BACKGROUND There is increasing worldwide recognition of the need for government policies to address the recent increases in the incidence and prevalence of childhood obesity. The complexity and inter-relatedness of the determinants of obesity pose a genuine policy challenge, both scientifically and politically. This study examines the characteristics of one of the early policy responses, the NS...

This paper establishes the link between an adaptation of the policy iteration method for Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces and the policy gradient method when the differentiation of the mean value is directly done over the policy without parameterization. This approach allows deriving sound and practical batch Reinforcement Learning algorithms for continuous stat...

despite several calls to support evidence-informed policy-making, variations in uptake of evidence into policy persist. this editorial brings together and builds on previous knowledge translation (kt) frameworks and theories to present a simple, yet, holistic approach for promoting evidence-informed policies. the proposed conceptual framework is characterized by its impact-oriented approach and...

In dynamic collaboration, participants oftentimes need to share resources with each other under the same criteria. However, since each participant has its own authorization policies as a way of controlling resource access, their discrepancies make such collaboration difficult. It is desired to develop a practical and automatic way to generate the collaborative policies for coequal authorization...