This draft report organizes our work on this topic to date. The work will continue. Hence, the bulk of this report is an unfinished appendix. We have organized this work on the impact that software complexity has for aircraft safety by looking in two directions. Backward tracing asks the question, “What aspects of safety, V&V, and certification can be complicated by complexity?” Forward tracing...

We attempt a structured view at the ontological query answering problem by distinguishing between two antagonistic perspectives: The knowledge representation perspective considers the ontology as a part of the specified knowledge whereas the database perspective assumes it to be part of the query. These two perspectives give rise to two computation strategies: (data-driven) forward chaining and...

This paper introduces the generalized forward-backward splitting algorithm for minimizing convex functions of the form F + ∑i=1Gi, where F has a Lipschitzcontinuous gradient and the Gi’s are simple in the sense that their Moreau proximity operators are easy to compute. While the forward-backward algorithm cannot deal with more than n = 1 non-smooth function, our method generalizes it to the cas...

Goals for reinforcement learning problems are typically defined through handspecified rewards. To design such problems, developers of learning algorithms must inherently be aware of what the task goals are, yet we often require agents to discover them on their own without any supervision beyond these sparse rewards. While much of the power of reinforcement learning derives from the concept that...

Computing the time evolution of quantum systems composed of many coupled degrees of freedom presents serious challenges. Currently, simulations of timedependent properties in polyatomic molecules, clusters, or condensed phases employ a variety of approximations, which are largely built around variational, quantum-classical or semiclassical ideas. While approximate methods have proven extremely ...