Stack Overflow (SO) is one of the world's largest technical Q&A websites, in which many posts contain code snippets.However, these code snippets may not comply with coding style guidelines and result in the problem of low readability and maintainability.To provide a better understanding of this coding style compliance issue for SO users, we plan and conduct an empirical study on SO.Specifically, we collected over 400,000 code snippets from SO in three languages, namely Python, C/C++, and JavaScript.The posts are divided into two types (i.e., question and answer) and analyzed separately.We found that for the question-and answer-type posts, more than 90% and 60% of code snippets contain style violations.The most frequently found violation is syntax errors for Python and indentations for C/C++ and JavaScript.In addition, the results show that with more violations in code snippets, the "Score" of Python and C/C++ posts, the "FavoriteCount" of C/C++ questions, and the "CommentCount" of JavaScript questions tend to be lower.The findings of our research indicate that code snippets on SO do not have good coding style compliance.Users, especially programming beginners are supposed to be wary of the potential problems of reusing code snippets on SO.

$\ell_1$-penalized quantile regression ($\ell_1$-QR) is a useful tool for modeling the relationship between input and output variables when detecting heterogeneous effects in the high-dimensional setting. Hypothesis tests can then be formulated based on the debiased $\ell_1$-QR estimator that reduces the bias induced by Lasso penalty. However, the non-smoothness of the quantile loss brings great challenges to the computation, especially when the data dimension is high. Recently, the convolution-type smoothed quantile regression (SQR) model has been proposed to overcome such shortcoming, and people developed theory of estimation and variable selection therein. In this work, we combine the debiased method with SQR model and come up with the debiased $\ell_1$-SQR estimator, based on which we then establish confidence intervals and hypothesis testing in the high-dimensional setup. Theoretically, we provide the non-asymptotic Bahadur representation for our proposed estimator and also the Berry-Esseen bound, which implies the empirical coverage rates for the studentized confidence intervals. Furthermore, we build up the theory of hypothesis testing on both a single variable and a group of variables. Finally, we exhibit extensive numerical experiments on both simulated and real data to demonstrate the good performance of our method.

Traditional biological and pharmaceutical manufacturing plants are controlled by human workers or pre-defined thresholds. Modernized factories have advanced process control algorithms such as model predictive control (MPC). However, there is little exploration of applying deep reinforcement learning to control manufacturing plants. One of the reasons is the lack of high fidelity simulations and standard APIs for benchmarking. To bridge this gap, we develop an easy-to-use library that includes five high-fidelity simulation environments: BeerFMTEnv, ReactorEnv, AtropineEnv, PenSimEnv and mAbEnv, which cover a wide range of manufacturing processes. We build these environments on published dynamics models. Furthermore, we benchmark online and offline, model-based and model-free reinforcement learning algorithms for comparisons of follow-up research.

The performance of clustering depends on an appropriately defined similarity between two items. When the similarity is measured based on human perception, human workers are often employed to estimate a similarity score between items in order to support clustering, leading to a procedure called crowdsourced clustering. Assuming a monetary reward is paid to a worker for each similarity score and assuming the similarities between pairs and workers' reliability have a large diversity, when the budget is limited, it is critical to wisely assign pairs of items to different workers to optimize the clustering result. We model this budget allocation problem as a Markov decision process where item pairs are dynamically assigned to workers based on the historical similarity scores they provided. We propose an optimistic knowledge gradient policy where the assignment of items in each stage is based on the minimum-weight K-cut defined on a similarity graph. We provide simulation studies and real data analysis to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.

The growing size of modern data brings many new challenges to existing statistical inference methodologies and theories, and calls for the development of distributed inferential approaches. This paper studies distributed inference for linear support vector machine (SVM) for the binary classification task. Despite a vast literature on SVM, much less is known about the inferential properties of SVM, especially in a distributed setting. In this paper, we propose a multi-round distributed linear-type (MDL) estimator for conducting inference for linear SVM. The proposed estimator is computationally efficient. In particular, it only requires an initial SVM estimator and then successively refines the estimator by solving simple weighted least squares problem. Theoretically, we establish the Bahadur representation of the estimator. Based on the representation, the asymptotic normality is further derived, which shows that the MDL estimator achieves the optimal statistical efficiency, i.e., the same efficiency as the classical linear SVM applying to the entire data set in a single machine setup. Moreover, our asymptotic result avoids the condition on the number of machines or data batches, which is commonly assumed in distributed estimation literature, and allows the case of diverging dimension. We provide simulation studies to demonstrate the performance of the proposed MDL estimator.

Aim at enhancing dexterous and safe operation in unstructured environment, a cable-driven soft robotic manipulator is designed in this paper. Due to soft material it made of and nearly infinite degree of freedom it owns, the soft robotic manipulator has higher security and dexterity than traditional rigid-link manipulator, which make it suitable to perform tasks in complex environments that is narrow, confined and unstructured. Though the soft robotic manipulator possesses advantages above, it is not an easy thing for it to achieve precise position control. In order to solve this problem, a kinematic model based on piecewise constant curvature hypothesis is proposed. Through building up three spaces and two mappings, the relationship between the length variables of 4 cables and the position and orientation of the soft robotic manipulator end-effector is obtained. Afterwards, a depth-independent image Jacobian matrix is introduced and an image-based visual servo controller is presented. Applied by adaptive algorithm, the controller could estimate unknown position of the feature point online, and then Lyapunov theory is used to prove the stability of the proposed controller. At last, experiments are conducted to demonstrate rationality and validity of the kinematic model and adaptive visual servo controller.