No Arabic abstract
Animals live in groups to defend against predation and to obtain food. However, for some animals --- especially ones that spend long periods of time feeding --- there are costs if a group chooses to move on before their nutritional needs are satisfied. If the conflict between feeding and keeping up with a group becomes too large, it may be advantageous to some animals to split into subgroups of animals with similar nutritional needs. We model the costs and benefits of splitting by a herd of cows using a cost function (CF) that quantifies individual variation in hunger, desire to lie down, and predation risk. We model the costs associated with hunger and lying desire as the standard deviations of individuals within a group, and we model predation risk as an inverse exponential function of group size. We minimize the cost function over all plausible groups that can arise from a given herd and study the dynamics of group splitting. We explore our model using two examples: (1) we consider group switching and group fission in a herd of relatively homogeneous cows; and (2) we examine a herd with an equal number of adult males (larger animals) and adult females (smaller animals).
The CoVid-19 is spreading pandemically all over the world. A rapid defeat of the pandemic requires carrying out on the population a mass screening, able to separate positive from negative cases. Such a cleaning will free a flow of productive population. The current rate and cost of testing, performed with the common PCR (polymerase chain reaction) method and with the available resources, is forcing a selection of the subjects to be tested. Indeed, each one must be examined individually at the cost of precious time. Moreover, the exclusion of potentially positive individuals from screening induces health risks, a broad slowdown in the effort to curb the viral spread, and the consequent mortality rates. We present a new procedure, the Purified by Unified Resampling of Infected Multitudes, in short Purim, able to untangle any massive candidate sample with inexpensive screening, through the cross-correlated analysis of the joint speciments. This procedure can reveal and detect most negative patients and in most cases discover the identity of the few positives already in the first or few secondary tests. We investigate the the two-dimensional correlation case in function of the infection probability. The multi-dimensional topology, the scaled Purim procedure are also considered. Extensive Purim tests may measure and weight the degree of epidemic: their outcome may identify focal regions in the early stages. Assuming hundreds or thousand subjects, the saving both in time and in cost will be remarkable. Purim may be able to filter scheduled flights, scholar acceptance, popular international event participants. The optimal extension of Purim outcome is growing as the inverse of the epidemia expansion. Therefore, the earlier, the better.
Serverless computing has recently experienced significant adoption by several applications, especially Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In serverless computing, rather than deploying and managing dedicated virtual machines, users are able to deploy individual functions, and pay only for the time that their code is actually executing. However, since serverless platforms are relatively new, they have a completely different pricing model that depends on the memory, duration, and the number of executions of a sequence/workflow of functions. In this paper we present an algorithm that optimizes the price of serverless applications in AWS Lambda. We first describe the factors affecting price of serverless applications which include: (1) fusing a sequence of functions, (2) splitting functions across edge and cloud resources, and (3) allocating the memory for each function. We then present an efficient algorithm to explore different function fusion-placement solutions and find the solution that optimizes the applications price while keeping the latency under a certain threshold. Our results on image processing workflows show that the algorithm can find solutions optimizing the price by more than 35%-57% with only 5%-15% increase in latency. We also show that our algorithm can find non-trivial memory configurations that reduce both latency and price.
We propose a low cost and effective way to combine a free simulation software and free CAD models for modeling human-object interaction in order to improve human & object segmentation. It is intended for research scenarios related to safe human-robot collaboration (SHRC) and interaction (SHRI) in the industrial domain. The task of human and object modeling has been used for detecting activity, and for inferring and predicting actions, different from those works, we do human and object modeling in order to learn interactions in RGB-D data for improving segmentation. For this purpose, we define a novel density function to model a three dimensional (3D) scene in a virtual environment (VREP). This density function takes into account various possible configurations of human-object and object-object relationships and interactions governed by their affordances. Using this function, we synthesize a large, realistic and highly varied synthetic RGB-D dataset that we use for training. We train a random forest classifier, and the pixelwise predictions obtained is integrated as a unary term in a pairwise conditional random fields (CRF). Our evaluation shows that modeling these interactions improves segmentation performance by ~7% in mean average precision and recall over state-of-the-art methods that ignore these interactions in real-world data. Our approach is computationally efficient, robust and can run real-time on consumer hardware.
The World Health Organisation currently recommends pre-screening for past infection prior to administration of the only licensed dengue vaccine, CYD-TDV. Using a bounding analysis, we show that despite additional testing costs, this approach can improve the economic viability of CYD-TDV: effective testing reduces unnecessary vaccination costs while increasing the health benefit for vaccine recipients. When testing is cheap enough, those trends outweigh additional screening costs and make test-then-vaccinate strategies net-beneficial in many settings. We derived these results using a general approach for determining price thresholds for testing and vaccination, as well as indicating optimal start and end ages of routine test-then-vaccinate programs. This approach only requires age-specific seroprevalence and a cost estimate for second infections. We demonstrate this approach across settings commonly used to evaluate CYD-TDV economics, and highlight implications of our simple model for more detailed studies. We found trends showing test-then-vaccinate strategies are generally more beneficial starting at younger ages, and that in some settings multiple years of testing can be more beneficial than only testing once, despite increased investment in testing.
We study minority games in efficient regime. By incorporating the utility function and aggregating agents with similar strategies we develop an effective mesoscale notion of state of the game. Using this approach, the game can be represented as a Markov process with substantially reduced number of states with explicitly computable probabilities. For any payoff, the finiteness of the number of states is proved. Interesting features of an extensive random variable, called aggregated demand, viz. its strong inhomogeneity and presence of patterns in time, can be easily interpreted. Using Markov theory and quenched disorder approach, we can explain important macroscopic characteristics of the game: behavior of variance per capita and predictability of the aggregated demand. We prove that in case of linear payoff many attractors in the state space are possible.