Tracheotomy with lantern slide demonstrations

The solemn lady with the lantern.

The tracheotomy punch for urgent tracheotomy.

Tracheotomy is a commonly performed surgical technique used for long-term mechanical ventilation, upper airway obstruction, need for pulmonary toilet, and as an adjunct to surgery where ventilation is anticipated. Urgent tracheotomy may be performed when difficulty is encountered during an elective tracheotomy, or when cricothyroidotomy is impossible or contraindicated due to distorted anatomy ...

Direct Policy Iteration with Demonstrations

We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy of an unknown Markov decision process (MDP) when expert demonstrations are available along with interaction samples. We build on classification-based policy iteration to perform a seamless integration of interaction and expert data, thus obtaining an algorithm which can benefit from both sources of information at the same time. Furthermore,...

A lantern lemma

We show that in the mapping class group of a surface any relation between Dehn twists of the form T j xT k y = M (M a multitwist) is the lantern relation, and any relation of the form (TxTy) k = M (where Tx commutes with M ) is the 2-chain relation. AMS Classification 57M07; 20F38, 57N05

Reinforcement Learning with Multiple Demonstrations

Many tasks in robotics can be described as a trajectory that the robot should follow. Unfortunately, specifying the desired trajectory is often a non-trivial task. For example, when asked to describe the trajectory that a helicopter should follow to perform an aerobatic flip, one would have to not only (a) specify a complete trajectory in state space that intuitively corresponds to the aerobati...