Y. Xu

A. L. Baxter, S. Y. BenZvi, W. Bonivento et al.

Developing sustainable software for the scientific community requires expertise in software engineering and domain science. This can be challenging due to the unique needs of scientific software, the insufficient resources for software engineering practices in the scientific community, and the complexity of developing for evolving scientific contexts. While open-source software can partially address these concerns, it can introduce complicating dependencies and delay development. These issues can be reduced if scientists and software developers collaborate. We present a case study wherein scientists from the SuperNova Early Warning System collaborated with software developers from the Scalable Cyberinfrastructure for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics project. The collaboration addressed the difficulties of open-source software development, but presented additional risks to each team. For the scientists, there was a concern of relying on external systems and lacking control in the development process. For the developers, there was a risk in supporting a user-group while maintaining core development. These issues were mitigated by creating a second Agile Scrum framework in parallel with the developers' ongoing Agile Scrum process. This Agile collaboration promoted communication, ensured that the scientists had an active role in development, and allowed the developers to evaluate and implement the scientists' software requirements. The collaboration provided benefits for each group: the scientists actuated their development by using an existing platform, and the developers utilized the scientists' use-case to improve their systems. This case study suggests that scientists and software developers can avoid scientific computing issues by collaborating and that Agile Scrum methods can address emergent concerns.

R. Abbasi, M. Ackermann, J. Adams et al.

Continued improvements on existing reconstruction methods are vital to the success of high-energy physics experiments, such as the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. In IceCube, further challenges arise as the detector is situated at the geographic South Pole where computational resources are limited. However, to perform real-time analyses and to issue alerts to telescopes around the world, powerful and fast reconstruction methods are desired. Deep neural networks can be extremely powerful, and their usage is computationally inexpensive once the networks are trained. These characteristics make a deep learning-based approach an excellent candidate for the application in IceCube. A reconstruction method based on convolutional architectures and hexagonally shaped kernels is presented. The presented method is robust towards systematic uncertainties in the simulation and has been tested on experimental data. In comparison to standard reconstruction methods in IceCube, it can improve upon the reconstruction accuracy, while reducing the time necessary to run the reconstruction by two to three orders of magnitude.

Y. Xu, X. Zhong, A. J. J. Yepes et al.

The creation of large-scale open domain reading comprehension data sets in recent years has enabled the development of end-to-end neural comprehension models with promising results. To use these models for domains with limited training data, one of the most effective approach is to first pretrain them on large out-of-domain source data and then fine-tune them with the limited target data. The caveat of this is that after fine-tuning the comprehension models tend to perform poorly in the source domain, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we explore methods that overcome catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning without assuming access to data from the source domain. We introduce new auxiliary penalty terms and observe the best performance when a combination of auxiliary penalty terms is used to regularise the fine-tuning process for adapting comprehension models. To test our methods, we develop and release 6 narrow domain data sets that could potentially be used as reading comprehension benchmarks.

A. M. Delgado, L. Fernandez, T. E. Perez et al.

Let $dν$ be a measure in $\mathbb{R}^d$ obtained from adding a set of mass points to another measure $dμ$. Orthogonal polynomials in several variables associated with $dν$ can be explicitly expressed in terms of orthogonal polynomials associated with $dμ$, so are the reproducing kernels associated with these polynomials. The explicit formulas that are obtained are further specialized in the case of Jacobi measure on the simplex, with mass points added on the vertices, which are then used to study the asymptotics kernel functions for $dν$.