We describe TensoriaCalc, a tensor calculus package written to be smoothly consistent with the Wolfram Language, so as to ensure ease of usage. It allows multiple metrics to be defined in a given session; and, once a metric is computed, associated standard differential geometry operations to be carried out - covariant derivatives, Hodge duals, index raising and lowering, derivation of geodesic equations, etc. Other non-metric operations, such as the Lie and exterior derivatives, coordinate transformation on tensors, etc. are also part of its built-in functionality.
We study a two-player zero-sum game in which the row player aims to maximize their payoff against a competing column player, under an unknown payoff matrix estimated through bandit feedback. We propose three algorithms based on the Explore-Then-Commit (ETC) and action pair elimination frameworks. The first adapts it to zero-sum games, the second incorporates adaptive elimination that leverages the $\varepsilon$-Nash Equilibrium property to efficiently select the optimal action pair, and the third extends the elimination algorithm by employing non-uniform exploration. Our objective is to demonstrate the applicability of ETC and action pair elimination algorithms in a zero-sum game setting by focusing on learning pure strategy Nash Equilibria. A key contribution of our work is a derivation of instance-dependent upper bounds on the expected regret of our proposed algorithms, which has received limited attention in the literature on zero-sum games. Particularly, after $T$ rounds, we achieve an instance-dependent regret upper bounds of $O(Δ+ \sqrt{T})$ for ETC in zero-sum game setting and $O\left(\frac{\log (T Δ^2)}Δ\right)$ for the adaptive elimination algorithm and its variant with non-uniform exploration, where $Δ$ denotes the suboptimality gap. Therefore, our results indicate that the ETC and action pair elimination algorithms perform effectively in zero-sum game settings, achieving regret bounds comparable to existing methods while providing insight through instance-dependent analysis.
Zachary Goisman, Timothy Carleton, Seth H. Cohen
et al.
Accurately assessing image source completeness is critical for interpreting measurements on telescope data. Using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) data from the Hubble Space Telescope ($HST$) archival project "SKYSURF", we model galaxy completeness as a function of the exposure time and background of an image. This is accomplished by adding simulated objects with varying magnitudes and sizes into these images, and determining the detection rate for each set of parameters. The fifty percent completeness results are then compared to the Exposure Time Calculator (ETC), in order to assess the differences between the STSCI ETC and our analysis of the archival data. Ultimately, we find that, for extended galaxies, the ETC predicts a 1-2 magnitudes fainter completeness limit than our data. We believe the difference is due to the ETC's flat surface brightness profiles being less accurate at predicting for extended sources compared to our more realistic profiles.
We present a hierarchical architecture to improve the efficiency of event-triggered control (ETC) in reducing resource consumption. This paper considers event-triggered systems generally as an impulsive control system in which the objective is to minimize the number of impulses. Our architecture recognizes that traditional ETC is a greedy strategy towards optimizing average inter-event times and introduces the idea of a deadline policy for the optimization of long-term discounted inter-event times. A lower layer is designed employing event-triggered control to guarantee the satisfaction of control objectives, while a higher layer implements a deadline policy designed with reinforcement learning to improve the discounted inter-event time. We apply this scheme to the control of an orbiting spacecraft, showing superior performance in terms of actuation frequency reduction with respect to a standard (one-layer) ETC while maintaining safety guarantees.
Centuria, il metaromanzo di Giorgio Manganelli apparso nel 1979, è (usando le parole di Italo Calvino) un’enciclopedia aperta. Scaturita al tempo stesso da un evidente scetticismo epistemologico e da un’idea di elaborazione letteraria più problematica, l’enciclopedia aperta si regge sull’equilibrio precario tra una forza centrifuga, fonte di una pluralità di storie e vicende potenzialmente infinite; e una forza centripeta, che si occupa al contrario della loro sistemazione all’interno di una rigida struttura. Questo saggio si propone di isolare i due poli di questo congegno narrativo paradossale, rispettivamente mettendo a fuoco: per le forze strutturanti, il rapporto con alcune opere di consultazione (dizionario, enciclopedia); per le forze disgreganti, la ricorrenza di specifici ‘meccanismi di pluralizzazione’ narrativa quali il ri-uso di materiale mutuato da opere precedenti, un’istanza enunciativa ipotetica e congetturale, la predilezione per i temi dell’attesa e della potenzialità degli eventi, e infine la ricorrenza dei concetti di elenco, schema e catalogo.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Style. Composition. Rhetoric
The conquest of America brought with it the introduction of rhetoric as a model of teaching and as a practice in the different manifestations of religious discourse, of which the preaching or sermon was the most important for scholars of the colonial era (16th-18th centuries) who, on the other hand, gave little importance to the three political genres: deliberative, epideictic and judicial or forensic, although these had not disappeared as discursive practices. The great classical deliberative oratory had taken a backseat in New Spain but continued to develop in the consistories of the mayoralties and in public debates; the judicial genre continued to be exercised in lawsuits before the Inquisition and local judicial bodies and the epideictic genre was manifested in the lives of saints and praises of various kinds. This situation changed during the 19th century, particularly in the second half, when great parliamentary oratory, civic and patriotic speeches that flooded the republic and judicial oratory flourished because of the new political conditions brought about by the struggle for independence and the triumph of liberalism, in addition to other important genres such as history and journalism. The purpose of this essay is, first, to offer an outline of oratory practices and rhetorical teaching during the Colony, emphasizing the importance of sermons and the oblivion of other discursive expressions and, second, to show the emergence of political genres during the 19th century, which reached their greatest splendor in discursive practices and liberal education.
Questo articolo propone un approfondimento sull’ultima fase della poetica di Sylvia Plath. Attraverso la lettura e il commento di alcuni testi dalla raccolta Ariel, nell’edizione restaurata che corrisponde alla sequenza nient’affatto casuale concepita dalla poetessa, si tracceranno le coordinate di un progetto che richiama le antiche cosmologie, dal momento che Plath prova a dare vita a un mondo, nuovo e più intimo, finalmente libero da dolorose separazioni. Pare indubbio che i componimenti per Ariel siano pervasi da un senso di creazione; come ha sottolineato Nadia Fusini, ciò a cui il lettore assiste è un vero e proprio miracolo di transustanziazione, attraverso cui Plath trasforma la sua scrittura in organismo vivente. Nell’intento di chiarire questa affermazione, nell’articolo si sostiene che, in Ariel, Plath non si nasconde più dietro la tecnica acquisita; al contrario, creatore e creatura nei testi della maturità diventano la stessa cosa. È questo l’inizio di un percorso che la porterà non solo a diventare Poeta, ma a farsi poesia.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Style. Composition. Rhetoric
Questo articolo presenta il progetto Macchine per leggere, nato dalla collaborazione tra il Dipartimento di Studi letterari, filosofici e di storia dell’arte dell’Università di Roma “Tor Vergata” e il Centro per il Libro e la Lettura del MiC. Scopo del progetto è la realizzazione di un ambiente digitale (desktop e mobile) che introduca gli studenti della scuola secondaria di secondo grado alla conoscenza e all’utilizzo delle tecniche di analisi computazionale dei testi, qui proposte come spunto per accostarsi alla lettura dei classici della letteratura italiana (tra gli altri che saranno resi disponibili sul sito, Il piacere, I Malavoglia, Il fu Mattia Pascal…). L’approccio del distant reading e gli strumenti informatici per l’analisi e la rappresentazione dei corpora e per il text mining (word cloud, indici di frequenza di termini e sintagmi, topic modeling, sentiment e network analysis), uniti ad altre risorse come la geolocalizzazione su mappe digitali dei luoghi letterari, saranno presentati sia come metodo per simulare in ambiente virtuale reading strategies, che come modelli per integrare le prassi ermeneutiche tradizionali – close reading. In una sezione del sito dedicata, gli algoritmi di cui si darà dimostrazione saranno a disposizione degli studenti in forma di web app, così che possano sperimentare in autonomia e su altri testi in loro possesso l’approccio distant proposto nell’ambito del progetto.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Style. Composition. Rhetoric
Drug repurposing is an unconventional approach that is used to investigate new therapeutic aids of existing and shelved drugs. Recent advancement in technologies and the availability of the data of genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, etc., and with the accessibility of large and reliable database resources, there are abundantly of opportunities to discover drugs by drug repurposing in an efficient manner. The recent pandemic of SARS-COV-2, that caused the death of 6,245,750 human beings to date, has tremendously increase the exceptional usage of bioinformatics tools in interpreting the molecular characterizations of viral infections. In this paper, we have employed various bioinformatics tools such as AutoDock-Vina, PyMol etc. We have found a leading drug candidate Cepharanthine that has shown better results and effectiveness than recently used antiviral drug candidates such as Favipiravir, IDX184, Remedesivir, Ribavirin and etc. This paper has analyzed Cepharanthine potential therapeutic importance as a drug of choice in managing COVID-19 cases. It is anticipated that proposed study would be beneficial for researchers and medical practitioners in handling SARS-CoV-2 and its variant related diseases.
The recent advancements in multicore machines highlight the need to simplify concurrent programming in order to leverage their computational power. One way to achieve this is by designing efficient concurrent data structures (e.g. stacks, queues, hash-tables, etc.) and synchronization techniques (e.g. locks, combining techniques, etc.) that perform well in machines with large amounts of cores. In contrast to ordinary, sequential data-structures, the concurrent data-structures allow multiple threads to simultaneously access and/or modify them. Synch is an open-source framework that not only provides some common high-performant concurrent data-structures, but it also provides researchers with the tools for designing and benchmarking high performant concurrent data-structures. The Synch framework contains a substantial set of concurrent data-structures such as queues, stacks, combining-objects, hash-tables, locks, etc. and it provides a user-friendly runtime for developing and benchmarking concurrent data-structures. Among other features, the provided runtime provides functionality for creating threads easily (both POSIX and user-level threads), tools for measuring performance, etc. Moreover, the provided concurrent data-structures and the runtime are highly optimized for contemporary NUMA multiprocessors such as AMD Epyc and Intel Xeon.
The study of provable adversarial robustness has mostly been limited to classification tasks and models with one-dimensional real-valued outputs. We extend the scope of certifiable robustness to problems with more general and structured outputs like sets, images, language, etc. We model the output space as a metric space under a distance/similarity function, such as intersection-over-union, perceptual similarity, total variation distance, etc. Such models are used in many machine learning problems like image segmentation, object detection, generative models, image/audio-to-text systems, etc. Based on a robustness technique called randomized smoothing, our $\textit{center smoothing}$ procedure can produce models with the guarantee that the change in the output, as measured by the distance metric, remains small for any norm-bounded adversarial perturbation of the input. We apply our method to create certifiably robust models with disparate output spaces - from sets to images - and show that it yields meaningful certificates without significantly degrading the performance of the base model. Code for our experiments is available at: https://github.com/aounon/center-smoothing.
In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving image-retrieval scheme using a codebook generated by using a plain-image dataset. Encryption-then-compression (EtC) images, which were proposed for EtC systems, have been used in conventional privacy-preserving image-retrieval schemes, in which a codebook is generated from EtC images uploaded by image owners, and extended SIMPLE descriptors are then calculated as image descriptors by using the codebook. In contrast, in the proposed scheme, a codebook is generated from a dataset independent of uploaded images. The use of an independent dataset enables us not only to use a codebook that does not require recalculation but also to constantly provide a high retrieval accuracy. In an experiment, the proposed scheme is demonstrated to maintain a high retrieval performance, even if codebooks are generated from a plain image dataset independent of image owners' encrypted images.
Il saggio si concentra su G., l’eroe eponimo del romanzo neo-modernista di John Berger, e su alcuni personaggi di contorno del medesimo testo – le figure femminili e il convitato di pietra – allo scopo di illustrare la reinterpretazione della figura di Don Giovanni, da parte dell’autore, quale rivoluzionario biologico e “anti-storico”. Particolare attenzione è riservata alle modalità narrative di costruzione dei personaggi entro un romanzo che mette assieme caratteristiche proprie del realismo e tecniche moderniste, poetiche di cui G. illustra il potenziale critico nei confronti del disimpegno politico postmoderno.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Style. Composition. Rhetoric
Tra la fine della dittatura (1974) e l’entrata nella CEE (1986), il Portogallo avvia un ripensamento sul proprio passato che, dal punto di vista letterario, equivale anche a una rinnovata attenzione al rapporto autore-narratore-personaggio. Tra gli esempi di personaggi metanarrativi non ancora presi in considerazione dalla critica, l’intervento si concentrerà su O que diz Molero di Dinis Machado (1977) e Walt, o frio e o quente di Fernando Assis Pacheco (1978).
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Style. Composition. Rhetoric
Krishan Kumar Tiwari, Vladica Sark, Eckhard Grass
et al.
Terahertz spectrum is being researched upon to provide ultra-high throughput radio links for indoor applications, e.g., virtual reality (VR), etc. as well as outdoor applications, e.g., backhaul links, etc. This paper investigates a monopulse-based beam tracking approach for limited mobility users relying on sparse massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) wireless channels. Owing to the sparsity, beamforming is realized using digitally-controlled radio frequency (RF) / intermediate-frequency (IF) phase shifters with constant amplitude constraint for transmit power compliance. A monopulse-based beam tracking technique, using received signal strength indi-cation (RSSI) is adopted to avoid feedback overheads for obvious reasons of efficacy and resource savings. The Matlab implementation of the beam tracking algorithm is also reported. This Matlab implementation has been kept as general purpose as possible using functions wherein the channel, beamforming codebooks, monopulse comparator, etc. can easily be updated for specific requirements and with minimum code amendments.
Il gioco del mondo, diffuso in Italia e in parecchi altri paesi anche extra-europei con denominazioni diverse, è uno dei giochi infantili che maggiormente ha attratto l’attenzione degli studi etnografici, per i suoi rimandi al rito e al mito, connessi alle specifiche modalità del percorso d’andata e ritorno entro uno schema tracciato a terra. Attraverso considerazioni d’ordine lessicale e storico, s’intende evidenziare e giustificare la natura labirintica del gioco, ad oggi solo sporadicamente ipotizzata.
In appendice, una testimonianza della scrittrice Carla Muschio.
The Mondo(Italian word for Hopscotch) is one of the most known children’s playground games. In Italy and across the globe, this game is called by several different names, even in the same language and nation. Since it is connected to the rite and the myth, being a sort of initiation path represented into a scheme drawn on the ground, it has been the object of more than one ethnographic research. By analyzing some lexical and historical evidences, this paper aims to stress and motivate the labyrinthic nature of the Mondo game, which has been rarely proposed since now.
As an appendix, a testimony by the writer Carla Muschio.
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar, Style. Composition. Rhetoric
AbstractDrawing upon research on narrative and speech styles and on digital and multimodal communication, the author proposes multimodal narrative discourse analysis (MNDA) with associated pedagogical and analytical procedures to teach and study storytelling. The second language (L2) students first participated in multimodal narrative simulations in the virtual world of Second Life. The university students then presented, evaluated, and revised stories in both face-to-face and digital contexts through multiple modalities and technologies. MNDA further provided tools and methods for analyzing the students’ discursive processes and agentive experiences of L2 storytelling. The results of MNDA showed that the proper use of narrative elements, discourse structures, and stylistic devices, as well as bodily, visual, and video resources, assisted the students in developing multimodal designs and storytelling styles. This technology-mediated discourse approach to L2 storytelling suggests the importance of teaching and researching broader narrative contexts and activities other than simply elocution in multimodal communicative activities.
Rajeev Gupta, Ranganath Kondapally, Chakrapani Ravi Kiran
In this paper, we present design, implementation, and effectiveness of generating personalized suggestions for email replies. To personalize email responses based on users style and personality, we model the users persona based on her past responses to emails. This model is added to the language-based model created across users using past responses of the all user emails. A users model captures the typical responses of the user given a particular context. The context includes the email received, recipient of the email, and other external signals such as calendar activities, preferences, etc. The context along with users personality (e.g., extrovert, formal, reserved, etc.) is used to suggest responses. These responses can be a mixture of multiple modes: email replies (textual), audio clips, etc. This helps in making responses mimic the user as much as possible and helps the user to be more productive while retaining her mark in the responses.