Malcolm Feeley, one of the founding giants of the law and society field, is also one of its most exciting, diverse, and contemporary scholars. His works have examined criminal courts, prison reform, the legal profession, legal professionalism, and a variety of other important topics of enduring theoretical interest with a keen eye for the practical implications. In this volume, The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice, an eminent group of...

How does the European Union integrate new values into the text of its treaties? A growing body of literature indicates that, in the past three decades, new norms and values have entered the EU's discourse, resulting in what is usually termed ‘normative power Europe’. Yet the research and knowledge to-date about the EU's discursive assimilation of new values and norms is surprisingly poor. As any institutional change, such integration has the...

We provide theoretical investigation of curriculum learning in the context of stochastic gradient descent when optimizing the convex linear regression loss. We prove that the rate of convergence of an ideal curriculum learning method is monotonically increasing with the difficulty of the examples. Moreover, among all equally difficult points, convergence is faster when using points which incur higher loss with respect to the current...

In scenario-based programming (SBP), the semantics, which enables direct execution of these intuitive specifications, calls, among others, for synchronizing concurrent scenarios prior to every event-selection decision. Doing so even when the running scenarios are distributed across multiple physical system components, may degrade system performance or robustness. In this paper we describe a technique for automated distribution of an...

It is commonly assumed that recognition and discrimination of chirality, both in nature and in artificial systems, depend solely on spatial effects. However, recent studies have suggested that charge redistribution in chiral molecules manifests an enantiospecific preference in electron spin orientation. We therefore reasoned that the induced spin polarization may affect enantiorecognition through exchange interactions. Here, we show...

We study automata on infinite words and their applications in system specification and verification. We first introduce Büchi automata and survey their closure properties, expressive power, and determinization. We then introduce additional acceptance conditions and the model of alternating automata. We compare the different classes of automata in terms of expressive power and succinctness, and describe decision problems for them. Finally, we...

TCP’s congestion control architecture suffers from notoriously bad performance. Consequently, recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in both academia and industry in novel approaches to congestion control. We show, however, that past approaches fall short of attaining ideal performance. We leverage ideas from the rich literature on online (convex) optimization in machine learning to design Vivace, a novel rate-control protocol,...

This paper studies linear factor models that have arbitrarily dependent factors. Assuming that the coefficients are known and that their matrix representation satisfies rank conditions, we identify the nonparametric joint distribution of the unobserved factors using first and then second-order partial derivatives of the log characteristic function of the observed variables. In conjunction with these identification strategies the mean and...

Abstract—The Network Time Protocol (NTP) synchronizes time across computer systems over the Internet. Unfortunately, NTP is highly vulnerable to “time shifting attacks”, in which the attacker’s goal is to shift forward/backward the local time at an NTP client. NTP’s security vulnerabilities have severe implications for time-sensitive applications and for security mechanisms, including TLS certificates, DNS and DNSSEC, RPKI, Kerberos, BitCoin,...

In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. Censorship works not by blocking the flow of information, but rather by flooding people with disinformation and distractions. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century cuts through these muddy waters and confronts some of the most urgent questions on today’s global agenda.

The prevalent use of too few references for evaluating text-to-text generation is known to bias estimates of their quality (henceforth, low coverage bias or LCB). This paper shows that overcoming LCB in Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) evaluation cannot be attained by re-scaling or by increasing the number of references in any feasible range, contrary to previous suggestions. This is due to the long-tailed distribution of valid corrections...

Extensive efforts are currently put into securing messaging platforms, where a key challenge is that of protecting against man-in-the-middle attacks when setting up secure end-to-end channels. The vast majority of these efforts, however, have so far focused on securing user-to-user messaging, and recent attacks indicate that the security of group messaging is still quite fragile. We initiate the study of out-of-band authentication in the...

Sentence splitting is a major simplification operator. Here we present a simple and efficient splitting algorithm based on an automatic semantic parser. After splitting, the text is amenable for further fine-tuned simplification operations. In particular, we show that neural Machine Translation can be effectively used in this situation. Previous application of Machine Translation for simplification suffers from a considerable disadvantage in...

Solution-processable dithieno[3,2-b:2′,3′-d]thiophene (DTT) derivatives, 2,6-bis(phenylethynyl)dithieno[3,2-b:2′,3′-d]thiophene (BP-Et-DTT) and 2,6-bis(thiophen-2-ylethynyl)dithieno[3,2-b:2′,3′-d]thiophene (BT-Et-DTT) were synthesized and characterized as organic semiconductors for organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs). Thermal, optical, and electrochemical properties of the DTT-based semiconductors were investigated. The solution-sheared...

A searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) scheme enables a client to store data on an untrusted server while supporting keyword searches in a secure manner. Recent experiments have indicated that the practical relevance of such schemes heavily relies on the tradeo between their space overhead, locality (the number of non-contiguous memory locations that the server accesses with each query), and read eciency (the ratio between the number of...

Non-naturalist normative realists face an epistemological objection: They must explain how their preferred route of justification ensures a non-accidental connection between justified moral beliefs and the normative truths. One strategy for meeting this challenge begins by pointing out that we are semantically or conceptually competent in our use of the normative terms, and then argues that this competence guarantees the non-accidental truth...

An appealing concept developed by economists in contemporary happiness studies is that of procedural utility: people’s tendency to value the processes that lead to outcomes in addition to the outcomes themselves. This paper identifies David Hume as an early forerunner of a very similar idea. Moreover, it demonstrates just how Hume used this idea to justify the very idea of commerce. The significance of this is twofold: demonstrating just how...

Several well-known open questions (such as: are all groups sofic/hyperlinear?) have a common form: can all groups be approximated by asymptotic homomorphisms into the symmetric groups Sym(n) (in the sofic case) or the finite dimensional unitary groups U(n) (in the hyperlinear case)? In the case of U(n), the question can be asked with respect to different metrics and norms. This paper answers, for the first time, one of these versions, showing...

The DNA damage response is an essential process for the survival of living cells. In a subset of stress-responsive genes in humans, Elongin controls transcription in response to multiple stimuli, such as DNA damage, oxidative stress, and heat shock. Yeast Elongin (Ela1-Elc1), along with Def1, is known to facilitate ubiquitylation and degradation of RNA polymerase II (pol II) in response to multiple stimuli, yet transcription activity has not...

Can ideas and techniques from machine learning be leveraged to automatically generate "good" routing configurations? We investigate the power of data-driven routing protocols. Our results suggest that applying ideas and techniques from deep reinforcement learning to this context yields high performance, motivating further research along these lines.