Abstract

This study investigates the impact of loss-framing and individual risk attitude on the willingness- to purchase insurance products, utilizing a game-like interface in a choice architecture. The application presents events as experienced in real-life , as a young adult searching for employment to retirement. Both financial and emotional loss-framing events are followed by choices to purchase insurance. The participant cohorts considered were undergraduate students and older participants, the latter group was further subdivided by income and education. From the within-subject analysis, the preliminary findings reveal that the loss framing effect on insurance consumption is higher in the younger population though contingent on the insurance product type. Health and accident insurance shows a negative correlation with risk attitudes for the younger age and a positive correlation with accident insurance for older participants. Risk attitude and life insurance products willingness-to-purchase showed no dependency. The findings elucidate the role of age, income, family responsibilities, and risk attitude in purchasing insurance products. Importantly, it confirms the correlation between age and the effect heuristics of framing/nudging.

Abstract

Remote Labs refer to an end-to-end system, including hardware and software built to access scientific equipment and resources remotely. The software platform built for such purposes needs to be robust enough to handle the communication of inputs and outputs between the client and the hardware nodes with minimal latency and simultaneously provide a seamless user experience. This paper highlights the importance of scalability in Remote Labs and presents multi-user multiplexing as a solution, to essentially provide users with concurrent access to the hardware node for experiments which can generate outputs instantaneously. The paper discusses the inefficiency of existing web-based Remote Labs with 4-layered architectures and proposes the use of WebSocket with a 3-layer software architecture to enhance user experience, accelerate input-output communication and implement multi-user multiplexing. To showcase the effectiveness of the proposed architecture over existing implementations using Blynk IoT platform as the middleware, a comprehensive communication pipeline was developed from scratch to perform Kirchhoff’s Voltage Law (KVL) experiment remotely.

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of loss-framing and individual risk attitude on willingness- to purchase insurance products utilizing a game-like interface as choice architecture. The application presents events as experienced in real life. Both financial and emotional loss-framing events are followed by choices to purchase insurance. The participant cohorts considered were undergraduate students and older participants; the latter group was further subdivided by income and education. The within-subject analysis reveals that the loss framing effect on insurance consumption is higher in the younger population, though contingent on the insurance product type. Health and accident insurance shows a negative correlation with risk attitudes for younger participants and a positive correlation with accident insurance for older participants. Risk attitude and life insurance products showed no dependency. The findings elucidate the role of age, income, family responsibilities, and risk attitude in purchasing insurance products. Importantly, it confirms the heuristics of framing/nudging.

Abstract

Music listening is a dynamic process that entails complex interactions between sensory, cognitive, and emotional processes. The naturalistic paradigm provides a means to investigate these processes in an ecologically valid manner by allowing experimental settings that mimic real-life musical experiences. In this paper, we highlight the importance of the naturalistic paradigm in studying dynamic music processing and discuss how it allows for investigating both the segregation and integration of brain processes using model-based and model-free methods. We further suggest that studying individual difference-modulated music processing in this paradigm can provide insights into the mechanisms of brain plasticity, which can have implications for the development of interventions and therapies in a personalized way. Finally, despite the challenges that the naturalistic paradigm poses, we end with a discussion on future prospects of music and neuroscience research, especially with the continued development and refinement of naturalistic paradigms and the adoption of open science practices.

Abstract

Safe autonomous driving critically depends on how well the ego-vehicle can predict the trajectories of neighboring vehicles. To this end, several trajectory prediction algorithms have been presented in the existing literature. Many of these approaches output a multi-modal distribution of obstacle trajectories instead of a single deterministic prediction to account for the underlying uncertainty. However, existing planners cannot handle the multi-modality based on just sample-level information of the predictions. With this motivation, this paper proposes a trajectory optimizer that can leverage the distributional aspects of the prediction in a computationally tractable and sample-efficient manner. Our optimizer can work with arbitrarily complex distributions and thus can be used with output distribution represented as a deep neural network. The core of our approach is built on embedding distribution in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), which we leverage in two ways. First, we propose an RKHS embedding approach to select probable samples from the obstacle trajectory distribution. Second, we rephrase chance-constrained optimization as distribution matching in RKHS and propose a novel sampling-based optimizer for its solution. We validate our approach with hand-crafted and neural network-based predictors trained on real-world datasets and show improvement over the existing stochastic optimization approaches in safety metrics.

Abstract

In this article, a novel adaptive controller is designed for Euler-Lagrangian systems under predefined time-varying state constraints. The proposed controller could achieve this objective without a priori knowledge of system parameters and, crucially, of state-dependent uncertainties. The closed-loop stability is verified using the Lyapunov method, while the overall efficacy of the proposed scheme is verified using a simulated robotic arm compared to the state of the art.

Abstract

Discovering new reaction pathways lies at the heart of drug discovery and chemical experimentation. A huge amount of drug reaction data lies in unannotated patent texts which are not machine readable. Reaction roles play an important role in analysing chemical pathways, and tracing chemicals through them, and while there is a vast body of chemical data available, the unavailability of reaction role annotated data is a blocker to effectively deploy deep learning methods for reaction discovery. This paper introduces a new dataset, WEAVE 2.0, obtained from chemical patents, along with full, manual, annotations of novel chemical reactions with reaction role information. We also provide baseline and state of the art models for chemical entity recognition from our raw dataset. Our dataset and associated models form the foundation of neural understanding of chemical reaction pathways via reaction roles.

Abstract

The RSU(Road-Side Unit)-assisted computation offloading allows vehicles to use the RSU’s compute resources to provide connected services which cannot be done due to on-board resource limitations. We propose the empirical analysis framework that can systematically characterize such RSU’s compute workloads. We first formalize the relationship of the three aspects: the local load (generated from vehicles), the composite load (imposed on RSUs) and the traffic flow (mobility patterns of vehicles). Then, our framework takes the models of the local load and the traffic flow as input, and produces the RSUs’ composite loads as an output. We provide the quantitative analysis to show how the RSU’s composite loads change in varying traffic flows in some areas of New York City with different offload patterns.

Abstract

This paper presents a method for automatically generating Wikipedia articles in the Hindi language, using Wikidata as a knowledge base. Our method extracts structured information from Wikidata, such as the names of entities, their properties, and their relationships, and then uses this information to generate natural language text that conforms to a set of templates designed for the domain of interest. We evaluate our method by generating articles about scientists, and we compare the resulting articles to machine-translated articles. Our results show that more than 70% of the generated articles using our method are better in terms of coherence, structure, and readability. Our approach has the potential to significantly reduce the time and effort required to create Wikipedia articles in Hindi and could be extended to other languages and domains as well.

Abstract

Is creativity domain-specific or domain-general? Significant studies have approached this problem using self-reported personality and domain-specific and general creative ideation surveys and lack cognitive perspectives. Creativity is defined as the generation of original and useful products that have emerged through the applications of basic cognitive processes to existing knowledge structures. The current study investigates its implications while modifying the basic knowledge structure. Further, we examine the role of the knowledge domain in creative task performance. For prior knowledge structure, we used advanced Raven’s matrices and modified its constraints to create a novel creative advanced Raven’s Matrices (cAPM) to induce creativity. For creativity, we asked participants to perform two tasks: create Raven's like matrices using creative reasoning task (CRT) and Guilford's alternative uses task (AUT). Unlike other creativity tasks like AUT, CRT allows to measure both convergent and divergent thinking in a given task. The CRT and AUT are different from APM puzzles in two ways, i.e., the knowledge domain and the involvement of creative thinking. The fixed order of APM followed by creativity tasks allowed us to evaluate the boundaries of induced creative thinking across the knowledge domain