Simulation: The Practice of Model Development and Use

The analytical approaches utilized for evaluating the acceptability of technological risk originate from analogies to financial cost-benefit risk analysis. These analogies appear generally valid for viewing risk from a societal basis, but are not applicable to individual risk assessments. Conflicts arising from these different views of risk assessment provide insights to the origins of individual, intuitive evaluations. Societal risk decisions made under conflict represent political compromises, and the resulting decision process creates substantial conflict costs. The pragmatic use of quantitative risk criteria (safety targets) may be useful in reducing these costs.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/208/4448/1114.full.pdf

Risks of Risk Decisions

Research in computer analysis of medical images bears many promises to improve patients' health. However, a number of systematic challenges are slowing down the progress of the field, from limitations of the data, such as biases, to research incentives, such as optimizing for publication. In this paper we review roadblocks to developing and assessing methods. Building our analysis on evidence from the literature and data challenges, we show that at every step, potential biases can creep in. On a positive note, we also discuss on-going efforts to counteract these problems. Finally we provide recommendations on how to further address these problems in the future. 

/pdf/machine-learning-for-medical-imaging-methodological-failures-1dou90my.pdf

Machine learning for medical imaging: methodological failures and recommendations for the future

We review the experimental evidence for various shapes of dose-response relationships for carcinogens and summarize those experiments that give the most information on relatively low doses. A brief review of some models is given to illustrate the shapes of dose-response curve expected from them. Our major interest is in the use of dose-response relationships to estimate risks to humans at low doses, and so we pay special attention to experimentally observed and theoretically expected nonlinearities. There are few experimental examples of nonlinear dose-response relations in humans, but this may simply be due to the limitations in the data. The several examples in rodents, even though for high dose data, suggest that nonlinearity is common. In some cases such nonlinearities may be rationalized on the basis of the pharmacokinetics of the test compound or its metabolites.

Dose-response relationships for carcinogens: a review.

IEEE 802.11ax-2019 will replace both IEEE 802.11n-2009 and IEEE 802.11ac-2013 as the next high-throughput Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) amendment. In this paper, we review the expected future WLAN scenarios and use-cases that justify the push for a new PHY/MAC IEEE 802.11 amendment. After that, we overview a set of new technical features that may be included in the IEEE 802.11ax-2019 amendment and describe both their advantages and drawbacks. Finally, we discuss some of the network-level functionalities that are required to fully improve the user experience in next-generation WLANs and note their relation with other on-going IEEE 802.11 amendments.

/pdf/ieee-802-11ax-high-efficiency-wlans-57ejajfm5d.pdf

IEEE 802.11ax: High-Efficiency WLANs

I tried a bunch of things: The dangers of unexpected overfitting in classification of brain data

Energy, Ecology, and the Environment

Optimising the VolgenantJonker algorithm for approximating graph edit distance

Although it is agreed that the Volgenant-Jonker (VJ) algorithm provides a fast way to approximate graph edit distance (GED), until now nobody has reported how the VJ algorithm can be tuned for this task. To this end, we revisit VJ and propose a series of refinements that improve both the speed and memory footprint without sacrificing accuracy in the GED approximation. We quantify the effectiveness of these optimisations by measuring distortion between control-flow graphs: a problem that arises in malware matching. We also document an unexpected behavioural property of VJ in which the time required to find shortest paths to unassigned nodes decreases as graph size increases, and explain how this phenomenon relates to the birthday paradox.

/pdf/revisiting-volgenant-jonker-for-approximating-graph-edit-2d9tq2rdmv.pdf

Revisiting Volgenant-Jonker for Approximating Graph Edit Distance

This paper examines the application of systemic problem structuring methods to the development of a research strategy in response to the challenges of fifth generation 5G. The paper proposes a methodology for strategic decision making. The key stakeholders, objectives, technologies, and boundaries from existing literature are identified and problem structuring based on hierarchical process modeling is used to explore the dependency of certain features of 5G on specific technologies, giving an indication of the importance of certain technologies over others and thus insight into where to place research effort. The hard technical challenges of 5G are discussed and equally the importance of the soft social and business challenges explored. For context, we explain how 5G will provide a platform for innovations and discuss how new and existing businesses may use this to their advantage. Problem structuring is used to explore how the challenges and opportunities of future wireless systems are related to the process of developing new business models.

/pdf/planning-for-5g-a-problem-structuring-approach-for-survival-3zpd4kx0yh.pdf

William Jones

Papers

I tried a bunch of things: The dangers of unexpected overfitting in classification of brain data

Energy, Ecology, and the Environment

Optimising the VolgenantJonker algorithm for approximating graph edit distance

Revisiting Volgenant-Jonker for Approximating Graph Edit Distance

Planning For 5G: A Problem Structuring Approach for Survival in the Telecoms Industry