This is a proposal for the research I wish to do for my Master’s thesis. It is an attempt to categorize what I know, what I don’t know, what I need to do, and where I need help. It also consists of my attempt to completely survey the literature.

Echo State Networks (ESN) have been used successfully in a broad range of applications, from dynamic pattern recognition to channel equalization in digital communication systems [5, 7, 9]. Their simplicity and ease of use, paired with their underlying ”mathematical power” make them an ideal choice in many black-box modelling tasks. For many applications, however, it is mandatory to learn and ad...

when I joined the Max Planck Institut as a post-doctoral fellow, I have been working at Semideenite Programming and its applications to Approximation Problems. The techniques from Semideenite Programming have proved useful in the design of good approximation algorithms as is evinced by the ground breaking paper of Goemans and Williamson on Max Cut and Max Sat 13]. Since then several researchers...

Gray and Szalay [1] documented the data avalanche problem in the sciences in which improvements in physical instruments and better data pipelines lead to an exponential growth in data size. Paralleling this exponential trend is the accumulation of data at multiple, autonomous data sources. Exploring the resulting massive, widely-distributed data is of immense scientific value: as Gray and Szala...

My interest in art and interactivity started in 1994 as an undergraduate student. At the time, the digital media technologies were in their infancy. From the field of communications I arrived at my study theme: interaction mediated by the new media technologies. I chose artists as a study object because their experimental practices push the new media to their limit, exploring new and emerging i...

There is an urgent and continuing need to identify cost-effective and practical interventions to prevent HIV transmission. Three recent studies have found that male circumcision can significantly reduce HIV incidence in men. These results opened an enormous potential intervention for HIV prevention in African countries. We propose to replicate one of the studies conducted in Kisumu, Kenya, to s...

After more than half a century mean variance analysis still remains the primary conceptual tool for understanding the trade-off between risk and return and for the definition of optimal investment portfolios. Despite its theoretical appeal practical applications have always experienced major difficulties. Optimal portfolio weights appear extremely sensitive to minor changes in expected returns ...

This study developed and evaluated a brief training program for grant reviewers that aimed to increase inter-rater reliability, rating scale knowledge, and effort to read the grant review criteria. Enhancing reviewer training may improve the reliability and accuracy of research grant proposal scoring and funding recommendations. Seventy-five Public Health professors from U.S. research universit...