The Great Filter refers to a highly speculative theory that implicitly claims one can test, via a probability model, whether known aspects of the history of life on Earth are consistent with the hypothesis that emergence of intelligent life was very unlikely. We describe the theory and some of the many objections to it. We give a mathematical argument to show that one objection, namely that it ...

Reward shaping allows reinforcement learning (RL) agents to accelerate learning by receiving additional reward signals. However, these signals can be difficult to design manually, especially for complex RL tasks. We propose a simple and general approach that determines the reward of pre-defined events by their rarity alone. Here events become less rewarding as they are experienced more often, w...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether persons who experienced adverse childhood events or recent negative life events have a worse cognitive performance and faster cognitive decline and the role of depression and apolipoprotein E-∊4 in this relationship. METHODS The community-based sample consisted of 10-year follow-up data of 1312 persons participating in the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (age r...

Learning to predict rare events from sequences of events with categorical features is an important, real-world, problem that existing statistical and machine learning methods are not well suited to solve. This paper describes timeweaver, a genetic algorithm based machine learning system that predicts rare events by identifying predictive temporal and sequential patterns. Timeweaver is applied t...

Much of the work on b r a i n models in the l a t e 1950's and ea r l y 1960's comprised the cons t ruc ­ t i o n , e i t h e r in hardware, or more commonly by s imu la t i on on a d i g i t a l computer, of networks of a r t i f i c i a l neurons (he rea f te r the term 'neuron' w i l l r e f e r t o a r t i f i c i a l neurons, where necessary b r a i n c e l l s w i l l be r e f e r r e d a...

Healthcare Big Data Exploration in Rea-Time

Since 2005, Google has conducted the largest corporate experiment with prediction markets we are aware of. In this paper, we illustrate how markets can be used to study how an organization processes information. We show that market participants are not typical of Google’s workforce, and that market participation and success is skewed towards Google’s engineering and quantitatively oriented empl...

The geospace is very sensitive to solar and geomagnetic activity, to changes in these activities and its manifestations in the near-Earth space environment and on the Earth. The Sun, as the origin of visible and invisible influence, poses a health and safety threat to humans and all kinds of human activities. This paper describes recently obtained results of cross-disciplinary heliobiological s...

We model systemic risk by including a common factor exposure to market-wide shocks and an exposure to tail dependence effects arising from linkages among extreme stock returns. Specifically our model allows for the firm-specific impact of infrequent and extreme events. When a jump occurs, its impact is in the same direction for all firms (either positive or negative), but its size and volatilit...

The etiology and clinical course of bipolar disorder are considered to be determined by genetic and environmental factors. Although the kindling hypothesis emphasizes the impact of environmental factors on initial onset, their connection to the outcome and clinical course have been poorly established. Hence, there have been numerous research efforts to investigate the impact of environmental fa...