - a two-way valve system. By bridging the gap of the regular air ways lost by laryngectomy, the sense of smell and taste are restored. In the following we will present details and characteristics of these two main components required for a modular prosthesis of the larynx in laryngectomees
A Blockchain Grand Challenge: Smart Financial Derivatives
No full textBlockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) research encompasses use cases ranging from social innovation to banking, and technical developments ranging from cryptography to semantics of legal text. Research in both academia and industry is highly interdisciplinary across domains such as computer science, linguistics, law, cryptography, banking, economics, and social sciences. The growing complexity of blockchain science and use cases, coupled with the interdisciplinary nature of the research, poses new challenges to our community. Research publication plays a key role in supporting this highly interdisciplinary work: supporting the need for rapid and reliable dissemination of preliminary and final results, and the need for longevity of results beyond the end of financial or management support for a research project. Industry teams rarely have subscriptions to academic journals, and an open access journal adds substantial value in supporting the research community. The field is young, with many research challenges to be addressed. One “grand challenge” for our research community is the implementation of high-value, long-lived, financial derivatives transactions running as smart contracts on DLT (“smart financial derivatives”). This is currently being explored by academia, banking practitioners, trade associations and technology vendors, and is driving research across a wide range of research groups, each focusing on a different aspect. What makes this a “grand” challenge is the need for a large number of diverse research problems to be solved simultaneously. The following outlines a few of the major research questions being investigated: some of these are general research problems that affect blockchain/DLT development broadly, whereas others are very specific to financial derivatives, but all of these aspects must be solved, and their solutions combined effectively, to provide efficient and resilient solutions to the grand challenge
Towards a Wearable Feminine Hygiene Platform for Detection of Invasive Fungal Pathogens via Gold Nanoparticle Aggregation
No full textCandida albicans is an opportunistic fungus that becomes pathogenic and problematic under certain biological conditions. C. albicans may cause painful and uncomfortable symptoms, as well as deaths in immunocompromised patients. Therefore, early detection of C. albicans is essential. However, conventional detection methods are costly, slow, and inaccessible to women in remote or developing areas. To address these concerns, we have developed a wearable and discrete naked-eye detectable colorimetric platform for C. albicans detection. With some modification, this platform is designed to be directly adhered to existing feminine hygiene pads. Our platform is rapid, inexpensive, user-friendly, and disposable and only requires three steps: (i) the addition of vaginal fluid onto sample pads; (ii) the addition of gold nanoparticle gel and running buffer, and (iii) naked eye detection. Our platform is underpinned by selective thiolated aptamer-based recognition of 1,3-β-D glucan molecules—a hallmark of C. albicans cell walls. In the absence of C. albicans, wearable sample pads turn bright pink. In the presence of C. albicans, the wearable pads turn dark blue due to significant nanoparticle target-induced aggregation. We demonstrate naked-eye colorimetric detection of 4.4 × 106 C. albicans cells per ml and nanoparticle stability over a pH range of 3.0–8.0. We believe that this proof-of-concept platform has the potential to have a significant impact on women’s health globally
High throughput instrument to screen fluorescent proteins under two-photon excitation
No full textAuthor Posting. © Optical Society of America , 2020. This article is posted here by permission of Optical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Molina, R. S., King, J., Franklin, J., Clack, N., McRaven, C., Goncharov, V., Flickinger, D., Svoboda, K., Drobizhev, M., & Hughes, T. E. High throughput instrument to screen fluorescent proteins under two-photon excitation. Biomedical Optics Express, 11(12), (2020): 7192-7203, https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.409353.Two-photon microscopy together with fluorescent proteins and fluorescent protein-based biosensors are commonly used tools in neuroscience. To enhance their experimental scope, it is important to optimize fluorescent proteins for two-photon excitation. Directed evolution of fluorescent proteins under one-photon excitation is common, but many one-photon properties do not correlate with two-photon properties. A simple system for expressing fluorescent protein mutants is E. coli colonies on an agar plate. The small focal volume of two-photon excitation makes creating a high throughput screen in this system a challenge for a conventional point-scanning approach. We present an instrument and accompanying software that solves this challenge by selectively scanning each colony based on a colony map captured under one-photon excitation. This instrument, called the GIZMO, can measure the two-photon excited fluorescence of 10,000 E. coli colonies in 7 hours. We show that the GIZMO can be used to evolve a fluorescent protein under two-photon excitation.National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (F31 NS108593, U01 NS094246, U24 NS109107); Howard Hughes Medical Institute
A common graphical form
No full textWe present the Common Graphical Form, a low level, abstract machine independent structure which provides a basis for implementing graph reduction on distributed processors. A key feature of the structure is its ability to model disparate abstract machines in a uniform manner; this enables us to experiment with different abstract machines without having to recode major parts of the run-time system for each additional machine. Because we are dealing with a uniform data structure it is possible to build a suite of performance measurement tools to examine interprocessor data-flow and to apply these tools to different abstract machines in order to make relative comparisons between them at run-time. As a bonus to our design brief we exploit the unifying characteristics of the Common Graphical Form by using it as an intermediate language at compile-time
E. K. Wedelstadt Dental Club of Iowa.
No full textEditors: Aug. 1859-July 1865, J. D. White, J. H. McQuillen, G. J. Ziegler.--Aug. 1865-Dec. 1871, J. H. McQuillen, G. J. Ziegler.--Jan. 1872-May 1891, J. W. White.--July 1891-Apr. 1930, E. C. Kirk (with L. P. Anthony, Dec. 1917-Apr. 1930).--May 1930-Dec. 1936, L. P. Anthony.Vols. 1-13 are called "new series."Merged in Jan. 1937 with: Journal of the American Dental Association, ISSN 1048-6364, to form: Journal of the American Dental Association and dental cosmos, ISSN 0375-8451
A calculus for multi-level emergent behaviours in component-based systems and simulations
No full textA major issue in Complexity Science is the formal description of emer- gent properties and behaviours in terms of lower level properties and behaviours. As a consequence, there are few techniques for empirically investigating specific emer- gent properties. In this paper, we introduce a general compositional approach to specifying such properties, using constraints to define representative sets of com- positions. More specifically, we propose a calculus of complex events, which are compositions of events generated from component-level rule executions. Complex event types can be assembled hierarchically, giving a formal means of relating be- haviours at different levels of abstraction. In being able to specify and then identify complex events of different types in systems and simulations, we have a method for empirically discovering relationships between behaviours defined at different levels. The formalism offers two important practical advantages. Firstly, higher level prop- erties can be defined with different degrees of specificity so they can be defined with limited knowledge; we can then further sub-classify properties after they have been detected to discover differences in their constituent properties. Secondly, the formal- ism is related directly to the rules driving component behaviour so that all higher level behaviours can ultimately be decomposed into rule executions; this is partic- ularly important for desirable and dysfunctional properties, and in circumstances where intervention at the component rule level is possible
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