Face detection is a canonical example of a rare event detection problem, in which target patterns occur with much lower frequency than nontargets. Out of millions of face-sized windows in an input image, for example, only a few will typically contain a face. Viola and Jones recently proposed a cascade architecture for face detection which successfully addresses the rare event nature of the task...

This paper addresses the problem of tuning hyperparameters in support vector machine modeling. A Direct Simplex Search (DSS) method, which seeks to evolve hyperparameter values using an empirical error estimate as steering criterion, is proposed and experimentally evaluated on real-world datasets. DSS is a robust hill climbing scheme, a popular derivative-free optimization method, suitable for ...

The decision between lytic and lysogenic development of temperate DNA bacteriophages is determined largely by transcriptional regulation through DNA-binding proteins. To determine whether a heterologous RNA-binding activity could control the developmental fate of a DNA bacteriophage, a derivative of P22 was constructed in which the chosen developmental pathway is regulated by an RNA-binding mol...

This paper is an endeavour to address the problem of distributed leader selection in a formation of autonomous agents where the agents do not communicate directly via communication channels. The algorithm that the agents use to select a leader relies on the agents observing each others’ behaviours. It is shown that the proposed algorithm is terminated, on average, in finite number of step and r...

BACKGROUND Evolutionary theory predicts that organisms should evolve the ability to produce high fitness phenotypes in the face of environmental disturbances (environmental robustness) or genetic mutations (genetic robustness). While several studies have uncovered mechanisms that lead to both environmental and genetic robustness, we have yet to understand why some components of the genome are m...

Developmental selection, the non-random elimination of offspring during development, is hypothesized to alter the opportunity for selection on a given trait at later stages of the life cycle. Here, we provide a direct demonstration of developmental selection against developmental instability, assessed as the incidence of minor, discrete phenotypic abnormalities in the male sex comb, a condition...

This paper reports an empirical test of Schneider’s (1987) selection proposition that organizations select people who share the organization’s values. The values of 412 applicants to nine utility companies in the United Kingdom were captured and their fit to (1) the values of the organization as viewed by members of the Top Team (P–OV fit), (2) the values of the recruiting departments as viewed...

Measurement of natural selection on correlated characters provides valuable information on fitness surfaces, patterns of directional, stabilizing, or disruptive selection, mechanisms of fitness variation operating in nature, and possible spatial variation in selective pressures. We examined effects of seed weight, germination date, plant size, early growth, and late growth on individual fitness...

Divergent selection for heat production/loss (kcal.kg-.75.d-1), measured in 9- to 11-wk-old male mice, was conducted for 15 generations. Heat loss was measured for 15 h on individual animals placed overnight in direct, gradient-layer calorimeters. Selection for high (MH) and low (ML) heat loss and unselected control (MC) occurred in each of three replicates for a total of nine unique lines. Rep...

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