Lessons from reinforcement learning for biological representations of space.

Neuroscientists postulate 3D representations in the brain in a variety of different coordinate frames (e.g. 'head-centred', 'hand-centred' and 'world-based').

Thermodynamics of non-Markovian reservoirs and heat engines.

We show that non-Markovian effects of the reservoirs can be used as a resource to extract work from an Otto cycle. The state transformation under non-Markovian dynamics is achieved via a two-step process, namely an isothermal process using a Markovian reservoir followed by an adiabatic process. From second law of thermodynamics, we show that the maximum amount of extractable work from the state prepared under the non-Markovian dynamics quantifies a lower bound of non-Markovianity.

Stationary mass distribution and nonlocality in models of coalescence and shattering.

We study the asymptotic properties of the steady state mass distribution for a class of collision kernels in an aggregation-shattering model in the limit of small shattering probabilities. It is shown that the exponents characterizing the large and small mass asymptotic behavior of the mass distribution depend on whether the collision kernel is local (the aggregation mass flux is essentially generated by collisions between particles of similar masses) or nonlocal (collision between particles of widely different masses give the main contribution to the mass flux). We show that the nonlocal regime is further divided into two subregimes corresponding to weak and strong nonlocality.

Saying What You're Looking For: Linguistics Meets Video Search.

We present an approach to searching large video corpora for clips which depict a natural-language query in the form of a sentence. Compositional semantics is used to encode subtle meaning differences lost in other approaches, such as the difference between two sentences which have identical words but entirely different meaning: The person rode the horse versus The horse rode the person. Given a sentential query and a natural-language parser, we produce a score indicating how well a video clip depicts that sentence for each clip in a corpus and return a ranked list of clips.

Pneumococcal Vaccine in Diabetes: Relevance in India.

Currently we have more than 65 million Diabetes patients in India with estimated 80 million prediabetics. Diabetes is a immunologically vulnerable population to develop all types of microbial infections. Pneumoccocal infections do have a substantial morbidity and mortality burden in the community.