Faqmine.com

What is the Human Genome Project?

The Human Genome Project (HGP) is an international 13-year effort formally begun in October 1990. The project was planned to last 15 years, but rapid technological advances accelerated the completion to 2003. Project goals were to determine the complete sequence of the 3 billion DNA subunits (bases), identify all human genes, and make them accessible for further biological study. As part of the HGP, parallel sequencing was done for selected model organisms such as the bacterium E. coli to help develop the technology and interpret human gene function. The Department of Energy’s Human Genome Program and the National Institutes of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) together sponsored the U.S. Human Genome Project.

Who was head of the U.S. Human Genome Project?

The Department of Energy’s Human Genome Program research was directed by Ari Patrinos, head of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research. Francis Collins directed the National Institutes of Health National Human Genome Research Institute efforts.

Who are some important contributors to genetics?

Many people have contributed to the field of genetics. See the Important Contributors to Genetics page for five of them.

How far along is the project? How many genes have been identified?

Final HGP papers were published in 2006. A high-quality, “finished” sequence of the human genome was completed in 2003. (The first working draft was completed In June 2000.) In- depth analyses of complete chromosomes continue to be published. See the Human Genome Project Progress Web page for updates.

What U.S. laboratories and investigators were involved in the Human Genome Project?

Many laboratories around the United States received funding from either the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or both, for Human Genome Project research. A list of the major U.S. and international Human Genome Project research sites can be found here.

Other researchers at numerous colleges, universities, and laboratories throughout the United States also received DOE and NIH funding for human genome research. At any given time, the DOE Human Genome Program funded about 200 separate principal investigators.

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/faq/faqs1.shtml

What is Reinforcement Learning?

Reinforcement learning (RL) is learning from interaction with an environment, from the consequences of action, rather than from explicit teaching. RL become popular in the 1990s within machine learning and artificial intelligence, but also within operations research and with offshoots in psychology and neuroscience.

Most RL research is conducted within the mathematical framework of Markov decision processes (MDPs). MDPs involve a decision-making agent interacting with its environment so as to maximize the cumulative reward it receives over time. The agent perceives aspects of the environment’s state and selects actions. The agent may estimate a value function and use it to construct better and better decision-making policies over time.

RL algorithms are methods for solving this kind of problem, that is, problems involving sequences of decisions in which each decision affects what opportunities are available later, in which the effects need not be deterministic, and in which there are long-term goals. RL methods are intended to address the kind of learning and decision making problems that people and animals face in their normal, everyday lives.

Is RL just trial-and-error learning, or does it include planning?

Modern reinforcement learning concerns both trial-and-error learning without a model of the environment, and deliberative planning with a model. By “a model” here we mean a model of the dynamics of the environment. In the simplest case, this means just an estimate of the state-transition probabilities and expected immediate rewards of the environment. In general it means any predictions about the environment’s future behavior conditional on the agent’s behavior.

How does RL relate to Neuro-Dynamic Programming?

To a first approximation, Reinforcement Learning and Neuro-Dynamic Programming are synonomous. The name “reinforcement learning” came from psychology (although psychologists rarely use exactly this term) and dates back to the eary days of cybernetics. For example, Marvin Minsky used this term in his 1954 thesis, and Barto and Sutton revived it in the early 1980’s. The name “neuro-dynamic programming” was coined by Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis in 1996 to capture the idea of the field as a combination of neural networks and dynamic programming.

In fact, neither name is very descriptive of the subject, and I recommend you use neither when you want to be technically precise. Names such as this are useful when referring to a general body of research, but not for carefully distinguishing ideas from one another. In that sense, there is no point in trying to draw a careful distinction between the referents of these two names.

The problem with “reinforcement learning” is that it is dated. Much of the field does not concern learning at all, but just planning from complete knowledge of the problem (a model of the environment). Almost the same methods are used for planning and learning, and it seems off-point to emphasize learning in the name of the field. “Reinforcement” does not seem particularly pertinent either.

The problem with “neuro-dynamic programming” is similar in that neither neural networks nor dynamic programming are critical to the field. Many of the methods, such as “Monte Carlo”, or “rollout” methods, are completely unrelated to dynamic programming, and neural networks are just one choice among many for method of function approximation. Moreover, one could argue that the component names, “neural networks” and “dynamic programming”, are each not very descriptive of their respective methods.

http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~sutton/RL-FAQ.html#What%20is%20RL

What is Bloglines?

Bloglines is a FREE online service that helps you subscribe to and manage lots of web information, such as news feeds, weblogs and audio. Bloglines tracks the information you’re interested in, retrieves new stuff as it happens, and organizes everything for you on your own personal web news page.

How Does Bloglines Work?

Bloglines is a “news aggregator.” Many online information sources, including web sites, weblogs and news services, now broadcast their content to the web in so-called “syndicated feeds” or “news feeds” with new technologies like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and ATOM. News aggregator software and services collect those syndicated feeds and present them to end users in a variety of ways.

Bloglines is a server-based aggregation system. This means that we run and manage all of the software and technologies necessary to collect the syndicated feeds from tens of millions of online information sources on our own computer servers and databases, and deliver that amazing content to you as a free, easy-to use online service.

After you join Bloglines you simply search for the content you are interested in and identify the feeds you want to track. Once you “subscribe” to those feeds (a single-click maneuver in most cases), Bloglines will constantly check those feeds for changes or additions and direct new information onto your Bloglines personal page.

How is Bloglines different from other news readers and aggregators?

There are 4 ways we’re different:

1. We’re free. Others charge a one time or monthly fee.
2. We’re a web-based service you can use from any computer or appliance with a web browser. Others are desktop-bound software applications.
3. Nobody offers all the features we do.
4. We were the first, we are the largest and fastest growing.

How Much Does Bloglines Cost?

Nothing. Zip. Nada. Bloglines is completely free.

http://www.bloglines.com/help/faq#What

What is “Shibboleth”?

Shibboleth is the open-source software used by AAI. Together with the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) it provides the technical framework for AAI.

What happens when I access an AAI Resource?

When you try to access an AAI-enabled resource, your web browser is redirected to your Home Organization, you may have to choose your Home Organization on the “Where Are You From” Server (WAYF). As soon as you have logged in, you are redirected back to the resource. Notice that once you have successfully authenticated, you don’t have to repeat the process for other resources but can access them directly, provided your Home Organization has a single sign-on system implemented and you don’t close your web browser in-between.

What is this “Shibboleth Handle Request Processed” message?

Whenever you successfully have logged in at your Home Organization, it redirects you back to an AAI-protected Resource. During this process you briefly see that message on the screen

I submitted a form on an AAI-enabled resource, but the form data was not sent. What happened?

As an AAI-authenticated user you have a Shibboleth session set up. If this session expires, the web browser is redirected to your Home Organization to renew the session (see also question above). During this process the submitted data may get lost and the Resource may react as if no data were submitted. You then either can fill out the form again or try to go back in your web browser until you find the page that contains the filled out form and submit it again. If this effect occurs often, you should contact the administrator of the Resource and ask him to increase the Shibboleth session timeout.

How does OpenID relate to SWITCHaai?

The document Digital Identities, SWITCHaai and OpenID introduces the terminology, covers characteristics of digital identities and discusses how SWITCHaai and OpenID relate to each other.

http://www.switch.ch/aai/support/faq/#01