Dynamic Distribution-Sensitive Point Location

We propose a dynamic data structure for the distribution-sensitive point location problem in the plane. Suppose that there is a fixed query distribution within a convex subdivision S , and we are given an oracle that can return in O (1) time the probability of a query point falling into a polygonal region of constant complexity. We can maintain S such that each query is answered in O opt (S) ) expected time, where opt ( S ) is the expected time of the best linear decision tree for answering point location queries in S . The space and construction time are O(n log 2 n ), where n is the number of vertices of S . An update of S as a mixed sequence of k edge insertions and deletions takes O(k log 4 n) amortized time. As a corollary, the randomized incremental construction of the Voronoi diagram of n sites can be performed in O(n log 4 n ) expected time so that, during the incremental construction, a nearest neighbor query at any time can be answered optimally with respect to the intermediate Voronoi diagram at that time.

A HOUSE THAT GROWS ON THE INSIDE

<p>With house prices rising so rapidly, many New Zealand families find the stretch to homeownership beyond them. It is now customary to hear of people unable to purchase a property for their needs, in relation to the size of the house, its location or both and the idea of homeownership is fast becoming a pipeline dream for most people. With large upfront costs and large mortgage repayments, the cost of purchasing or building a house is unaffordable for a growing number of the population (Aravena & Lacobelli, 2012; Michael Bassett, 2013). Affordability is a broad notion but in essence, this research portfolio addresses it as the concern for accessibility of New Zealanders to put a roof over their heads. The crux of this issue is the relatively high cost to purchase a place to call home, making housing a commodity to enrich a few. An alternative solution to building and financing a home is needed. This research portfolio questions how flexible design and incremental construction approaches can be applied to a range of sites typical to the New Zealand context, providing an alternative housing solution that addresses housing affordability. This alternative housing solution demonstrates flexible design and incremental construction tactics derived from the comparative and critical analysis of literature and precedence. These tactics are demonstrated through the design of four typologies that accommodate the users changing needs and financial circumstances. Housing affordability has been addressed by the consideration of these flexible design and incremental construction tactics to allow for incremental investment. As the users, financial circumstances increase or change, the design and construction of their dwelling allows them to make changes easily. This reduces the need for major construction work in order to change the layout and use and it easily allows for the opportunity to expand when the money becomes available. It also averts the necessity to move which in the current property market is costly in terms of finances and time. To address the aims of this research portfolio, this alternative housing solution inverts the typical process of building and financing a home. It responds effortlessly to the occupant’s requirements, however varied. Incorporating flexible design and incremental construction tactics allows for incremental change and incremental investment over the lifetime of the building. At times when a lack of supply has resulted in rampant price increases, we need to question why, would one build a house that takes a great amount of time, money and effort to construct but so quickly becomes redundant? A dwelling, therefore, shouldn’t be a product. A dwelling should be an ongoing process.</p>

A HOUSE THAT GROWS ON THE INSIDE

<p>With house prices rising so rapidly, many New Zealand families find the stretch to homeownership beyond them. It is now customary to hear of people unable to purchase a property for their needs, in relation to the size of the house, its location or both and the idea of homeownership is fast becoming a pipeline dream for most people. With large upfront costs and large mortgage repayments, the cost of purchasing or building a house is unaffordable for a growing number of the population (Aravena & Lacobelli, 2012; Michael Bassett, 2013). Affordability is a broad notion but in essence, this research portfolio addresses it as the concern for accessibility of New Zealanders to put a roof over their heads. The crux of this issue is the relatively high cost to purchase a place to call home, making housing a commodity to enrich a few. An alternative solution to building and financing a home is needed. This research portfolio questions how flexible design and incremental construction approaches can be applied to a range of sites typical to the New Zealand context, providing an alternative housing solution that addresses housing affordability. This alternative housing solution demonstrates flexible design and incremental construction tactics derived from the comparative and critical analysis of literature and precedence. These tactics are demonstrated through the design of four typologies that accommodate the users changing needs and financial circumstances. Housing affordability has been addressed by the consideration of these flexible design and incremental construction tactics to allow for incremental investment. As the users, financial circumstances increase or change, the design and construction of their dwelling allows them to make changes easily. This reduces the need for major construction work in order to change the layout and use and it easily allows for the opportunity to expand when the money becomes available. It also averts the necessity to move which in the current property market is costly in terms of finances and time. To address the aims of this research portfolio, this alternative housing solution inverts the typical process of building and financing a home. It responds effortlessly to the occupant’s requirements, however varied. Incorporating flexible design and incremental construction tactics allows for incremental change and incremental investment over the lifetime of the building. At times when a lack of supply has resulted in rampant price increases, we need to question why, would one build a house that takes a great amount of time, money and effort to construct but so quickly becomes redundant? A dwelling, therefore, shouldn’t be a product. A dwelling should be an ongoing process.</p>

Finding More Property Violations in Model Checking via the Restart Policy

Model checking is an efficient formal verification technique that has been applied to a wide spectrum of applications in software engineering. Popular model checking algorithms include Bounded Model Checking (BMC) and Incremental Construction of Inductive Clauses for Indubitable Correctness/Property Directed Reachability(IC3/PDR). The recently proposed Complementary Approximate Reachability (CAR) model checking algorithm has a performance close to BMC in bug-finding, while its depth-first strategy sometimes leads the algorithm to a trap, which will waste lots of computation. In this paper, we enhance the recently proposed Complementary Approximate Reachability (CAR) model checking algorithm by integrating the restart policy, which yields a restartable CAR model (abbreviated as r-CAR). The restart policy can help avoid the trap problem caused by the depth-first strategy and has played an important role in modern SAT-solving algorithms to search for a satisfactory solution. As the bug-finding in model checking is reducible to a similar search problem, the restart policy can be useful to enhance the bug-finding capability. We made an extensive experiment to evaluate the new algorithm. Our results show that out of the 749 industrial instances, r-CAR is able to find 13 instances that the state-of-the-art BMC technique cannot find and can solve more than 11 instances than the original CAR. The new algorithm successfully contributes to the current model-checking portfolio in practice.

MICE-PES: An Algorithm for Accurate Conformational Analysis and its Implementation to Natural Products

<p>Secondary metabolites from natural sources have revolutionized the modern drug industry by acting as lead compounds. Many commercial drugs have evolved originally from natural molecules before being synthesized in the laboratory for commercialization. Because of the importance of natural molecules, it is crucial to determine their structural properties carefully as it is essential for their synthesis and studying their pharmacological behaviour. Many natural molecules have flexible structures and can adopt many different conformations in solution at room temperature. Hence, the determination of their relative configuration is a challenging task with the available experimental techniques. For structural analysis of natural molecules and to study their properties, all conformers which might be responsible for their chemical properties have to be considered. Theoretical chemistry has been very helpful in absolute structure determination of complex and conformationally flexible natural molecules by calculating their theoretical nuclear magnetic resonance, ultraviolet, infra red, and circular dichroism spectra etc. There are a number of software tools that offer conformational analysis by utilizing different molecular mechanics approaches. They produce a large number of possible conformers and are not general purpose, thus compromising accuracy. Apart from that, different force fields available for conformational analysis and minimization have been designed for specific molecular classes and do not produce good results beyond their scope. In the past, there have been reports about a “build-up procedure” for predicting the low energy conformations of peptides by optimising smaller fragments of the molecule under study and then joining them while minimizing their energies using force fields. Later on, this method was extended to predict the structure of DNA from sequences. This method used force field methods and did not gain much popularity due to its various limitations. Here, MICE-PES (Method for the Incremental Construction and Exploration of the Potential Energy Surface) is presented, an algorithm which performs a conformational analysis using high level quantum chemical calculations by building the molecule incrementally from its smallest possible analogue whose conformational degrees of freedom are very well separated than the rest of the molecule. MICE-PES has been validated through studies on known biomolecule 3-epi-xestoaminol whose absolute configuration has been determined already by experimental and theoretical methods. MICE-PES has also been used to assign the relative configuration of a natural product (meroterphenol C) whose configuration could not be established experimentally. Overall, the development of MICE-PES will be very helpful in solving problems in the study of conformationally flexible systems, in all aspects of organic chemistry.</p>

MICE-PES: An Algorithm for Accurate Conformational Analysis and its Implementation to Natural Products

<p>Secondary metabolites from natural sources have revolutionized the modern drug industry by acting as lead compounds. Many commercial drugs have evolved originally from natural molecules before being synthesized in the laboratory for commercialization. Because of the importance of natural molecules, it is crucial to determine their structural properties carefully as it is essential for their synthesis and studying their pharmacological behaviour. Many natural molecules have flexible structures and can adopt many different conformations in solution at room temperature. Hence, the determination of their relative configuration is a challenging task with the available experimental techniques. For structural analysis of natural molecules and to study their properties, all conformers which might be responsible for their chemical properties have to be considered. Theoretical chemistry has been very helpful in absolute structure determination of complex and conformationally flexible natural molecules by calculating their theoretical nuclear magnetic resonance, ultraviolet, infra red, and circular dichroism spectra etc. There are a number of software tools that offer conformational analysis by utilizing different molecular mechanics approaches. They produce a large number of possible conformers and are not general purpose, thus compromising accuracy. Apart from that, different force fields available for conformational analysis and minimization have been designed for specific molecular classes and do not produce good results beyond their scope. In the past, there have been reports about a “build-up procedure” for predicting the low energy conformations of peptides by optimising smaller fragments of the molecule under study and then joining them while minimizing their energies using force fields. Later on, this method was extended to predict the structure of DNA from sequences. This method used force field methods and did not gain much popularity due to its various limitations. Here, MICE-PES (Method for the Incremental Construction and Exploration of the Potential Energy Surface) is presented, an algorithm which performs a conformational analysis using high level quantum chemical calculations by building the molecule incrementally from its smallest possible analogue whose conformational degrees of freedom are very well separated than the rest of the molecule. MICE-PES has been validated through studies on known biomolecule 3-epi-xestoaminol whose absolute configuration has been determined already by experimental and theoretical methods. MICE-PES has also been used to assign the relative configuration of a natural product (meroterphenol C) whose configuration could not be established experimentally. Overall, the development of MICE-PES will be very helpful in solving problems in the study of conformationally flexible systems, in all aspects of organic chemistry.</p>

Emergent Tangled Program Graphs in Partially Observable Recursive Forecasting and ViZDoom Navigation Tasks

Modularity represents a recurring theme in the attempt to scale evolution to the design of complex systems. However, modularity rarely forms the central theme of an artificial approach to evolution. In this work, we report on progress with the recently proposed Tangled Program Graph (TPG) framework in which programs are modules. The combination of the TPG representation and its variation operators enable both teams of programs and graphs of teams of programs to appear in an emergent process. The original development of TPG was limited to tasks with, for the most part, complete information. This work details two recent approaches for scaling TPG to tasks that are dominated by partially observable sources of information using different formulations of indexed memory. One formulation emphasizes the incremental construction of memory, again as an emergent process, resulting in a distributed view of state. The second formulation assumes a single global instance of memory and develops it as a communication medium, thus a single global view of state. The resulting empirical evaluation demonstrates that TPG equipped with memory is able to solve multi-task recursive time-series forecasting problems and visual navigation tasks expressed in two levels of a commercial first-person shooter environment.

“To Interfere on Their Behalf”: Sovereignty, Networks, and Capital in the Dominican Republic

This article uses a lawsuit between British engineers and Dominican merchants over a sugar estate mortgage to examine how transnational capital networks functioned at the local level during a moment of transition in the late nineteenth-century global economy. When Dominican courts ruled against the engineers, the firm unsuccessfully sought diplomatic intervention, raising questions on the one hand about the incremental construction of Dominican sovereignty and on the other about the links between diplomatic and business networks on the ground. It is situated within calls for new approaches to the history of the Dominican Republic that utilize international archives and focus on corporate bodies, both in local and Pan-Caribbean contexts.

Who Am I?

To enable targeted ads, companies profile Internet users, automatically inferring potential interests and demographics. While current profiling centers on users' web browsing data, smartphones and other devices with rich sensing capabilities portend profiling techniques that draw on methods from ubiquitous computing. Unfortunately, even existing profiling and ad-targeting practices remain opaque to users, engendering distrust, resignation, and privacy concerns. We hypothesized that making profiling visible at the time and place it occurs might help users better understand and engage with automatically constructed profiles. To this end, we built a technology probe that surfaces the incremental construction of user profiles from both web browsing and activities in the physical world. The probe explores transparency and control of profile construction in real time. We conducted a two-week field deployment of this probe with 25 participants. We found that increasing the visibility of profiling helped participants anticipate how certain actions can trigger specific ads. Participants' desired engagement with their profile differed in part based on their overall attitudes toward ads. Furthermore, participants expected algorithms would automatically determine when an inference was inaccurate, no longer relevant, or off-limits. Current techniques typically do not do this. Overall, our findings suggest that leveraging opportunistic moments within pervasive computing to engage users with their own inferred profiles can create more trustworthy and positive experiences with targeted ads.