Ann Jurecic is assistant professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she teaches courses in writing as well as literature and medicine. Her book Illness as Narrative is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press. Her work has appeared in the journals Literature and Medicine, Pedagogy, and Biography as well as in College English, and she serves as book...

Intelligent industrial and mobile robots may be considered proven technology in structured environments. Teach programming and supervised learning methods permit solutions to a variety of applications. However, we believe that to extend the operation of these machines to more unstructured environments requires a new learning method. Both unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning are pote...

We demonstrate the possibility of optimal control of physical inventory systems in a nonstationary fitness terrain, based on the combined application of evolutionary search and adaptive critic terrain following. We show that adaptive critic based approximate dynamic programming techniques based on plant-controller Jacobeans can be used with systems characterized by discrete valued states and co...

This essay rejoins Merinda Simmons’s protection of Russell McCutcheon’s critic vs. caretaker dichotomy in her response to my “Can a Critic be a Caretaker Too? Religion, Conflict and Conflict Transformation” (JAAR 2011). While Simmons aims to preserve McCutcheon’s binary as a purportedly benignly unavoidable opposition, I expose the perils of epistemic anti-realism at the heart of that dichotomy...

We present a training framework for neural abstractive summarization based on actor-critic approaches from reinforcement learning. In the traditional neural network based methods, the objective is only to maximize the likelihood of the predicted summaries, no other assessment constraints are considered, which may generate low-quality summaries or even incorrect sentences. To alleviate this prob...