Treatment Services for Drinking Problems: Hidden Questions

Effectiveness of Treatment in General Medicine Patients With Drinking Problems

As many as 40 percent of patients in general medicine and family medicine practices have or have had serious alcohol­related problems. Detection of drinking problems and subsequent intervention by the primary care physician can significantly improve the outcome for these patients. Studies have shown that even brief interventions, administered during a regular office visit, can have therapeutic ...

Drinking Driver Enforcement Problems

Does e-therapy for problem drinking reach hidden populations?

TO THE EDITOR: Currently, nearly one in every 13 adults abuses alcohol or is alcohol dependent. In addition, several million adults also engage in risky drinking behavior that could lead to alcohol-related problems. However, only a small proportion of the people with alcohol problems ever seek and engage in treatment (1). A national survey in the United States (2) found that only 16% of those w...

Hidden Symmetry Subgroup Problems

We advocate a new approach for addressing hidden structure problems and finding efficient quantum algorithms. We introduce and investigate the hidden symmetry subgroup problem (HSSP), which is a generalization of the well-studied hidden subgroup problem (HSP). Given a group acting on a set and an oracle whose level sets define a partition of the set, the task is to recover the subgroup of symme...

Reinforcement Learning for Problems with Hidden State

In this paper, we describe how techniques from reinforcement learning might be used to approach the problem of acting under uncertainty. We start by introducing the theory of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) to describe what we call hidden state problems. After a brief review of other POMDP solution techniques, we motivate reinforcement learning by considering an agent wi...