[English title and abstract below] Der Titel von Brendan Wenzels Bilderbuch stille Stein (2019) benennt die Hauptfigur und Handlung: ein Stein, der still an einem Ufer liegt. Wie verändert diese materielle Perspektive Wahrnehmung im dargestellten Natur-Kultur-Verhältnisse? Welche Wissensformen bringt eine solche Erzählweise hervor? Die kulturökologische Lektüre dieses Bilderbuches fokussiert bi...

Obtaining uncertainty estimates is increasingly important in modern machine learning, especially as models are given an increasing amount of responsibility. Yet, as the tasks undertaken by automation become more complex, so do the models and accompanying inference strategies. In fact, exact inference is often impossible in practice for modern probabilistic models. Thus, performing variational i...

This paper considers the problem of estimating a high-dimensional vector of parameters θ ∈ R from a noisy observation. The noise vector is i.i.d. Gaussian with known variance. For a squared-error loss function, the James-Stein (JS) estimator is known to dominate the simple maximum-likelihood (ML) estimator when the dimension n exceeds two. The JS-estimator shrinks the observed vector towards th...

Studying the space of Lagrangian submanifolds is a fundamental problem in symplectic topology. Lagrangian spheres appear naturally in the Leftschetz pencil picture of symplectic manifolds. In this paper we demonstrate the uniqueness up to Hamiltonian isotopy of the Lagrangian spheres in some 4-dimensional Stein symplectic manifolds. The most important example is the cotangent bundle of the 2-sp...