Abstract
This paper aims to provide a closer look at consumers' attitude toward Facebook advertising by providing a comparison between attitude toward brand posts and ads, a topic that has been disregarded in the extant literature. It also considers the relationship with the users' ad avoidance and electronic word-of-mouth communication. An exploratory quantitative analysis was performed by means of a structured self-administered questionnaire. 385 individuals aged between 18 and 44 participated in the study. The results include evidence on respondents' more favourable attitude toward brand posts than toward Facebook ads. Moreover, ads are considered more annoying by those who spend more time on Facebook. These results help shed the light on how Facebook users handle ads and brand posts, offering some clues for a more effective social media marketing strategy. Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Abstract
We present a numerical implementation of a solver for the Maxwell-Bloch equations to calculate the propagation of a light pulse in a nonlinear medium composed of an atomic gas in one, two and three dimensional systems. This implementation solves the wave equation of light using a finite difference method in the time domain scheme, while the Bloch equations for the atomic population in each point of the simulation domain are integrated using splitting methods. We present numerical simulations of atomic-gas systems and performance benchmarks.

Abstract
Performance estimation denotes a task of estimating the loss that a predictive model will incur on unseen data. These procedures are part of the pipeline in every machine learning task and are used for assessing the overall generalisation ability of models. In this paper we address the application of these methods to time series forecasting tasks. For independent and identically distributed data the most common approach is cross-validation. However, the dependency among observations in time series raises some caveats about the most appropriate way to estimate performance in these datasets and currently there is no settled way to do so. We compare different variants of cross-validation and different variants of out-of-sample approaches using two case studies: One with 53 real-world time series and another with three synthetic time series. Results show noticeable differences in the performance estimation methods in the two scenarios. In particular, empirical experiments suggest that cross-validation approaches can be applied to stationary synthetic time series. However, in real-world scenarios the most accurate estimates are produced by the out-of-sample methods, which preserve the temporal order of observations.

Abstract
CMA-ES is one of the most popular stochastic search algorithms. It performs favourably in many tasks without the need of extensive parameter tuning. The algorithm has many beneficial properties, including automatic step-size adaptation, efficient covariance updates that incorporates the current samples as well as the evolution path and its invariance properties. Its update rules are composed of well established heuristics where the theoretical foundations of some of these rules are also well understood. In this paper we will fully derive all CMA-ES update rules within the framework of expectation-maximisation-based stochastic search algorithms using information-geometric trust regions. We show that the use of the trust region results in similar updates to CMA-ES for the mean and the covariance matrix while it allows for the derivation of an improved update rule for the step-size. Our new algorithm, Trust-Region Co-variance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (TR-CMA-ES) is fully derived from first order optimization principles and performs favourably in compare to standard CMA-ES algorithm. © 2017 ACM.

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