arXiv research

The increasingly fast development cycle for online course contents, along with the diverse student demographics in each online classroom, make real-time student outcomes prediction an interesting topic for both industrial research and practical needs. In this paper, we tackle the problem of real-time student performanc…

Proposes a robust similarity measure for sparse time series data.

PKF improves KF for dynamic uncertainty tracking in time-course data.

Increasingly fast development and update cycle of online course contents, and diverse demographics of students in each online classroom, make student performance prediction in real-time (before the course finishes) and/or on curriculum without specific historical performance data available interesting topics for both i…

In a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), predictive models of student behavior can support multiple aspects of learning, including instructor feedback and timely intervention. Ongoing courses, when the student outcomes are yet unknown, must rely on models trained from the historical data of previously offered courses. I…

Blended courses that mix in-person instruction with online platforms are increasingly popular in secondary education. These tools record a rich amount of data on students' study habits and social interactions. Prior research has shown that these metrics are correlated with students' performance in face to face classes.…

Most existing approaches to clustering gene expression time course data treat the different time points as independent dimensions and are invariant to permutations, such as reversal, of the experimental time course. Approaches utilizing HMMs have been shown to be helpful in this regard, but are hampered by having to ch…

In order to help undergraduate students towards successfully completing their degrees, developing tools that can assist students during the course selection process is a significant task in the education domain. The optimal set of courses for each student should include courses that help him/her graduate in a timely fa…

The biological processes involved in a drug's mechanisms of action are oftentimes dynamic, complex and difficult to discern. Time-course gene expression data is a rich source of information that can be used to unravel these complex processes, identify biomarkers of drug sensitivity and predict the response to a drug. H…

Bayesian model estimates ACT impact on pediatric AML survival.

We provide a novel approach and an exploratory study for modelling life event choices and occurrence from a probabilistic perspective through causal discovery and survival analysis. Our approach is formulated as a bi-level problem. In the upper level, we build the life events graph, using causal discovery tools. In the…

This is a lecture note for the course DS-GA 3001 <Natural Language Understanding with Distributed Representation> at the Center for Data Science , New York University in Fall, 2015. As the name of the course suggests, this lecture note introduces readers to a neural network based approach to natural language understand…

Proposes new models to predict student grades more accurately.

With pressure to increase graduation rates and reduce time to degree in higher education, it is important to identify at-risk students early. Automated early warning systems are therefore highly desirable. In this paper, we use unsupervised clustering techniques to predict the graduation status of declared majors in fi…

Unified HDP and LDA models for efficient topic clustering of online course queries.

Grade prediction for future courses not yet taken by students is important as it can help them and their advisers during the process of course selection as well as for designing personalized degree plans and modifying them based on their performance. One of the successful approaches for accurately predicting a student'…

We present two Bayesian procedures to infer the interactions and external currents in an assembly of stochastic integrate-and-fire neurons from the recording of their spiking activity. The first procedure is based on the exact calculation of the most likely time courses of the neuron membrane potentials conditioned by …

Advanced mathematical relativity course for math and physics students.

We discuss fun problems, vaguely related to notions and theorems of a course in differential geometry. This paper can be regarded as a weekend "treasure chest" supplementing the course weekday lecture notes. The problems and solutions are not original, while their relation to the course might be so.

The Web has enabled one of the most visible recent developments in education---the deployment of massive open online courses. With their global reach and often staggering enrollments, MOOCs have the potential to become a major new mechanism for learning. Despite this early promise, however, MOOCs are still relatively u…

Course on arithmetic lattices at EPFL.

Understanding large-scale patterns in student course enrollment is a problem of great interest to university administrators and educational researchers. Yet important decisions are often made without a good quantitative framework of the process underlying student choices. We propose a probabilistic approach to modellin…

In massive open online courses (MOOCs), peer grading serves as a critical tool for scaling the grading of complex, open-ended assignments to courses with tens or hundreds of thousands of students. But despite promising initial trials, it does not always deliver accurate results compared to human experts. In this paper,…

This book is a textbook for the basic course of differential geometry. It is recommended as an introductory material for this subject.

Study heat flow on changing surfaces, proving existence and uniqueness.

We measure the influence of different time-scales on the dynamics of financial market data. This is obtained by decomposing financial time series into simple oscillations associated with distinct time-scales. We propose two new time-varying measures: 1) an amplitude scaling exponent and 2) an entropy-like measure. We a…

In this article, a large data set containing every course taken by every undergraduate student in a major university in Canada over 10 years is analysed. Modern machine learning algorithms can use large data sets to build useful tools for the data provider, in this case, the university. In this article, two classifiers…

Peer grading is the process of students reviewing each others' work, such as homework submissions, and has lately become a popular mechanism used in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Intrigued by this idea, we used it in a course on algorithms and data structures at the University of Hamburg. Throughout the whole se…

Although compelling assessments have been examined in recent years, more studies are required to yield a better understanding of the several methods where assessment techniques significantly affect student learning process. Most of the educational research in this area does not consider demographics data, differing met…

These notes are the first half of the contents of the course given by the second author at the Bachelier Seminar (February 8-15-22 2008) at IHP. They also correspond to topics studied by the first author for her Ph.D.thesis.

These are lecture notes on Floer and Rabinowitz-Floer homology written for a graduate course at UNICAMP August-December 2016 and a mini-course held at IMPA in August 2017.

Teaches uncertainty in ML through practical examples.

An introductory course on hyperbolic geometry for advanced students.

These are lecture notes on scale calculus and M-polyfolds written for a graduate course at UNICAMP March-June 2018 and an advanced mini-course given during the biannual meeting of Brazilian mathematicians, CBM-32, at IMPA in August 2019.

Using black-hole inequalities and the increase of the horizon's areas, we show that there are arbitrarily small electro-vacuum perturbations of the standard initial data of the extreme Reissner-Nordstrom black-hole that, (by contradiction), cannot decay in time into any extreme Kerr-Newman black-hole. This proves the e…

Notes for a one semester course. The notes contain a description of compact three dimensional Seifert fibered spaces and a classification up to homeomorphism of compact three dimensional Seifert fibered spaces with non-empty boundary.

A temporal point process is a mathematical model for a time series of discrete events, which covers various applications. Recently, recurrent neural network (RNN) based models have been developed for point processes and have been found effective. RNN based models usually assume a specific functional form for the time c…

Stochastic networks are a plausible representation of the relational information among entities in dynamic systems such as living cells or social communities. While there is a rich literature in estimating a static or temporally invariant network from observation data, little has been done toward estimating time-varyin…

In the following series of papers we analyze the long-time behavior of 3 dimensional Ricci flows with surgery. Our main result will be that if the surgeries are performed correctly, then only finitely many surgeries occur and after some time the curvature is bounded by $C t^{-1}$. This result confirms a conjecture of P…

These are the lecture notes for an advanced Ph.D. level course I taught in Spring'02 at the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook. The course primarily focused on an introduction to stochastic calculus and derivative pricing with various stochastic computations recast in the language of path integr…

The Internet has rich and rapidly increasing sources of high quality educational content. Inferring prerequisite relations between educational concepts is required for modern large-scale online educational technology applications such as personalized recommendations and automatic curriculum creation. We present PREREQ,…

Course on knots using branched coverings.

Lecture notes on curves in complex projective plane from a topological viewpoint.

Student performance modelling (SPM) is a critical step to assessing and improving students performances in their learning discourse. However, most existing SPM are based on statistical approaches, which on one hand are based on probability, depicting that results are based on estimation; and on the other hand, actual i…

These notes have been prepared as reading material for the mini-course that the author gave at IMS, National University of Singapore, as part of the "Summer school on the moduli space of Higgs bundles".

This paper presents several strategies that can improve neural network-based predictive methods for MOOC student course trajectory modeling, applying multiple ideas previously applied to tackle NLP (Natural Language Processing) tasks. In particular, this paper investigates LSTM networks enhanced with two forms of regul…

These notes are based on the mini-course given in June 2004 in Cetraro, Italy, in the frame of a C.I.M.E. school. Of course, they contain much more material that I could present in the 6 hours course. The main goal is to give an idea of the general variational and dynamical nature of nice and powerful concepts and resu…

These are lecture notes for the course "Analysis and X-ray tomography". The course is a broad overview of various tools in analysis that can be used to study X-ray tomography. The focus is on tools and ideas, not so much on technical details and minimal assumptions. Only very basic functional analysis is assumed as bac…