Linear operators in equations describing physical problems on a symmetric domain often are also equivariant, which means that they commute with its symmetries, i.e., with the group of orthogonal transformations which leave the domain invariant. Under suitable dis-cretizations the resulting system matrices are also equivariant. Methods for exploiting this equivariance in the numerical solution o...

The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the central trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the exploration phase involves costly experiments and occurs before the exploitation phase; and where each play of an arm durin...

Microalgae show an enormous potential as sustainable feedstock for numerous bioproducts. The current work analyzes the feasibility of business cases for different markets of products from microalgae. We perform a techno-economic evaluation of the whole process chain including cultivation, biorefinery and market exploitation for a 100 hectares facility in six locations. Our projections show a cu...

We present new global and local policy search algorithms suitable for problems with policy-dependent cost variance (or risk), a property present in many robot control tasks. These algorithms exploit new techniques in nonparameteric heteroscedastic regression to directly model the policy-dependent distribution of cost. For local search, the learned cost model can be used as a critic for performi...

Improvements in system cost, size, performance, power dissipation, and design turnaround time are the key benefits offered by System-on-Chip designs. However they come at the cost of an increased complexity and long development cycles. Integrating reconfigurable cores offers a way to increase their flexibility and lifespan. However the integration of embedded reconfigurable units poses a number...

In many applications, especially autonomous exploration, there is a trade-off between operational safety, forcing conservatism about resource usage; and maximising utility, requiring high resource utilisation. In this paper we consider a method of generating plans that maintain this conservatism whilst allowing exploitation of situations where resource usage is better than pessimistically estim...

One poorly investigated issue in organizational agility is the question how organizations change their speed while adopting and exploiting new IT capability. In this paper we outline a theory of software development agility that draws upon a model of IT innovations by Swanson and on March’s learning theory and in particular on his concepts of exploration and exploitation. We explore how both ...

exceeded losses of nonstructural components from structural ones in most demolished buildings in previous earthquakes and its limitation on functionality of critical facilities and building serviceability after earthquakes should be got the point of view for accounting loss of building as a merit for building performance. this paper attempts to demonstrate the significant role of distribution p...

background: air pollution in tehran, capital of iran is responsible for several diverse negative effects. it has been estab­lished that air pollution can affect human health. these health effects include increased hospital admissions due to the ex­acerba­tion of cardiac and respiratory diseases, as well as symptoms such as headache, cough, eye irritation, nausea, sputum and even death in the mo...

Since the development of assisted reproductive technologies, infertile individuals have crossed borders to obtain treatments unavailable or unaffordable in their own country. Recent media coverage has focused on the outsourcing of surrogacy to developing countries, where the cost for surrogacy is significantly less than the equivalent cost in a more developed country. This paper discusses the e...