The definition of risk in surgical patients is a complex and controversial area. Generally risk is poorly understood and depends on past individual and professional perception, and societal norms. In medical use the situation is further complicated by practical considerations of the ease with which risk can be measured; and this seems to have driven much risk assessment work, with a focus on ob...

The distribution semantics is an approach for integrating logic programming and probability theory that underlies many languages and has been successfully applied in many domains. When the program has function symbols, the semantics was defined for special cases: either the program has to be definite or the queries must have a finite number of finite explanations. In this paper we show that it ...

This paper presents “strong” limits on the number of samples required for recovery in the domains of compressive sensing, matrix-completion and model-selection. In other words, the paper determines lower-bounds on systems parameters; where if these lower bounds are not met, then any recovery algorithm will be guaranteed to be erroneous with high probability. A common mathematical framework is p...

Hawking’s zeta function regularization procedure is shown to be rigorously and uniquely defined, thus putting and end to the spreading lore about different difficulties associated with it. Basic misconceptions, misunderstandings and errors which keep appearing in important scientific journals when dealing with this beautiful regularization method —and other analytical procedures— are clarified ...

We report on a series of human evaluations of the task of sentence fusion. In this task, a human is given two sentences and asked to produce a single coherent sentence that contains only the important information from the original two. Thus, this is a highly constrained summarization task. Our investigations show that even at this restricted level, there is no measurable agreement between human...