  State estimation (SE) of water distribution networks (WDNs) is difficult to
solve due to nonlinearity/nonconvexity of water flow models, uncertainties from
parameters and demands, lack of redundancy of measurements, and inaccurate flow
and pressure measurements. This paper proposes a new, scalable successive
linear approximation to solve the SE problem in WDNs. The approach amounts to
solving either a sequence of linear or quadratic programs---depending on the
operators' objectives. The proposed successive linear approximation offers a
seamless way of dealing with valve/pump model nonconvexities, is different than
a first order Taylor series linearization, and can incorporate with robust
uncertainty modeling. Two simple testcases are adopted to illustrate the
effectiveness of proposed approach using head measurements at select nodes.


  Quantum fluids of light are realized in semiconductor microcavities by
exciton-polaritons, solid-state quasi-particles with a light mass and sizeable
interactions. Here, we use the microscopic analogue of oceanographic techniques
to measure the excitation spectrum of a thermalised polariton condensate.
Increasing the fluid density, we demonstrate the transition from a
free-particle parabolic dispersion to a linear, sound-like Goldstone mode
characteristic of superfluids at equilibrium. Notably, we show that excitations
are created with a definite direction with respect to the condensate, analogous
to how a sea breeze develops surface waves aligned with the wind. These results
reveal the effect of asymmetric pumping on the collective excitations of a
condensate. Furthermore, we measure the critical sound speed for polariton
superfluids close to equilibrium.


  We discuss the dimensional reduction of fermionic modes in a recently found
class of consistent truncations of D=11 supergravity compactified on squashed
seven-dimensional Sasaki-Einstein manifolds. Such reductions are of interest,
for example, in that they have $(2+1)$-dimensional holographic duals, and the
fermionic content and their interactions with charged scalars are an important
aspect of their applications. We derive the lower-dimensional equations of
motion for the fermions and exhibit their couplings to the various bosonic
modes present in the truncations under consideration, which most notably
include charged scalar and form fields. We demonstrate that our results are
consistent with the expected supersymmetric structure of the lower dimensional
theory, and apply them to a specific example which is relevant to the study of
$(2+1)$-dimensional holographic superconductors.


  In this part of the series I show how five-tensors can be used for describing
in a coordinate-independent way finite and infinitesimal Poincare
transformations in flat space-time. As an illustration, I reformulate the
classical mechanics of a perfectly rigid body in terms of the analogs of
five-vectors in three-dimensional Euclidean space. I then introduce the notion
of the bivector derivative for scalar, four-vector and four-tensor fields in
flat space-time and calculate its analog in three-dimensional Euclidean space
for the Lagrange function of a system of several point particles in classical
nonrelativistic mechanics.


  We report time series and variability information for the optical
identifications of X-ray sources in 47 Tuc reported in Paper I. The eight CVs
with secure orbital periods have fainter accretion disks, in the V band, than
field CVs with similar periods. These faint disks and the faint absolute
magnitudes (Mv) of the 47 Tuc CVs suggests they have low accretion rates. The
median Fx/Fopt value for the 47 Tuc CVs is higher than that of all known
classes of field CV, because of both the faint Mv values and the relatively
high X-ray luminosities (Lx). The latter are only seen in DQ Her systems in the
field, but the 47 Tuc CVs are much fainter optically than most field DQ Hers.
Some combination of magnetic behavior and low accretion rates may be able to
explain our observations, but the results at present are ambiguous, since no
class of field CV has distributions of both Lx and Mv that are consistent with
those of the 47 Tuc CVs. The radial distribution of the X-ray detected active
binaries is indistinguishable from that of the much larger sample of optical
variables detected in previous WFPC2 studies. The X-ray properties of these
objects are consistent with those of active binaries found in field studies.
One reasonable and one marginal candidate for optical identification of a
quiescent LMXB was found (one is already known). Finally, we study the blue
variables showing little or no evidence for X-ray emission. Their generally
long periods and the absence of flickering suggests they are not CVs. At
present we have no satisfactory explanation for these objects, although some
may be detached WD-main sequence star binaries.


  We use the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic sample to constrain
the projected radial distribution of satellites around isolated ~ L* galaxies.
We employ mock galaxy catalogs derived from high-resolution cosmological
simulations to investigate the effects of interloper contamination and show
that interlopers significantly bias the estimated slope of the projected radial
distribution of satellites. We also show that the distribution of interlopers
around galaxies is expected to be non-uniform in velocity space because
galaxies are clustered and reside in crowded environments. Successful methods
of interloper contamination correction should therefore take into account
environments of the host galaxies. Two such new methods are presented and the
most reliable of them is used to correct for interloper contamination in
analyses of the SDSS galaxy sample. The best fit power-law slope of the
interloper-corrected surface density distribution of satellites, Sigma(R) ~
R^alpha, in the volume-limited SDSS sample is alpha ~ -1.7 +/- 0.1, independent
of the galaxy and satellite luminosities. Comparison with Lambda-CDM
simulations shows that the radial distribution of the SDSS satellites is more
concentrated than that of subhalos around galaxy-sized halos, especially at R <
100 kpc/h. The predicted dark matter radial distribution is somewhat more
concentrated than the profile of the SDSS satellites, but the difference is not
statistically significant for our sample.


  In critical machine learning applications, ensuring fairness is essential to
avoid perpetuating social inequities. In this work, we address the challenges
of reducing bias and improving accuracy in data-scarce environments, where the
cost of collecting labeled data prohibits the use of large, labeled datasets.
In such settings, active learning promises to maximize marginal accuracy gains
of small amounts of labeled data. However, existing applications of active
learning for fairness fail to deliver on this, typically requiring large
labeled datasets, or failing to ensure the desired fairness tolerance is met on
the population distribution.
  To address such limitations, we introduce an innovative active learning
framework that combines an exploration procedure inspired by posterior sampling
with a fair classification subroutine. We demonstrate that this framework
performs effectively in very data-scarce regimes, maximizing accuracy while
satisfying fairness constraints with high probability. We evaluate our proposed
approach using well-established real-world benchmark datasets and compare it
against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in producing
fair models, and improvement over existing methods.


  We give a re-interpretation of an `entropy defect' in the electromagnetic
Casimir effect. The electron gas in a perfect crystal is an electromagnetically
disordered system whose entropy contains a finite Casimir-like contribution.
The Nernst theorem (third law of thermodynamics) is not applicable.


  The spatial and temporal discreteness of gravitational wave sources leads to
shot noise that may, in some regimes, swamp any attempts at measuring the
anisotropy of the gravitational wave background. Cross-correlating a
gravitational wave background map with a sufficiently dense galaxy survey can
alleviate this issue, and potentially recover some of the underlying properties
of the gravitational wave background. We quantify the shot noise level and we
explicitly show that cross-correlating the gravitational wave background and a
galaxy catalog improves the chances of a first detection of the background
anisotropy with a gravitational wave observatory operating in the frequency
range (10Hz,100Hz), given sufficient sensitivity.


  Chiral antisymmetric tensor fields can have chiral couplings to quarks and
leptons. Their kinetic terms do not mix different representations of the
Lorentz symmetry and a local mass term is forbidden by symmetry. The chiral
couplings to the fermions are asymptotically free, opening interesting
perspectives for a possible solution to the gauge hierarchy problem. We argue
that the interacting theory for such fields can be consistently quantized, in
contrast to the free theory which is plagued by unstable solutions. We suggest
that at the scale where the chiral couplings grow large the electroweak
symmetry is spontaneously broken and a mass term for the chiral tensors is
generated non-perturbatively. Massive chiral tensors correspond to massive spin
one particles that do not have problems of stability. We also propose an
equivalent formulation in terms of gauge fields.


  In this paper, we prove the K-theoretical and L-theoretical Farrell-Jones
Conjecture with coefficients in an additive category for nearly
crystallographic groups of the form $\mathbb{Q}^n \rtimes \mathbb{Z}$, where
$\mathbb{Z}$ acts on $\mathbb{Q}^n$ as an irreducible integer matrix with
determinant $d$, $|d |>1$.


  In this paper, we introduce the notion of (g,\Phi_{h})-convex dominated
function and present some properties of them. Finally, we present a version of
Hermite-Hadamard-type inequalities for (g,\Phi_{h})-convex dominated functions.
Our results generalize the Hermite-Hadamard-type inequalities in [2], [4] and
[6].


  The amplitude of ground state superconducting energy gap $\Delta(0)$ and
relative jump in electronic specific heat at the transition temperature,
$\Delta$$C$${/}$$\gamma$$T_c$, are primary fundamental parameters of any
superconductor. There are several well-established techniques to measure these
values for bulk samples. However, there is limited number of techniques which
can be applied to measure these parameters in atomically thin superconductors.
Here we proposed a new approach to extract $\Delta(0)$ and
$\Delta$$C$${/}$$\gamma$$T_c$ in atomically thin superconductors by utilizing
perpendicular, Bc2,perp(T) (when magnetic field is applied in perpendicular
direction to the film surface), and parallel, Bc2,||(T) (when magnetic field is
applied in parallel direction to the film surface), upper critical field data.
Deduced parameters for few layers thick Al, Sn, NbSe2, MoS2, magic angle
twisted trilayer graphene (MATTG), and WTe2 are well matched values expected
for strong- and moderately strong-coupled electron-phonon mediated
superconductors. Observed, in many atomically thin superconductors, an
enhancement of Bc2,||(0) above the Pauli-Clogston-Chandrasekhar limiting field
(i.e., magnetic field required to break the Cooper pair) is explained based on
the sample geometry, without an assumption that some exotic pairing mechanism,
for instance, Ising-type, is emergent in these materials.


  Given a matrix $\mathbf{A} \in \mathbb{R}^{k \times n}$, a partitioning of
$[k]$ into groups $S_1,\dots,S_m$, an outer norm $p$, and a collection of inner
norms such that either $p \ge 1$ and $p_1,\dots,p_m \ge 2$ or $p_1=\dots=p_m=p
\ge 1/\log n$, we prove that there is a sparse weight vector $\mathbf{\beta}
\in \mathbb{R}^{m}$ such that $\sum_{i=1}^m \beta_i \cdot
\|\mathbf{A}_{S_i}\mathbf{x}\|_{p_i}^p \approx_{1\pm\varepsilon} \sum_{i=1}^m
\|\mathbf{A}_{S_i}\mathbf{x}\|_{p_i}^p$, where the number of nonzero entries of
$\mathbf{\beta}$ is at most $O_{p,p_i}(\varepsilon^{-2}n^{\max(1,p/2)}(\log
n)^2(\log(n/\varepsilon)))$. When $p_1\dots,p_m \ge 2$, this weight vector
arises from an importance sampling procedure based on the block Lewis weights,
a recently proposed generalization of Lewis weights. Additionally, we prove
that there exist efficient algorithms to find the sparse weight vector
$\mathbf{\beta}$ in several important regimes of $p$ and $p_1,\dots,p_m$.
  Our main technical contribution is a substantial generalization of the
change-of-measure method that Bourgain, Lindenstrauss, and Milman used to
obtain the analogous result when every group has size $1$. Our generalization
allows one to analyze change of measures beyond those implied by D. Lewis's
original construction, including the measure implied by the block Lewis weights
and natural approximations of this measure.


  We study holographic subregion volume complexity for a line segment in the
AdS$_3$ Vaidya geometry. On the field theory side, this gravity background
corresponds to a sudden quench which leads to the thermalization of the
strongly-coupled dual conformal field theory. We find the time-dependent
extremal volume surface by numerically solving a partial differential equation
with boundary condition given by the Hubeny-Rangamani-Takayanagi surface, and
we use this solution to compute holographic subregion complexity as a function
of time. Approximate analytical expressions valid at early and at late times
are derived.


  This paper presents our approach for the SemEval-2024 Task 10: Emotion
Discovery and Reasoning its Flip in Conversations. For the Emotion Recognition
in Conversations (ERC) task, we utilize a masked-memory network along with
speaker participation. We propose a transformer-based speaker-centric model for
the Emotion Flip Reasoning (EFR) task. We also introduce Probable Trigger Zone,
a region of the conversation that is more likely to contain the utterances
causing the emotion to flip. For sub-task 3, the proposed approach achieves a
5.9 (F1 score) improvement over the task baseline. The ablation study results
highlight the significance of various design choices in the proposed method.


  If a point particle moves chaotically through a periodic array of scatterers
the associated transport coefficients are typically irregular functions under
variation of control parameters. For a piecewise linear two-parameter map we
analyze the structure of the associated irregular diffusion coefficient and
current by numerically computing dimensions from box-counting and from the
autocorrelation function of these graphs. We find that both dimensions are
fractal for large parameter intervals and that both quantities are themselves
fractal functions if computed locally on a uniform grid of small but finite
subintervals. We furthermore show that there is a simple functional
relationship between the structure of fractal fractal dimensions and the
difference quotient defined on these subintervals.


  In the last decade we have witnessed the explosive growth of online social
networking services (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, RenRen and LinkedIn.
While SNSs provide diverse benefits for example, forstering interpersonal
relationships, community formations and news propagation, they also attracted
uninvited nuiance. Spammers abuse SNSs as vehicles to spread spams rapidly and
widely. Spams, unsolicited or inappropriate messages, significantly impair the
credibility and reliability of services. Therefore, detecting spammers has
become an urgent and critical issue in SNSs. This paper deals with Follow spam
in Twitter. Instead of spreading annoying messages to the public, a spammer
follows (subscribes to) legitimate users, and followed a legitimate user. Based
on the assumption that the online relationships of spammers are different from
those of legitimate users, we proposed classification schemes that detect
follow spammers. Particularly, we focused on cascaded social relations and
devised two schemes, TSP-Filtering and SS-Filtering, each of which utilizes
Triad Significance Profile (TSP) and Social status (SS) in a two-hop subnetwork
centered at each other. We also propose an emsemble technique,
Cascaded-Filtering, that combine both TSP and SS properties. Our experiments on
real Twitter datasets demonstrated that the proposed three approaches are very
practical. The proposed schemes are scalable because instead of analyzing the
whole network, they inspect user-centered two hop social networks. Our
performance study showed that proposed methods yield significantly better
performance than prior scheme in terms of true positives and false positives.


  We simulate the near-field effects of strong coupling between molecular
excitons and localized surface plasmons, supported by aluminum nanodisks. The
simulations are done using a simple model of a two-level system, implemented in
a commercial electromagnetic finite-difference time-domain solver. While the
Rabi splitting is present in the near-field, its spectral gap is seen to be
smaller than the one obtained in the far-field, although it follows a clear
square root dependence on the molecular density as expected. Moreover, the
energy exchange between the plasmonic mode and the excitonic material is
evident in 'beats' within the electromagnetic near-field, which are out of
phase with respect to the exciton population. Our results explicitly
demonstrate the collective nature of strong coupling, which is expressed by the
synchronized population oscillations at the collective Rabi frequency set by
the number of molecules interacting with the plasmonic mode. This analysis
sheds light on strong coupling effects in the near-field region using a
versatile model, which provides a powerful tool to study strong coupling,
near-field effects, and light-matter interactions in general.


  Galaxy clusters with a dense cooling core exhibit a central increase in the
metallicity of the intracluster medium. Recent XMM-Newton studies with detailed
results on the relative abundances of several heavy elements show that the high
central abundances are mostly due to the contribution from supernovae type Ia.
The dominant source is the stellar population of the central cluster galaxy.
With this identification of the origin of heavy elements and the observed rates
of SN Ia in elliptical galaxies, the central abundance peak can be used as a
diagnostic for the history of the cluster core region. We find for four nearby
cooling core clusters that the enrichment times for the central peaks are
larger than 6 - 10 Gyrs even for a higher SN Ia rate in the past. This points
to an old age and a relatively quiet history of these cluster core regions. A
detailed analysis of the element abundance ratios provides evidence that the SN
Ia yields in the central cluster galaxies are more rich in intermediate mass
elements, like Si and S, compared to the SN Ia models used to explain the heavy
element enrichment in our Galaxy.


  We investigate the behavior of the entanglement entropy of space in the
primordial phase of the universe before the beginning of cosmic inflation. We
argue that in this phase the entanglement entropy of a region of space grows
from a zero-law to an area-law. This behavior provides a quantum version of the
classical BKL conjecture that spatially separated points decouple in the
approach to a cosmological singularity. We show that the relational growth of
the entanglement entropy with the scale factor provides a new statistical
notion of arrow of time in quantum gravity. The growth of entanglement in the
pre-inflationary phase provides a mechanism for the production of the quantum
correlations present at the beginning of inflation and imprinted in the CMB
sky.


  Morley's Theorem about angle trisectors can be viewed as the statement that a
certain diagram `exists', meaning that triangles of prescribed shapes meet in a
prescribed pattern. This diagram is the case n=3 of a class of diagrams we call
`Conway's doughnuts'. These diagrams can be proven to exist using John
Smillie's holonomy method, recently championed by Eric Braude: `Guess the
shapes; check the holonomy.' For n = 2, 3, 4 the existence of the doughnut
happens to be easy to prove because the hole is absent or triangular.


  Mercury has perhaps the strangest behavior of any of the metals. Although the
other metals in column IIB have an $hcp$ ground state, mercury's ground state
is the body centered tetragonal $\beta$Hg phase. The most common phase of
mercury is the rhombohedral $\alpha$Hg phase, which is stable from 79K to the
melting point and meta-stable below 79K. Another rhombohedral phase,
$\gamma$Hg, is believed to exist at low temperatures. First-principles
calculations are used to study the energetics of the various phases of mercury.
Even when partial spin-orbit effects are included, the calculations indicate
that the hexagonal close packed structure is the ground state. It is suggested
that a better treatment of the spin-orbit interaction might alter this result.


  The reported diffusion constants for hydrogen in silicon vary over six orders
of magnitude. This spread in measured values is caused by the different
concentrations of defects in the silicon that has been studied. Hydrogen
diffusion is slowed down as it interacts with impurities. By changing the
material properties such as the crystallinity, doping type and impurity
concentrations, the diffusivity of hydrogen can be changed by several orders of
magnitude. In this study the influence of the hydrogen concentration on the
temperature dependence of the diffusion in high energy proton implanted silicon
is investigated. We show that the Arrhenius parameters, which describe this
temperature dependence decrease with increasing hydrogen concentration. We
propose a model where the relevant defects that mediate hydrogen diffusion
become saturated with hydrogen at high concentrations. When the defects that
provide hydrogen with the lowest energy positions in the lattice are saturated,
hydrogen resides at energetically less favorable positions and this increases
the diffusion of hydrogen through the crystal. Furthermore, we present a survey
of different studies on the diffusion of hydrogen. We observed a correlation of
the Arrhenius parameters calculated in those studies, leading to a modification
of the Arrhenius equation for the diffusion of hydrogen in silicon.


  In this paper, we present a detailed example of numerical study of flm
formation in the context of metal coating. Subsequently we simulate wiping of
the film by a planar jet. The simulations have been performed using Basilisk, a
grid-adapting, strongly optimized code. Mesh adaptation allows for arbitrary
precision in relevant regions such as the contact line or the liquid-air impact
zone, while coarse grid is applied elsewhere. This, as the results indicate, is
the only realistic approach for a numerical method to cover the wide range of
necessary scales from the predicted film thickness (tens of microns) to the
domain size (meters). The results suggest assumptions of laminar flow inside
the film are not justified for heavy coats (liquid zinc). As for the wiping,
our simulations supply a great amount of instantaneous results concerning
initial film atomization as well as film thickness.


  In an effort to eliminate laser phase noise in laser interferometer
spaceborne gravitational wave detectors, several combinations of signals have
been found that allow the laser noise to be canceled out while gravitational
wave signals remain. This process is called time delay interferometry (TDI). In
the papers that defined the TDI variables, their performance was evaluated in
the limit that the gravitational wave detector is fixed in space. However, the
performance depends on certain symmetries in the armlengths that are available
if the detector is fixed in space, but that will be broken in the actual
rotating and flexing configuration produced by the LISA orbits. In this paper
we investigate the performance of these TDI variables for the real LISA orbits.
First, addressing the effects of rotation, we verify Daniel Shaddock's result
that the Sagnac variables will not cancel out the laser phase noise, and we
also find the same result for the symmetric Sagnac variable. The loss of the
latter variable would be particularly unfortunate since this variable also
cancels out gravitational wave signal, allowing instrument noise in the
detector to be isolated and measured. Fortunately, we have found a set of more
complicated TDI variables, which we call Delta-Sagnac variables, one of which
accomplishes the same goal as the symmetric Sagnac variable to good accuracy.
Finally, however, as we investigate the effects of the flexing of the detector
arms due to non-circular orbital motion, we show that all variables, including
the interferometer variables, which survive the rotation-induced loss of
direction symmetry, will not completely cancel laser phase noise when the
armlengths are changing with time. This unavoidable problem will place a
stringent requirement on laser stability of 5 Hz per root Hz.


  Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are well-known to exhibit flux variability
across a wide range of wavelength regimes, but the precise origin of the
variability at different wavelengths remains unclear. To investigate the
relatively unexplored near-IR variability of the most luminous AGNs, we conduct
a search for variability using well sampled JHKs-band light curves from the
2MASS survey calibration fields. Our sample includes 27 known quasars with an
average of 924 epochs of observation over three years, as well as one
spectroscopically confirmed blazar (SDSSJ14584479+3720215) with 1972 epochs of
data. This is the best-sampled NIR photometric blazar light curve to date, and
it exhibits correlated, stochastic variability that we characterize with
continuous auto-regressive moving average (CARMA) models. None of the other 26
known quasars had detectable variability in the 2MASS bands above the
photometric uncertainty. A blind search of the 2MASS calibration field light
curves for AGN candidates based on fitting CARMA(1,0) models (damped-random
walk) uncovered only 7 candidates. All 7 were young stellar objects within the
{\rho} Ophiuchus star forming region, five with previous X-ray detections. A
significant {\gamma}-ray detection (5{\sigma}) for the known blazar using 4.5
years of Fermi photon data is also found. We suggest that strong NIR
variability of blazars, such as seen for SDSSJ14584479+3720215, can be used as
an efficient method of identifying previously-unidentified {\gamma}-ray
blazars, with low contamination from other AGN.


  Starting with the homogeneous Bethe-Salpeter equation for two fermions, we
perform a 3D reduction using a series expansion around an unspecified
positive-energy instantaneous approximation of the kernel. A second series
expansion is made, at the 3D level, in order to get an "hermitian" potential.
The combination of both series gives a very simple result, which does not
depend of the initial approximation of the kernel anymore, and could be
obtained directly by starting with an approximation of the free propagator. The
generalisation of this result to a system of f (=0,...N) fermions and N-f
bosons is easy.


  The low-frequency optical excitations of AA-stacked bilayer graphene are
investigated by the tight-binding model. Two groups of asymmetric LLs lead to
two kinds of absorption peaks resulting from only intragroup excitations. Each
absorption peak obeys a single selection rule similar to that of monolayer
graphene. The excitation channel of each peak is changed as the field strength
approaches a critical strength. This alteration of the excitation channel is
strongly related to the setting of the Fermi level. The peculiar optical
properties can be attributed to the characteristics of the LL wave functions of
the two LL groups. A detailed comparison of optical properties between
AA-stacked and AB-stacked bilayer graphenes is also offered. The compared
results demonstrate that the optical properties are strongly dominated by the
stacking symmetry. Furthermore, the presented results may be used to
discriminate AABG from MG, which can be hardly done by STM.


  Recent work on the limitations of using reinforcement learning from human
feedback (RLHF) to incorporate human preferences into model behavior often
raises social choice theory as a reference point. Social choice theory's
analysis of settings such as voting mechanisms provides technical
infrastructure that can inform how to aggregate human preferences amid
disagreement. We analyze the problem settings of social choice and RLHF,
identify key differences between them, and discuss how these differences may
affect the RLHF interpretation of well-known technical results in social
choice.


  This work suggests a new variational approach to the task of computer aided
restoration of incomplete characters, residing in a highly noisy document. We
model character strokes as the movement of a pen with a varying radius.
Following this model, a cubic spline representation is being utilized to
perform gradient descent steps, while maintaining interpolation at some initial
(manually sampled) points. The proposed algorithm was utilized in the process
of restoring approximately 1000 ancient Hebrew characters (dating to ca.
8th-7th century BCE), some of which are presented herein and show that the
algorithm yields plausible results when applied on deteriorated documents.


  As autonomous vehicles (AVs) take on growing Operational Design Domains
(ODDs), they need to go through a systematic, transparent, and scalable
evaluation process to demonstrate their benefits to society. Current scenario
sampling techniques for AV performance evaluation usually focus on a specific
functionality, such as lane changing, and do not accommodate a transfer of
information about an AV system from one ODD to the next. In this paper, we
reformulate the scenario sampling problem across ODDs and functionalities as a
submodular optimization problem. To do so, we abstract AV performance as a
Bayesian Hierarchical Model, which we use to infer information gained by
revealing performance in new scenarios. We propose the information gain as a
measure of scenario relevance and evaluation progress. Furthermore, we leverage
the submodularity, or diminishing returns, property of the information gain not
only to find a near-optimal scenario set, but also to propose a stopping
criterion for an AV performance evaluation campaign. We find that we only need
to explore about 7.5% of the scenario space to meet this criterion, a 23%
improvement over Latin Hypercube Sampling.


  The paper considers linear regression problems where the number of predictor
variables is possibly larger than the sample size. The basic motivation of the
study is to combine the points of view of model selection and functional
regression by using a factor approach: it is assumed that the predictor vector
can be decomposed into a sum of two uncorrelated random components reflecting
common factors and specific variabilities of the explanatory variables. It is
shown that the traditional assumption of a sparse vector of parameters is
restrictive in this context. Common factors may possess a significant influence
on the response variable which cannot be captured by the specific effects of a
small number of individual variables. We therefore propose to include principal
components as additional explanatory variables in an augmented regression
model. We give finite sample inequalities for estimates of these components. It
is then shown that model selection procedures can be used to estimate the
parameters of the augmented model, and we derive theoretical properties of the
estimators. Finite sample performance is illustrated by a simulation study.


  Surface diffusion has an impact on the lateral resolution of nanostructures
in bottom-up atom nanofabrication. In this paper we study the effects of the
gallium atoms self-assembled on silicon surfaces (100) patterned with trenches
at different slopes. These particular substrate morphologies have been made to
enable an effective deposition rate variation along the surface. In this way we
experimentally mimic the effect of the atomic flux modulation created by
standing wave during an atom nanofabrication experiment. Even if we observe
self organization of gallium atoms on the surface, we conclude that the
nano-islands are not affected by surface diffusion processes and the effective
variation of the deposition rate per unit area is the dominant factor affecting
the growth differences along the surface. This result demonstrates that the
gallium atoms self-organization should not prevent the observation of a
periodic nano-patterning created by atom nano-fabrication techniques.


  Muon spin rotation measurements supported by magnetization experiments have
been carried out in a stoichiometric high-$T_c$ parent compound La$_2$CuO$_4$
in %the a temperature range from 2~K to 340~K and in transverse magnetic fields
up to 5~T. Along with the antiferromagnetic local field, muon spin rotation
spectra indicate presence of an additional source of magnetic field on the
muon. The characteristic splitting of about 45~G coming from this additional
magnetic field is consistent with spontaneous circulating currents model of
Varma.


  We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe
left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made
difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from
traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the
lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that
mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are
surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the
choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is
essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we
propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its
effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in
matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show
its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching
facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally,
we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system
through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.


  We perform 3+1D viscous hydrodynamic calculations of proton-lead and
lead-lead collisions at top LHC energy. We show that existing data from
high-multiplicity p-Pb events can be well described in hydrodynamics,
suggesting that collective flow is plausible as a correct description of these
collisions. However, a more stringent test of the presence of hydrodynamic
behavior can be made by studying the detailed momentum dependence of
two-particle correlations. We define a relevant observable, $r_n$, and make
predictions for its value and centrality dependence if hydrodynamics is a valid
description. This will provide a non-trivial confirmation of the nature of the
correlations seen in small collision systems, and potentially to determine
where the hydrodynamic description, if valid anywhere, stops being valid.
Lastly, we probe what can be learned from this observable, finding that it is
insensitive to viscosity, but sensitive to aspects of the initial state of the
system that other observables are insensitive to, such as the transverse length
scale of the fluctuations in the initial stages of the collision.


  The hadronic decay widths and some ratios of branching fractions of the newly
observed charmed strange baryons, $\Xi_c(3055)^0$, $\Xi_c(3055)^+$ and
$\Xi_c(3080)^+$ are calculated in a $^3P_0$ model. In the calculation, they are
considered as $34$ kinds of $D-wave$ charmed strange baryons. Among these
assignments, $\Xi_c(3055)^+$ is very possibly a $J^P={5\over 2}^+$
$\hat\Xi_{c3}^\prime(\frac{5}{2}^+)$ or $\check\Xi_{c3}^2(\frac{5}{2}^+)$,
where $\Xi_c(3055)^+$ has the total decay width $\Gamma=10.1$ MeV and
$\Gamma=7.6$ MeV. The predicted ratios $\Gamma(\Xi_c(3055)^+ \to \Lambda D^+ )/
\Gamma(\Xi_c(3055)^+ \to \Sigma_c^{++}K^-)=3.39$. $\Xi_c(3055)^+$ is also very
possibly a $J^P={7\over 2}^+$ $\hat\Xi_{c3}^\prime(\frac{7}{2}^+)$ or
$\check\Xi_{c3}^2(\frac{7}{2}^+)$. In these two assignments, $\Xi_c(3055)^+$
has the total decay width $\Gamma=9.7$ MeV and $\Gamma=6.3$ MeV. The predicted
ratios $\Gamma(\Xi_c(3055)^+ \to \Lambda D^+ )/ \Gamma(\Xi_c(3055)^+ \to
\Sigma_c^{++}K^-)=5.91~\rm{or}~6.04$. As a isospin partner of $\Xi_c(3055)^+$,
$\Xi_c(3055)^0$ is also very possibly a $J^P={5\over 2}^+$
$\hat\Xi_{c3}^\prime(\frac{5}{2}^+)$ or $\check\Xi_{c3}^2(\frac{5}{2}^+)$,
where $\Xi_c(3055)^0$ has the total decay width $\Gamma=10.9$ MeV and
$\Gamma=7.0$ MeV. The predicted ratios $\Gamma(\Xi_c(3055)^0 \to \Lambda D^0 )/
\Gamma(\Xi_c(3055)^0 \to \Sigma_c^{+}K^-)=4.24~\rm{or}~4.20$. $\Xi_c(3055)^0$
is also very possibly a $J^P={7\over 2}^+$ $\hat\Xi_{c3}^\prime(\frac{7}{2}^+)$
or $\check\Xi_{c3}^2(\frac{7}{2}^+)$. In these assignments, $\Xi_c(3055)^0$ has
the total decay width $\Gamma=10.3$ MeV and $\Gamma=7.1$ MeV. The predicted
ratios $\Gamma(\Xi_c(3055)^0 \to \Lambda D^0 )/ \Gamma(\Xi_c(3055)^0 \to
\Sigma_c^{+}K^-)=7.47~\rm{or}~7.56$. The results agree well with recent
experimental data from Belle. $\Xi_c(3080)^+$ seems impossible to be identified
with a D-wave charmed strange baryon.


  In this paper, we propose a pragmatic approach to improve reproducibility of
experimental analyses of traffic engineering (TE) algorithms, whose
implementation, evaluation and comparison are currently hard to replicate. Our
envisioned goal is to enable universally-checkable experiments of existing and
future TE algorithms. We describe the design and implementation of REPETITA, a
software framework that implements common TE functions, automates experimental
setup, and eases comparisons (in terms of solution quality, execution time,
etc.) of TE algorithms. In its current version, REPETITA includes (i) a dataset
for repeatable experiments, consisting of more than 250 real network topologies
with complete bandwidth and delay information as well as associated traffic
matrices; and (ii) the implementation of state-of-the-art algorithms for
intra-domain TE with IGP weight tweaking and Segment Routing optimization. We
showcase how our framework can successfully reproduce results described in the
literature, and ease new analyses of qualitatively-diverse TE algorithms. We
publicly release our REPETITA implementation, hoping that the community will
consider it as a demonstration of feasibility, an incentive and an initial code
basis for improving experiment reproducibility: Its plugin-oriented
architecture indeed makes REPETITA easy to extend with new datasets,
algorithms, TE primitives and analyses. We therefore invite the research
community to use and contribute to our released code and dataset.


  With the development of affordable aberration-correctors, analytical scanning
transmission electron microscopy (STEM) studies of complex interfaces can now
be conducted at high spatial resolution at laboratories worldwide.
Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (STEM-EDS) in particular has grown in
popularity, since it enables elemental mapping over a wide range of ionization
energies. However, the interpretation of atomically-resolved data is greatly
complicated by beam-sample interactions that are often overlooked by novice
users. Here we describe the practical factors---namely, sample thickness and
the choice of ionization edge---that affect the quantification of a model
perovskite oxide interface. Our measurements of the same sample in regions of
different thickness indicate that interface profiles can vary by as much as 2-5
unit cells, depending on the spectral feature. This finding is supported by
multislice simulations, which reveal that on-axis maps of even perfectly abrupt
interfaces exhibit significant delocalization. Quantification of thicker
samples is further complicated by channeling to heavier sites across the
interface, as well as an increased signal background. We show that extreme care
must be taken to prepare samples to minimize channeling effects and argue that
it may not be possible to extract atomically-resolved information from many
chemical maps.


  We show the renormalization of contact interaction for odd-wave scattering in
one-dimension(1D). Based on the renormalized interaction, we exactly solve the
two-body problem in a harmonic trap, and further explore the universal
properties of spin-polarized fermions near odd-wave resonance using the
operator product expansion method. It is found that the high-momentum
distribution behaves as $C/k^2$, with $C$ the odd-wave contact. Various
universal relations are derived. Our work suggests a new universal system
emergent in 1D with large odd-wave scattering length.


  A topological group is constructed which is homotopy equivalent to the
pointed loop space of a path-connected Riemannian manifold $M$ and which is
given in terms of "composable small geodesics" on $M$. This model is analogous
to J. Milnor's free group construction \cite{Milnor} which provides a model for
the pointed loop space of a connected simplicial complex. Related function
spaces are constructed from "composable small geodesics" which provide models
for the free loop space of $M$ as well as the space of continuous maps from a
surface to $M$.


  This paper studies nonparametric estimation of parameters of multivariate
Hawkes processes. We consider the Bayesian setting and derive posterior
concentration rates. First rates are derived for L1-metrics for stochastic
intensities of the Hawkes process. We then deduce rates for the L1-norm of
interactions functions of the process. Our results are exemplified by using
priors based on piecewise constant functions, with regular or random partitions
and priors based on mixtures of Betas distributions. Numerical illustrations
are then proposed with in mind applications for inferring functional
connec-tivity graphs of neurons.


  Black holes with dyonic charges in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton-axion
supergravity theory are revisited in the context of black hole shadows. We
consider static as well as rotating (namely the dyonic Kerr-Sen) black holes.
The matter stress-energy tensor components, sourced by the Maxwell, axion and
dilaton fields satisfy the standard energy conditions. The analytical
expressions for the horizon and the shadow radius of the static spacetimes
demonstrate their dependence on $P^2+Q^2$ ($P$, $Q$ the magnetic and electric
charges, respectively) and the mass parameter $M$. The shadow radius lies in
the range $2M <R_{shadow}<3\sqrt{3} M$ and there is no stable photon orbit
outside the horizon. Further, shadows cast by the rotating dyonic Kerr-Sen
black holes are also studied and compared graphically with their Kerr-Newman
and Kerr-Sen counterparts. Deviation of the shadow boundary is prominent with
the variation of the magnetic charge, for the relatively slowly rotating dyonic
Kerr-Sen spacetimes. We test any possible presence of a magnetic monopole
charge in the backdrop of recent EHT observations for the supermassive black
holes M87$^*$ and Sgr A$^*$. Deviation from circularity of the shadow boundary
($\Delta C$) and deviation of the average shadow radius from the Schwarzschild
shadow radius (quantified as the fractional deviation parameter $\delta$) are
the two observables used here. Observational bound on $\Delta C$ (available
only for M87$^*$) is satisfied for all theoretically allowed regions of
parameter space and thus cannot constrain the parameters. The observational
bound on $\delta$ available for Sgr A$^*$ translates into an upper limit on any
possible magnetic monopole charge linked to Sgr A$^*$ and is given as
$P\lesssim 0.873\, M$. Such a constraint on $P$ is however expected to be far
more stringent for other astrophysical tests.


  In this paper, we focus on batch state estimation for linear systems. This
problem is important in applications such as environmental field estimation,
robotic navigation, and target tracking. Its difficulty lies on that limited
operational resources among the sensors, e.g., shared communication bandwidth
or battery power, constrain the number of sensors that can be active at each
measurement step. As a result, sensor scheduling algorithms must be employed.
Notwithstanding, current sensor scheduling algorithms for batch state
estimation scale poorly with the system size and the time horizon. In addition,
current sensor scheduling algorithms for Kalman filtering, although they scale
better, provide no performance guarantees or approximation bounds for the
minimization of the batch state estimation error. In this paper, one of our
main contributions is to provide an algorithm that enjoys both the estimation
accuracy of the batch state scheduling algorithms and the low time complexity
of the Kalman filtering scheduling algorithms. In particular: 1) our algorithm
is near-optimal: it achieves a solution up to a multiplicative factor 1/2 from
the optimal solution, and this factor is close to the best approximation factor
1/e one can achieve in polynomial time for this problem; 2) our algorithm has
(polynomial) time complexity that is not only lower than that of the current
algorithms for batch state estimation; it is also lower than, or similar to,
that of the current algorithms for Kalman filtering. We achieve these results
by proving two properties for our batch state estimation error metric, which
quantifies the square error of the minimum variance linear estimator of the
batch state vector: a) it is supermodular in the choice of the sensors; b) it
has a sparsity pattern (it involves matrices that are block tri-diagonal) that
facilitates its evaluation at each sensor set.


  Annihilation of the electron-positron pairs in macroscopic polyelectrons is
considered. It is shown that very fast collapse of the spatial area occupied by
macroscopic polyelectron (or dense electron-positron plasma) produces an
instant annihilation of a very large number of electron-positron pairs. This
phenomenon corresponds to the so-called annihilation explosion. Annihilation of
each electron-positron pair is a highly exothermic process. Therefore, in dense
electron-positron plasma one can observe a very interesting phenomenon of
photon detonation, i.e. a self-organized formation and propagation of the
detonation wave which coincides with the annihilation wave. The photon
detonation can be used in many applications, including many military and
astrophysical problems.


  We introduce an Eulerian approach for problems involving one or more soft
solids immersed in a fluid, which permits mechanical interactions between all
phases. The reference map variable is exploited to simulate finite-deformation
constitutive relations in the solid(s) on the same fixed grid as the fluid
phase, which greatly simplifies the coupling between phases. Our coupling
procedure, a key contribution in the current work, is shown to be
computationally faster and more stable than an earlier approach, and admits the
ability to simulate both fluid--solid and solid--solid interaction between
submerged bodies. The interface treatment is demonstrated with multiple
examples involving a weakly compressible Navier--Stokes fluid interacting with
a neo-Hookean solid, and we verify the method's convergence. The solid contact
method, which exploits distance-measures already existing on the grid, is
demonstrated with two examples. A new, general routine for cross-interface
extrapolation is introduced and used as part of the new interfacial treatment.


  Achieving success in agricultural activities heavily relies on precise
navigation in row crop fields. Recently, segmentation-based navigation has
emerged as a reliable technique when GPS-based localization is unavailable or
higher accuracy is needed due to vegetation or unfavorable weather conditions.
It also comes in handy when plants are growing rapidly and require an online
adaptation of the navigation algorithm. This work applies a segmentation-based
visual agnostic navigation algorithm to lavender fields, considering both
simulation and real-world scenarios. The effectiveness of this approach is
validated through a wide set of experimental tests, which show the capability
of the proposed solution to generalize over different scenarios and provide
highly-reliable results.


  Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of standards that provide
low-latency, high-reliability guarantees for the transmission of traffic in
networks, and it is becoming an accepted solution for complex time-critical
systems such as those in industrial automation and the automotive. In
time-critical systems, it is essential to verify the timing predictability of
the system, and the application of scheduling mechanisms in TSN can also bring
about changes in system timing. Therefore, schedulability analysis techniques
can be used to verify that the system is scheduled according to the scheduling
mechanism and meets the timing requirements. In this paper, we provide a clear
overview of the state-of-the-art works on the topic of schedulability analysis
in TSN in an attempt to clarify the purpose of schedulability analysis,
categorize the methods of schedulability analysis and compare their respective
strengths and weaknesses, point out the scheduling mechanisms under analyzing
and the corresponding traffic classes, clarify the network scenarios
constructed during the evaluation and list the challenges and directions still
needing to be worked on in schedulability analysis in TSN. To this end, we
conducted a systematic literature review and finally identified 123 relevant
research papers published in major conferences and journals in the past 15
years. Based on a comprehensive review of the relevant literature, we have
identified several key findings and emphasized the future challenges in
schedulability analysis for TSN.


  Due to the existence of incompatible observables, the propositional calculus
of a quantum system does not form a Boolean algebra but an orthomodular
lattice. Such lattice can be realised as a lattice of subspaces on a real,
complex or quaternionic Hilbert space, which motivated the formulation of real
and quaternionic quantum mechanics in addition to the usual complex
formulation. It was argued that any real quantum system admits a complex
structure that turns it into a complex quantum system and hence real quantum
mechanics was soon discarded. Several authors however developed a quaternionic
version of quantum mechanics and this version did not seem to be equivalent its
standard formulation on a complex Hilbert space.
  Motivated by some recently developed techniques from quaternionic operator
theory, we conjecture in this article that this not correct and that any
quaternionic quantum system is actually simply the quaternionification of a
complex quantum system. We then show that this conjecture holds true for
quaternionic relativistic elementary systems by applying some recent arguments
that were used to show the equivalence of real and complex elementary
relativistic systems. Finally, we conclude by discussing how the misconception
that complex and quaternionic quantum mechanics are inequivalent arose from
assuming the existence of a left multiplication on the Hilbert space, which is
physically not justified.


  One of the widely used denoising methods in different domains is the
Savitzky-Golay (SG) filter. The SG filter has two design parameters: window
length and the filter order. As the length of the window increases, the
estimation variance decreases, but the bias error increases at the same time.
Mean square error (MSE) measure includes both bias and variance criteria. In
this paper, we obtain the optimal window length of an SG filter with arbitrary
order which minimizes the MSE. To achieve the optimal window length, we propose
an algorithm whose performance is better than the existing methods. In this
paper, we follow the viewpoint proposed by Persson and Strang and design the
filter on the basis of Chebyshev orthogonal polynomials


  We apply a formalism accounting for thermal effects (such as modified
Sommerfeld effect; Salpeter correction; decohering scatterings; dissociation of
bound states), to one of the simplest WIMP-like dark matter models, associated
with an "inert" Higgs doublet. A broad temperature range T ~ M/20...M/10^4 is
considered, stressing the importance and less-understood nature of late
annihilation stages. Even though only weak interactions play a role, we find
that resummed real and virtual corrections increase the tree-level overclosure
bound by 1...18%, depending on quartic couplings and mass splittings.


  In order to model the phase-coherent scattering of electrons in
two-dimensional electron gases in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit coupling, a
general partial-wave expansion is developed for scattering from a cylindrically
symmetric potential. The theory is applied to possible electron flow imaging
experiments using a moveable scanning probe microscope tip. In such
experiments, it is demonstrated theoretically that the Rashba spin-orbit
coupling can give rise to spin interference effects, even for unpolarized
electrons at nonzero temperature and no magnetic field.


  In this paper we present new and improved data on 38 cool white dwarfs
identified by Oppenheimer et al. 2001 (OHDHS) as candidate dark halo objects.
Using the high-res spectra obtained with LRIS, we measure radial velocities for
13 WDs that show an H alpha line. We show that the knowledge of RVs decreases
the UV-plane velocities by only 6%. The radial velocity sample has a W-velocity
dispersion of sig_W = 59 km/s--in between the values associated with the thick
disk and the stellar halo. We also see indications for the presence of two
populations by analyzing the velocities in the UV plane. In addition, we
present CCD photometry for half of the sample, and with it recalibrate the
photographic photometry of the remaining WDs. Using the new photometry in
standard bands, and by applying the appropriate color-magnitude relations for H
and He atmospheres, we obtain new distance estimates. New distances of the WDs
that were not originally selected as halo candidates yield 13 new candidates.
On average, new distances produce velocities in the UV plane that are larger by
10%, with already fast objects gaining more. Using the new data, while applying
the same UV-velocity cut (94 km/s) as in OHDHS, we find a density of cool WDs
of 1.7e-4 pc^-3, confirming the value of OHDHS. In addition, we derive the
density as a function of the UV-velocity cutoff. The density (corrected for
losses due to higher UV cuts) starts to flatten out at 150 km/s (0.4e-4 pc^-3),
and is minimized (thus minimizing a possible non-halo contamination) at 190
km/s (0.3e-4 pc^-3). These densities are in a rough agreement with the
estimates for the stellar halo WDs, corresponding to a factor of 1.9 and 1.4
higher values.


  We give from first principles the non-relativistic limit of scalar and Dirac
fields in curved spacetime. We aim to find general relativistic corrections to
the quantum theory of particles affected by Newtonian gravity, a regime
nowadays experimentally accessible. We believe that the ever-improving
measurement accuracy and the theoretical interest in finding general
relativistic effects in quantum systems require the introduction of corrections
to the Schr\"{o}dinger-Newtonian theory. We rigorously determine these
corrections by the non-relativistic limit of fully relativistic quantum
theories in curved spacetime. For curved static spacetimes, we show how a
non-inertial observer (equivalently, an observer in the presence of a
gravitational field) can distinguish a scalar field from a Dirac field by
particle-gravity interaction. We study the Rindler spacetime and discuss the
difference between the resulting non-relativistic Hamiltonians. We find that
for sufficiently large acceleration, the gravity-spin coupling dominates over
the corrections for scalar fields, promoting Dirac particles as the best
candidates for observing non-Newtonian gravity in quantum particle
phenomenology.


  Recent advances in commonsense reasoning depend on large-scale
human-annotated training data to achieve peak performance. However, manual
curation of training examples is expensive and has been shown to introduce
annotation artifacts that neural models can readily exploit and overfit on. We
investigate G-DAUG^C, a novel generative data augmentation method that aims to
achieve more accurate and robust learning in the low-resource setting. Our
approach generates synthetic examples using pretrained language models, and
selects the most informative and diverse set of examples for data augmentation.
In experiments with multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, G-DAUG^C
consistently outperforms existing data augmentation methods based on
back-translation, and establishes a new state-of-the-art on WinoGrande, CODAH,
and CommonsenseQA. Further, in addition to improvements in in-distribution
accuracy, G-DAUG^C-augmented training also enhances out-of-distribution
generalization, showing greater robustness against adversarial or perturbed
examples. Our analysis demonstrates that G-DAUG^C produces a diverse set of
fluent training examples, and that its selection and training approaches are
important for performance. Our findings encourage future research toward
generative data augmentation to enhance both in-distribution learning and
out-of-distribution generalization.


  This is a colloquium style pedagogical introduction to the paradigm of large
extra dimensions. To be published in the Proceedings of the Workshop "Crossing
the boundaries: Gauge dynamics at strong coupling," (May 14 - 17, 2009,
Minneapolis), Eds. M. Peloso and A. Vainshtein, (World Scientific, Singapore,
2009), p. 3.


  Asteroseismology provides a unique opportunity to probe the interiors of
evolved stars and constrain their internal rotation. The correct reproduction
of the core rotation evolution is key to understanding the internal processes
involved in low-mass stars. We explore the efficiency required to reproduce the
behaviour of the transport of angular momentum (AM) in view of asteroseismic
constraints. We computed a series of models and investigated an updated AM
transport by including a time-dependent extra viscosity related to the AMRI. We
compared our predictions to the asteroseismic measurements of the core and
surface rotation of a sample of SGB and RGB stars. We confirm that a
time-dependent additional viscosity is required to reproduce the general
behaviour of the core rotation rate along evolution. We show that it results in
stronger Li and Be depletions for low-mass stars over evolution. We confirm
that predicted Li abundances at the RGB bump by classical models, commonly used
as references, cannot reproduce the Li depletion along the MS and evolved
phases of stellar evolution. We show that the observed amount of Li of stars
less massive than 1Msun leads to a discrepancy between model predictions and
observations at the RGB bump. We show that a semi-parametric model can
reproduce the rotational behaviour along the first phases of evolution well,
with the exception of the sharp transition observed during the SGB phase. This
suggests that two distinct transport processes may be involved. The processes
required to transport chemicals during the MS, and AM until the RGB phase
impact the Li depletion all along the evolutionary duration. A good prediction
of the Li abundance at young phases places strong constraints on the predicted
one at more evolved phases. It also impacts the threshold that defines Li-rich
giant stars, showing that classical models tend to overestimate its value.


  We have combined neutron reflectometry with rheology in order to investigate
the solid boundary of liquids and polymers under shear deformation. Our
approach allows one to apply a controlled stress to a material while resolving
the structural arrangements on the sub nanometer length scale with neutron
reflectivity, off-specular and small angle scattering at the same time. The
specularly reflected neutron intensity of a 20 % by weight solution of the
Pluronic F127 in deuterated water is evaluated. We find pronounced changes in
the near interface structure under applied deformation for surfaces with
different surface energies, which are correlated with changes in the storage
and loss modulus.


  In this paper, we introduce tree varieties as a natural generalization of
products of partial flag varieties. We study orbits of the PGL action on tree
varieties. We characterize tree varieties with finitely many PGL orbits,
generalizing a celebrated theorem of Magyar, Weyman and Zelevinsky. We give
criteria that guarantee that a tree variety has a dense PGL orbit and provide
many examples of tree varieties that do not have dense PGL orbits. We show that
a triple of two-step flag varieties $F(k_1, k_2; n)^3$ has a dense PGL orbit if
and only if $k_1 + k_2 \not= n$.


  Multivariate measurements taken at different spatial locations occur
frequently in practice. Proper analysis of such data needs to consider not only
dependencies on-sight but also dependencies in and in-between variables as a
function of spatial separation. Spatial Blind Source Separation (SBSS) is a
recently developed unsupervised statistical tool that deals with such data by
assuming that the observable data is formed by a linear latent variable model.
In SBSS the latent variable is assumed to be constituted by weakly stationary
random fields which are uncorrelated. Such a model is appealing as further
analysis can be carried out on the marginal distributions of the latent
variables, interpretations are straightforward as the model is assumed to be
linear, and not all components of the latent field might be of interest which
acts as a form of dimension reduction. The weakly stationarity assumption of
SBSS implies that the mean of the data is constant for all sample locations,
which might be too restricting in practical applications. Therefore, an
adaptation of SBSS that uses scatter matrices based on differences was recently
suggested in the literature. In our contribution we formalize these ideas,
suggest an adapted SBSS method and show its usefulness on synthetic and real
data.


  Within the past two decades, Gaussian process regression has been
increasingly used for modeling dynamical systems due to some beneficial
properties such as the bias variance trade-off and the strong connection to
Bayesian mathematics. As data-driven method, a Gaussian process is a powerful
tool for nonlinear function regression without the need of much prior
knowledge. In contrast to most of the other techniques, Gaussian Process
modeling provides not only a mean prediction but also a measure for the model
fidelity. In this article, we give an introduction to Gaussian processes and
its usage in regression tasks of dynamical systems. Try Gaussian process
regression yourself: https://gpr.tbeckers.com


  The paper explores the indecomposable submodule structures of quantum divided
power algebra $\mathcal{A}_q(n)$ defined in \cite{HU} and its truncated objects
$\mathcal{A}_q(n, \bold m)$. An "intertwinedly-lifting" method is established
to prove the indecomposability of a module when its socle is non-simple. The
Loewy filtrations are described for all homogeneous subspaces
$\mathcal{A}^{(s)}_q(n)$ or $\mathcal{A}_q^{(s)}(n, \bold m)$, the Loewy layers
and dimensions are determined. The rigidity of these indecomposable modules is
proved. An interesting combinatorial identity is derived from our realization
model for a class of indecomposable $\mathfrak{u}_q(\mathfrak{sl}_n)$-modules.
Meanwhile, the quantum Grassmann algebra $\Omega_q(n)$ over $\mathcal{A}_q(n)$
is constructed, together with the quantum de Rham complex $(\Omega_q(n),
d^\bullet)$ via defining the appropriate $q$-differentials, and its subcomplex
$(\Omega_q(n,\bold m), d^\bullet)$. For the latter, the corresponding quantum
de Rham cohomology modules are decomposed into the direct sum of some
sign-trivial $\mathfrak{u}_q(\mathfrak{sl}_n)$-modules.


  Given a closed smooth manifold $M$ of even dimension $2n\ge6$ with finite
fundamental group, we show that the classifying space ${\rm BDiff}(M)$ of the
diffeomorphism group of $M$ is of finite type and has finitely generated
homotopy groups in every degree. We also prove a variant of this result for
manifolds with boundary and deduce that the space of smooth embeddings of a
compact submanifold $N\subset M$ of arbitrary codimension into $M$ has finitely
generated higher homotopy groups based at the inclusion, provided the
fundamental group of the complement is finite. As an intermediate result, we
show that the group of homotopy classes of simple homotopy self-equivalences of
a finite CW complex with finite fundamental group is up to finite kernel
commensurable to an arithmetic group.


  In this work, attempt is made to select three good hash functions which
uniformly distribute hash values that permute their internal states and allow
the input bits to generate different output bits. These functions are used in
different levels of hash tables that are coded in Java Programming Language and
a quite number of data records serve as primary data for testing the
performances. The result shows that the two-level hash tables with three
different hash functions give a superior performance over one-level hash table
with two hash functions or zero-level hash table with one function in term of
reducing the conflict keys and quick lookup for a particular element. The
result assists to reduce the complexity of join operation in query language
from O(n2) to O(1) by placing larger query result, if any, in multilevel hash
tables with multiple hash functions and generate shorter query result.


  We prove the analyticity in time for solutions of two parabolic equations in
the whole space, without any decaying or vanishing conditions. One of them
involves solutions to the heat equation of exponential growth of order $2$ on
$\M$. Here $\M$ is $\R^d$ or a complete noncompact manifold with Ricci
curvature bounded from below by a constant. An implication is a sharp
solvability condition for the Cauchy problem of the backward heat equation,
which is a well known ill-posed problem. Another implication is a sharp
criteria for time analyticity of solutions down to the initial time. The other
pertains bounded mild solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations
in the whole space.
  There are many long established analyticity results for the Navier-Stokes
equations. See for example \cite{Ka:1} and \cite{FT:1} for spatial and time
analyticity in certain integral sense, \cite{CN:1} for pointwise space-time
analyticity of 3 dimensional solutions to the Cauchy problem, and also the
pointwise time analyticity results of \cite{Ma:1} and \cite{Gi:1} under zero
boundary condition. Our result seems to be the first general pointwise time
analyticity result for the Cauchy problem for all dimensions, whose proof
involves only real variable method. The proof involves a method of
algebraically manipulating the integral kernel, which appears applicable to
other evolution equations.


  A continuous mass population model with local competition is constructed
where every emigrant colonizes an unpopulated island. The population founded by
an emigrant is modeled as excursion from zero of an one-dimensional diffusion.
With this excursion measure, we construct a process which we call Virgin Island
Model. Furthermore, a necessary and sufficient condition for extinction of the
total population is obtained for finite initial total mass.


  The aim of this note is to extend the results in arXiv:1504.02043 to the case
of approximate harmonic maps. More precisely, we will proved that the singular
strata $S^k(u)$ of an approximate harmonic map are k-rectifiable, and we will
show effect bounds on the quantitative strata. In the process we will simplify
many of the arguments from arXiv:1504.02043, and in particular we produce a new
main covering lemmas which vastly simplifies the older argument.


  Among those nearly incompressible vector fields
${\bf{v}}:{\mathbb{R}}^n\to{\mathbb{R}}^n$ with $|x|\log|x|$ growth at
infinity, we give a pointwise characterization of the ones for which
$\operatorname{curl}{\bf{v}}= D{\bf{v}}-D^t{\bf{v}}$ belongs to $L^\infty$.
When $n=2$ we can go further and describe, still in pointwise terms, the vector
fields ${\bf{v}}:{\mathbb{R}}^2\to{\mathbb{R}}^2$ for which
$|\operatorname{div}{\bf{v}}|+|\operatorname{curl}{\bf{v}}|\in L^\infty$.


  Newtonian spaces generalize first-order Sobolev spaces to abstract metric
measure spaces. In this paper, we study regularity of Newtonian functions based
on quasi-Banach function lattices. Their (weak) quasi-continuity is
established, assuming density of continuous functions. The corresponding
Sobolev capacity is shown to be an outer capacity. Assuming sufficiently high
integrability of upper gradients, Newtonian functions are shown to be
(essentially) bounded and (H\"older) continuous. Particular focus is put on the
borderline case when the degree of integrability equals the "dimension of the
measure". If Lipschitz functions are dense in a Newtonian space on a proper
metric space, then locally Lipschitz functions are proven dense in the
corresponding Newtonian space on open subsets, where no hypotheses (besides
being open) are put on these sets.


  We consider the deformation of a discontinuous group acting on the Euclidean
space by affine transformations.
  A distinguished feature here is that even a `small' deformation of a discrete
subgroup may destroy proper discontinuity of its action. In order to understand
the local structure of the deformation space of discontinuous groups, we
introduce the concepts from a group theoretic perspective, and focus on
`stability' and `local rigidity' of discontinuous groups.
  As a test case, we give an explicit description of the deformation space of
Z^k acting properly discontinuously on R^{k+1} by affine nilpotent
transformations.
  Our method uses an idea of `continuous analogue' and relies on the criterion
of proper actions on nilmanifolds.


  The Kerr solution is considered as a soliton-like background for spinning
elementary particles. Two stringy structures may be found in the Kerr geometry,
one string is real and another one is complex. The main attention in this paper
is paid to the complex string, which is connected with the Lind-Newman
representation of the Kerr metric source as an object with a complex
world-line. In a separate note, one new result is announced concerning the real
string: in the dilaton-axion gravity the Kerr singular ring may be considered
as a heterotic string, the field near the Kerr singularity coincides with the
solution obtained by Sen for heterotic string.


  It is important to study on genes affecting to growing environment of main
crops. Especially the recognition problem of promoter region, which is the
problem to predict whether DNA sequences contain promoter regions or not, is
prior to find abiotic stress-inducible genes. Studies on predicting promoter
sequences in DNA sequences have been studied by traditional pattern matching
methods and machine learning methods in biology and computer science.


  In this paper, we investigate an open research task of generating 3D cartoon
face shapes from single 2D GAN generated human faces and without 3D
supervision, where we can also manipulate the facial expressions of the 3D
shapes. To this end, we discover the semantic meanings of StyleGAN latent
space, such that we are able to produce face images of various expressions,
poses, and lighting by controlling the latent codes. Specifically, we first
finetune the pretrained StyleGAN face model on the cartoon datasets. By feeding
the same latent codes to face and cartoon generation models, we aim to realize
the translation from 2D human face images to cartoon styled avatars. We then
discover semantic directions of the GAN latent space, in an attempt to change
the facial expressions while preserving the original identity. As we do not
have any 3D annotations for cartoon faces, we manipulate the latent codes to
generate images with different poses and lighting, such that we can reconstruct
the 3D cartoon face shapes. We validate the efficacy of our method on three
cartoon datasets qualitatively and quantitatively.


  Strangeness enhancement in heavy-ion collisions is studied at the parton
level by examining the partition of the new sea quarks generated by gluon
conversion into the strange and non-strange sectors. The CTEQ parton
distribution functions are used as a baseline for the quiescent sea before
gluon conversion. By quark counting simple constraints are placed on the hadron
yields in different channels. The experimental values of particle ratios are
fitted to determine the strangeness enhancement factor. A quantitative measure
of Pauli blocking is determined. Energy dependence between SPS and RHIC
energies is well described. No thermal equilibrium or statistical model is
assumed.


  The generating series of the intersection numbers of the stable cohomology
classes on moduli spaces of curves satisfies the string equation and a KdV
hierarchy. Kontsevich's original proof of this result uses a matrix model and
the matrix Airy equation. Witten then recasted Kontsevich's results in terms of
Virasoro algebras, by means of an ingenious mixture of Feynman diagrams
techniques and integrations by parts with some "rather formidable choice" of
the integrands. In this note we show how Witten's formidable choices can be
bartered for standard Feynman diagram manipulations, as soon as one suitably
enlarges the class of Feynman diagrams occurring in the proof.


  The asteroid (3200) Phaethon is known to be the parent body of the Geminids,
although meteor showers are commonly associated with the activity of periodic
comets. What is most peculiar to the asteroid is its comet-like activity in the
ejection of micrometer-sized dust particles at every perihelion passage, while
the activity of the asteroid has never been identified outside the
near-perihelion zone at $0.14~\mathrm{au}$ from the Sun. From the theoretical
point of view, we argue that the activity of the asteroid is well explained by
the electrostatic lofting of micrometer-sized dust particles with the aid of
mobile alkali ions at high temperatures. The mass-loss rates of
micrometer-sized particles from the asteroid in our model is entirely
consistent with the values inferred from visible observations of Phaethon's
dust tail. For millimeter-sized particles, we predict three orders of
magnitudes higher mass-loss rates, which could also account for the total mass
of the Geminid meteoroid stream by the electrostatic lofting mechanism.


  The problem of symmetric private information retrieval (SPIR) from replicated
databases with colluding servers and adversaries is studied. Specifically, the
database comprises $K$ files, which are replicatively stored among $N$ servers.
A user wants to retrieve one file from the database by communicating with the
$N$ servers, without revealing the identity of the desired file to any server.
Furthermore, the user shall learn nothing about the other $K-1$ files. Any $T$
out of $N$ servers may collude, that is, they may communicate their
interactions with the user to guess the identity of the requested file. An
adversary in the system can tap in on or even try to corrupt the communication.
Three types of adversaries are considered: a Byzantine adversary who can
overwrite the transmission of any $B$ servers to the user; a passive
eavesdropper who can tap in on the incoming and outgoing transmissions of any
$E$ servers; and a combination of both -- an adversary who can tap in on a set
of any $E$ nodes, and overwrite the transmission of a set of any $B$ nodes. The
problems of SPIR with colluding servers and the three types of adversaries are
named T-BSPIR, T-ESPIR and T-BESPIR respectively. The capacity of the problem
is defined as the maximum number of information bits of the desired file
retrieved per downloaded bit. We show that the information-theoretical capacity
of T-BSPIR equals $1-\frac{2B+T}{N}$, if the servers share common randomness
(unavailable at the user) with amount at least $\frac{2B+T}{N-2B-T}$ times the
file size. Otherwise, the capacity equals zero. The capacity of T-ESPIR is
proved to equal $1-\frac{\max(T,E)}{N}$, with common randomness at least
$\frac{\max(T,E)}{N-\max(T,E)}$ times the file size. Finally, the capacity of
T-BESPIR is proved to be $1-\frac{2B+\max(T,E)}{N}$, with common randomness at
least $\frac{2B+\max(T,E)}{N-2B-\max(T,E)}$ times the file size.


  In this paper, we introduce and study the $q$-Krull dimension of a
commutative ring via its $q$-operation. A new characterization of $\tau_q$-von
Neumann regular rings is obtained, and some properties of rings $q$-Krull
dimension 0 are studied. Moreover, we characterize the $q$-Krull dimension of
$\tau_q$-Noetherian rings in terms of Krull dimension of some total quotient
rings. Besides, we show that every ring with $w$-Krull dimension $0$ is a \DW\
ring, positively answers an question proposed by H. Kim.


  Universities have been forced to rely on remote educational technology to
facilitate the rapid shift to online learning. In doing so, they acquire new
risks of security vulnerabilities and privacy violations. To help universities
navigate this landscape, we develop a model that describes the actors,
incentives, and risks, informed by surveying 49 educators and 14 administrators
at U.S. universities. Next, we develop a methodology for administrators to
assess security and privacy risks of these products. We then conduct a privacy
and security analysis of 23 popular platforms using a combination of
sociological analyses of privacy policies and 129 state laws, alongside a
technical assessment of platform software. Based on our findings, we develop
recommendations for universities to mitigate the risks to their stakeholders.


  We describe a method to compute the norm on the cotangent space to the moduli
space of Riemann surfaces associated to the Finsler Teichm\"uller metric. Our
method involves computing the periods of abelian double covers and is easy to
implement for Riemann surfaces presented as algebraic curves using existing
tools for approximating period matrices of plane algebraic curves. We
illustrate our method by depicting the unit sphere in the cotangent space to
moduli space at a particular surface of genus zero with five punctures and by
corroborating the proof of a theorem of Royden's for our example.


  We present STAR measurements of various harmonics of three-particle
correlations in $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV Au+Au collisions at RHIC. The quantity
$\langle\cos(m\phi_1+n\phi_2-(m+n)\phi_3)\rangle$ is measured for inclusive
charged particles for different harmonics $m$ and $n$ as a function of
collision centrality, transverse momentum $p_T$ and relative pseudorapidity
$\Delta\eta$. These observables provide detailed information on global event
properties like correlations between event planes of different harmonics and
are particularly sensitive to the expansion dynamics of the matter produced in
the collisions. We compare our measurements to different viscous hydrodynamic
models. We argue that these measurements probe the three-dimensional structure
of the initial state and provide unique ways to constrain the transport
parameters involved in hydrodynamic modeling of heavy-ion collisions.


  We report on the first results of a long-term project to derive distances of
galaxies at cosmological distances by applying the CO-line width-luminosity
relation. We have obtained deep CO-line observations of galaxies at redshifts
up to 29,000 km/s using the Nobeyama 45-m mm-wave Telescope, and some
supplementary data were obtained by using the IRAM 30-m telescope. We have
detected the CO line emission for several galaxies, and used their CO line
widths to estimate the absolute luminosities using the line-width-luminosity
relation. In order to obtain photometric data and inclination correction, we
also performed optical imaging observations of the CO-detected galaxies using
the CFHT 3.6-m telescope at high resolution. The radio and optical data have
been combined to derive the distance moduli and distances of the galaxies, and
Hubble ratios were estimated for these galaxies. We propose that the CO line
width-luminosity relation can be a powerful method to derive distances of
galaxies to redfhift of z = 0.1 and to derive the Hubble ratio in a significant
volume of the universe.
  Key words: Cosmology - Galaxies: general - Distance scale - CO line


  Thin fluid or elastic films and membranes are found in nature and technology,
for instance, as confinements of living cells or in loudspeakers. When applying
a net force, resulting flows in an unbounded two-dimensional incompressible
low-Reynolds-number fluid or displacements in a two-dimensional linearly
elastic solid seem to diverge logarithmically with the distance from the force
center, which has led to some debate. Recently, we have demonstrated that such
divergences cancel when the total (net) force vanishes. Here, we illustrate
that, if a net force is present, the boundaries play a prominent role. Already
a single no-slip boundary regulates the flow and displacement fields and leads
to their decay to leading order inversely in distance from a force center and
the boundary. In other words, it is the boundary that stabilizes the system in
this situation, unlike the three-dimensional case, where an unbounded medium by
itself is able to absorb a net force. We quantify the mobility and
displaceability of an inclusion as a function of the distance from the
boundary, as well as interactions between different inclusions. In the case of
free-slip boundary conditions, a kinked boundary is necessary to achieve
stabilization.


  Large scale imaging surveys will increase the number of galaxy-scale strong
lensing candidates by maybe three orders of magnitudes beyond the number known
today. Finding these rare objects will require picking them out of at least
tens of millions of images and deriving scientific results from them will
require quantifying the efficiency and bias of any search method. To achieve
these objectives automated methods must be developed. Because gravitational
lenses are rare objects reducing false positives will be particularly
important. We present a description and results of an open gravitational lens
finding challenge. Participants were asked to classify 100,000 candidate
objects as to whether they were gravitational lenses or not with the goal of
developing better automated methods for finding lenses in large data sets. A
variety of methods were used including visual inspection, arc and ring finders,
support vector machines (SVM) and convolutional neural networks (CNN). We find
that many of the methods will be easily fast enough to analyse the anticipated
data flow. In test data, several methods are able to identify upwards of half
the lenses after applying some thresholds on the lens characteristics such as
lensed image brightness, size or contrast with the lens galaxy without making a
single false-positive identification. This is significantly better than direct
inspection by humans was able to do. (abridged)


  We propose a convex distributed optimization algorithm for synthesizing
robust controllers for large-scale continuous time systems subject to exogenous
disturbances. Given a large scale system, instead of solving the larger
centralized synthesis task, we decompose the problem into a set of smaller
synthesis problems for the local subsystems with a given interconnection
topology. Hence, the synthesis problem is constrained to the sparsity pattern
dictated by the interconnection topology. To this end, for each subsystem, we
solve a local dissipation inequality and then check a small-gain like condition
for the overall system. To minimize the effect of disturbances, we consider the
$\mathrm{H}_\infty$ synthesis problems. We instantiate the distributed
synthesis method using accelerated alternating direction method of multipliers
(ADMM) with convergence rate $O(\frac{1}{k^2})$ with $k$ being the number of
iterations.


  The lack of reliable methods for identifying descriptors - the sets of
parameters capturing the underlying mechanisms of a materials property - is one
of the key factors hindering efficient materials development. Here, we propose
a systematic approach for discovering descriptors for materials properties,
within the framework of compressed-sensing based dimensionality reduction.
SISSO (sure independence screening and sparsifying operator) tackles immense
and correlated features spaces, and converges to the optimal solution from a
combination of features relevant to the materials' property of interest. In
addition, SISSO gives stable results also with small training sets. The
methodology is benchmarked with the quantitative prediction of the ground-state
enthalpies of octet binary materials (using ab initio data) and applied to the
showcase example of predicting the metal/insulator classification of binaries
(with experimental data). Accurate, predictive models are found in both cases.
For the metal-insulator classification model, the predictive capability are
tested beyond the training data: It rediscovers the available pressure-induced
insulator->metal transitions and it allows for the prediction of yet unknown
transition candidates, ripe for experimental validation. As a step forward with
respect to previous model-identification methods, SISSO can become an effective
tool for automatic materials development.


  We study the effect of including a BGK collisional kernel on the collective
modes of a QCD plasma which has a hard-particle distribution function which is
anisotropic in momentum space. We calculate dispersion relations for both the
stable and unstable modes and show that the addition of hard particle
collisions slows the rate of growth of QCD plasma unstable modes. We also show
that for any anisotropy there is an upper limit on the collisional frequency
beyond which no instabilities exist. Estimating a realistic value for the
collisional frequency for alpha_s ~ 0.2 - 0.4 we find that for the
large-anisotropy case which is relevant for the initial state of matter
generated by free streaming in heavy-ion collisions that the collisional
frequency is below this critical value.


  This is an erratum to an earlier paper, "Generalizations of the
Poincar\'e-Birkhoff theorem." An error in the statement of one of the theorems
is corrected.


  Within the well-known framework of financial portfolio optimization, we
analyze the existing relationships between the condition of arbitrage and the
utility maximization in presence of \emph{insider information}. We assume that,
since the initial time, the information flow is altered by adding the knowledge
of an additional random variable including future information. In this context
we study the utility maximization problem under the logarithmic and the
Constant Relative Risk Aversion (CRRA) utilities, with and without the
restriction of no temporary-bankruptcy. In particular, we show that the value
of the insider information may be bounded while the arbitrage condition holds
and we prove that the insider information does not always imply arbitrage for
the insider by providing an explicit example.


  The effects of the addition of sub-micrometer sized colloidal silica spheres
on the linear and nonlinear rheology of semi-dilute solutions of a viscoelastic
gel are studied. For a 1.4 wt.% solution of the surfactant CTAT, a peak in the
zero shear rate viscosity $\eta_{\circ}$ is observed at approximately equal
weight percents of silica and CTAT. This peak shifts to lower silica
concentrations on increasing either the CTAT concentration or the surface
charge on silica and disappears when the CTAT concentration is increased to
2.6wt%. The increases in $\eta_{\circ}$ and the high frequency plateau modulus
G$_{\circ}$ on the introduction of SiO$_{2}$ are explained by considering the
increasingly entangled wormlike micelles that are formed due to the enhanced
screening of the electrostatic interactions. The observed decrease in the
values of G$_{\circ}$ and $\eta_{\circ}$ at higher concentrations of silica
particles is explained in terms of the formation of surfactant bilayers due to
the adsorption of the positively charged cetyl trimethylammonium to the
negatively charged silica.


  The effects of two hurricanes (Katrina and Wilma) on protected mangroves in
southwest Florida and two hurricanes (Emily and Dean) on protected mangroves in
the Yucatan Peninsula were assessed paired sets of 20m multispectral SPOT and
16-day 500m MODIS images. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and
enhanced vegetation index (EVI) values were calculated to measure mangrove
canopy reflectance using three methods of analysis- 1) mangrove NDVI sample
point extraction, 2) qualitative assessment of 500m MODIS NDVI and EVI time
series, and 3) transects of NDVI differences before and after storm events.
Results show each method effectively captures changes in mangrove canopies
consistent with storm effects. However, the extent of damage to mangroves in
South Florida and Sian Ka'an was highly variable. Hurricanes Wilma and Katrina
produced a large drop in NDVI although NDVI values recovered within a year,
suggesting remarkable resilience. Hurricane Emily apparently increased mangrove
photosynthetic activity owing to the location of landfall relative to the study
area, the size of the wind field and the apparent lack of storm surge.
Comparison of SPOT NDVI and MODIS NDVI values revealed that the changes pre-
and post-storms were consistent at the different scales of observation.


  Participant level meta-analysis across multiple studies increases the sample
size for pooled analyses, thereby improving precision in effect estimates and
enabling subgroup analyses. For analyses involving biomarker measurements as an
exposure of interest, investigators must first calibrate the data to address
measurement variability arising from usage of different laboratories and/or
assays. In practice, the calibration process involves reassaying a random
subset of biospecimens from each study at a central laboratory and fitting
models that relate the study-specific "local" and central laboratory
measurements. Previous work in this area treats the calibration process from
the perspective of measurement error techniques and imputes the estimated
central laboratory value among individuals with only a local laboratory
measurement. In this work, we propose a repeated measures method to calibrate
biomarker measurements pooled from multiple studies with study-specific
calibration subsets. We account for correlation between measurements made on
the same person and between measurements made at the same laboratory. We
demonstrate that the repeated measures approach provides valid inference, and
compare it to existing calibration approaches grounded in measurement error
techniques in an example describing the association between circulating vitamin
D and stroke.


  The Nadler--Zaslow correspondence famously identifies the finite-dimensional
Floer homology groups between Lagrangians in cotangent bundles with the
finite-dimensional Hom spaces between corresponding constructible sheaves. We
generalize this correspondence to incorporate the infinite-dimensional spaces
of morphisms 'at infinity', given on the Floer side by Reeb trajectories (also
known as "wrapping") and on the sheaf side by allowing unbounded infinite rank
sheaves which are categorically compact. When combined with existing sheaf
theoretic computations, our results confirm many new instances of homological
mirror symmetry.
  More precisely, given a real analytic manifold $M$ and a subanalytic
isotropic subset $\Lambda$ of its co-sphere bundle $S^*M$, we show that the
partially wrapped Fukaya category of $T^*M$ stopped at $\Lambda$ is equivalent
to the category of compact objects in the unbounded derived category of sheaves
on $M$ with microsupport inside $\Lambda$. By an embedding trick, we also
deduce a sheaf theoretic description of the wrapped Fukaya category of any
Weinstein sector admitting a stable polarization.


  We compute the two-body one-loop effective action for the matrix theory in
the pp-wave background, and compare it to the effective action on the
supergravity side in the same background. Agreement is found for the effective
actions on both sides. This points to the existence of a supersymmetric
nonrenormalization theorem in the pp-wave background.


  We study the James constant $J(\mathbb{X})$, an important geometric quantity
associated with a normed space $ \mathbb{X} $, and explore its connection with
isosceles orthogonality $ \perp_I. $ The James constant is defined as
$J(\mathbb{X}) := \sup\{\min \{\|x+y\|, \|x-y\|\}: x, y \in \mathbb{X},~
\|x\|=\|y\|=1 \}.$ We prove that if $J(\mathbb{X})$ is attained for unit
vectors $x, y \in \mathbb{X},$ then $x\perp_I y.$ We also show that if
$\mathbb{X}$ is a two-dimensional polyhedral Banach space then $J(\mathbb{X})$
is always attained at an extreme point $z$ of the unit ball of $\mathbb{X},$ so
that $J(\mathbb{X}) = \|z+y\| = \|z-y\|,$ where $ \| y \| = 1 $ and $z\perp_I
y.$ This helps us to explicitly compute the James constant of a two-dimensional
polyhedral Banach space in an efficient way. We further study some related
problems with reference to several other geometric constants in a normed space.


  The mean white dwarf (WD) mass in the Galactic bulge cataclysmic variables
(CVs) was measured by applying the the shock temperature-WD mass correlation of
magnetic cataclysmic variables (mCVs) to the Galactic Bulge X-ray Emission
(GBXE) spectra. However, the resulting mean WD mass is lower than that of the
local CVs. This discrepancy could be explained by the dominating sources in the
GBXE are non-mCVs instead of mCVs. In this work, we conduct an thorough
investigation on the X-ray spectra of local DNe from \suzaku\ archives, and
derive semi-empirical correlations between the shock temperature $T_{\rm max}$,
the flux ratio of \fec\ to \feb\ lines, and WD mass for quiescent, non-magnetic
CVs. By applying these correlations to the GBXE, we derive the average WD mass
of CVs in the Galactic bulge to be $0.81\pm 0.07M_\odot$. This value is
consistent with previous optical measurements of WD mass in local CVs.


  Based on the simple and well understood concept of subfields in a finite
field, the technique called `field reduction' has proved to be a very useful
and powerful tool in finite geometry. In this paper we elaborate on this
technique. Field reduction for projective and polar spaces is formalized and
the links with Desarguesian spreads and linear sets are explained in detail.
Recent results and some fundamental ques- tions about linear sets and scattered
spaces are studied. The relevance of field reduction is illustrated by
discussing applications to blocking sets and semifields.


  We study the impact of two-photon absorption (2PA) and fifth-order nonlinear
loss such as 2PA-induced free-carrier absorption in semiconductors on the
performance of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering devices. We formulate the
equations of motion including effective loss coefficients, whose explicit
expressions are provided for numerical evaluation in any waveguide geometry. We
find that 2PA results in a monotonic, algebraic relationship between
amplification, waveguide length and pump power, whereas fifth-order losses lead
to a non-monotonic relationship. We define a figure of merit for materials and
waveguide designs in the presence of fifth-order losses. From this, we
determine the optimal waveguide length for the case of 2PA alone and upper
bounds for the total Stokes amplification for the case of 2PA as well as
fifth-order losses. The analysis is performed analytically using a small-signal
approximation and is compared to numerical solutions of the full nonlinear
modal equations.


  We place the representation variety in the broader context of abelian and
nonabelian cohomology. We outline the equivalent constructions of the moduli
spaces of flat bundles, of smooth integrable connections, and of holomorphic
integrable connections over a compact Kaehler manifold. In addition, we
describe the moduli space of Higgs bundles and how it relates to the
representation variety. We attempt to avoid abstraction, but strive to present
and clarify the unifying ideas underlying the theory.


  Shape calculus concerns the calculation of directional derivatives of some
quantity of interest, typically expressed as an integral. This article
introduces a type of shape calculus based on localized dilation of boundary
faces through perturbations of a level-set function. The calculus is tailored
for shape optimization problems where a partial differential equation is
numerically solved using a fictitious-domain method. That is, the boundary of a
domain is allowed to cut arbitrarily through a computational mesh, which is
held fixed throughout the computations. Directional derivatives of a volume or
surface integral using the new shape calculus yields purely boundary-supported
expressions, and the involved integrands are only required to be element-wise
smooth. However, due to this low regularity, only one-sided differentiability
can be guaranteed in general. The dilation concept introduced here differs from
the standard approach to shape calculus, which is based on domain
transformations. The use of domain transformations is closely linked the the
use of traditional body-fitted discretization approaches, where the
computational mesh is deformed to conform to the changing domain shape. The
directional derivatives coming out of a shape calculus using deforming meshes
under domain transformations are different then the ones from the
boundary-dilation approach using fixed meshes; the former are not purely
boundary supported but contain information also from the interior.


  It is well known that the kernel of a Toeplitz operator is nearly invariant
under the backward shift $S^*$. This paper shows that kernels of finite-rank
perturbations of Toeplitz operators are nearly $S^*$-invariant with finite
defect. This enables us to apply a recent theorem by
Chalendar--Gallardo--Partington to represent the kernel in terms of backward
shift-invariant subspaces, which we identify in several important cases.