Building behaviors, one layer at a time

Building communities one bacterium at a time.

T he biosphere is brimming with examples of symbiotic interactions between distantly related organisms that have evolved mutually beneficial relationships to ensure their survival. One might assume that there are many examples of syntrophic interactions among microorganisms because of their diversity and abundance (1, 2). Remarkably few cases between 2 or more microbial species have been descri...

Building relationships--one patient at a time.

Building Trust - One Gift at a Time

This paper reports an experiment evaluating the effect of gift giving on building trust. We have nested our explorations in the standard version of the investment game. Our gift treatment includes a dictator stage in which the trustee decides whether to give a gift to the trustor before both of them proceed to play the investment game. We observe that in such case the majority of trustees offer...

Forward Thinking: Building and Training Neural Networks One Layer at a Time

We present a general framework for training deep neural networks without backpropagation. This substantially decreases training time and also allows for construction of deep networks with many sorts of learners, including networks whose layers are defined by functions that are not easily differentiated, like decision trees. The main idea is that layers can be trained one at a time, and once the...

Building a Better America-One Wealth Quintile at a Time.

Disagreements about the optimal level of wealth inequality underlie policy debates ranging from taxation to welfare. We attempt to insert the desires of "regular" Americans into these debates, by asking a nationally representative online panel to estimate the current distribution of wealth in the United States and to "build a better America" by constructing distributions with their ideal level ...