We introduce a novel approach to inform the re-opening plan followed by a postpandemic lockdown by integrating a stochastic optimization technique with a disease transmission model. We assess Ontarios re-opening plans as a case-study. Taking into account the uncertainties in contact rates during different re-opening phases, we find the optimal timing for the upcoming re-opening phase that maximizes the relaxation of social contacts under uncertainties, while not overwhelming the health system capacity before the arrival of effective therapeutics or vaccines.

In this paper, the anti-deterioration effect of microbial transglutaminase (MTGase) on rehydrated sea cucumber was studied, and the effects of salt, sugar, and oil on the MTGase-treated sea cucumbers were also investigated. For all groups, the textural strength decreased with the storage time, but compared with the control group, the MTGase-treated group exhibited a significantly stronger texture profile (p < .05), higher thermal denaturation temperature of sea cucumber, lower protein degradation level (characterized by free ammonia nitrogen content and hydroxyproline content), reduced water migration rate and a more compact microstructure under scanning electron microscope. Salt compacted sea cucumber through water removal; sugar protected α-chain from disintegration but destabilized the collagen hydrogel system of sea cucumber body wall. Oil was inhibitive to water migration at the early stage of storage but was promotive at the late stage. These results have suggested MTGase is potentially applicable in processing shelf-stable seasoned instant sea cucumber products.Novelty impact statement: Instant sea cucumbers are susceptive to non-enzymatic deterioration during storage, which is a major reason limiting its product development. This study has found that MTGase could enhance the stability of sea cucumbers and the impact of food additives on the MTGase-treated sea cucumbers was also studied. These results suggested that MTGase is potentially applicable in producing seasoned instant sea cucumber products with better shelf-stability.

We propose a variation of simplex-downhill algorithm specifically customized for optimizing parameters in statistical machine translation (SMT) decoder for better end-user automatic evaluation metric scores for translations, such as versions of BLEU, TER and mixtures of them. Traditional simplexdownhill has the advantage of derivative-free computations of objective functions, yet still gives satisfactory searching directions in most scenarios. This is suitable for optimizing translation metrics as they are not differentiable in nature. On the other hand, Armijo algorithm usually performs line search efficiently given a searching direction. It is a deep hidden fact that an efficient line search method will change the iterations of simplex, and hence the searching trajectories. We propose to embed the Armijo inexact line search within the simplexdownhill algorithm. We show, in our experiments, the proposed algorithm improves over the widelyapplied Minimum Error Rate training algorithm for optimizing machine translation parameters.

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This article investigates the output regulation for stochastic port‐Hamiltonian systems (SPHSs) subject to sinusoidal disturbances. An energy‐based regulation scheme with an internal model unit is proposed by exploiting the stochastic Hamiltonian structure, which drives the tracking error to the origin while maintaining asymptotical stability in probability of the closed‐loop system. An energy‐based robust regulation scheme as well as an alternative condition is then developed without solving Hamilton–Jacobi–Issacs inequalities. The proposed regulators preserve the stochastic Hamiltonian structure of the disturbed SPHS by coordinate transformation. Hence the output regulation problems fall into the stabilization framework for SPHSs and there is no need to solve regulator equations. These results cover the stabilization of SPHSs and the output regulation of deterministic port‐Hamiltonian systems. Simulations on an inverted pendulum show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.