  Network stability and reliability is an absolute requirement for
telecommunications networks. Bonding interface is a technique that can
facilitate the network to serve services that require network stability and
reliability. This interface bonding system combines two interfaces into a
virtual link that is characterized by the use of one IP address. If a frame is
sent from the sender to the receiver, but in the process of sending one of the
links there is an interruption, then the link that is still connected will be
able to maintain the connection so that frame transmission continues, this
working system is called link redundancy. To monitor the condition of the link
whether it is connected or broken, a mechanism called link-monitoring is used.
The monitoring link used in this final project is Media Independent Interface
(MII). The test step is to implement a Bonding Interface network for the use of
video streaming, VoIP, and file transfer. The analysis carried out is a
failover test that uses a connection switching time parameter and a QoS test
with packet loss, delay, jitter, and throughput parameters. The results will
then be compared with a network that does not use a Bonding Interface, which is
a network that is only connected using one link. From the results of the
research conducted is that the Bonding Interface system is able to perform a
redundancy mechanism when one of the links is broken/down to an
active/connected link and the services that are run are not interrupted.
Bonding Interface is also able to provide network stability compared to
networks that do not use a Bonding Interface, this is characterized by a
smaller jitter value than the use of a network with one link.


  Electrical resistivity measurements of detwinned single crystals of the
representative iron arsenide Ba(Fe$_{1-x}$Co$_x$)$_2$As$_2$ reveal a dramatic
in-plane anisotropy associated with the tetragonal-to-orthorhombic structural
transition that precedes the onset of long-range antiferromagnetic order. These
results indicate that the structural transition in this family of compounds is
fundamentally electronic in origin.


  Consider a group $\Gamma$ acting on a formal (Fedosov) deformation
quantization $\mathbb{A}_\hbar(M)$ of a symplectic manifold $(M,\omega)$. This
canonically induces an action of $\Gamma$ by symplectomorphisms on $M$. We
examine the reverse problem of extending group actions by symplectomorphisms to
the deformation quantization. To do this we first define a notion of extension
that does not impose restrictions on the Fedosov connection realizing
$\mathbb{A}_\hbar(M)$ in its gauge equivalence class by considering composition
of pull-back with certain inner automorphisms of sections of the Weyl bundle.
We reformulate the well known sufficient conditions for existence of such
extensions and show by way of example that they are not necessary. We then turn
to the corresponding classification problem of extensions of a given action by
symplectomorphisms. To this end we associate a group $\bar{\mathcal{G}_\nabla}$
to each Fedosov connection $\nabla$ and show that the (non-Abelian) group
cohomology $\mbox{H}^1(\Gamma,\bar{\mathcal{G}_\nabla})$ classifies extensions
up to a natural notion of equivalence. Finally we develop several tools that
allow for computation of $\mbox{H}^1(\Gamma,\bar{\mathcal{G}_\nabla})$ and
apply these to compute $\mbox{H}^1(\Gamma,\bar{\mathcal{G}_\nabla})$ in a range
of examples.


  We study the impact of neutrino magnetic moments on astrophysical neutrinos,
in particular supernova neutrinos and ultra-high energy neutrinos from
extragalactic sources. We show that magnetic moment-induced conversion of
left-handed neutrinos into unobservable right-handed singlet states can
substantially change the flux and flavour composition of these neutrinos at
Earth. Notably, neutrinos from a supernova's neutronisation burst, whose flux
can be predicted with O(10%) accuracy, offer a discovery reach to neutrino
magnetic moments $\sim \text{few} \times 10^{-13} \mu_B$, up to one order of
magnitude below current limits. For high-energy neutrinos from distant sources,
for which no robust flux prediction exists, we show how the flavour composition
at Earth can be used as a handle to establish the presence of non-negligible
magnetic moments, potentially down to $\text{few} \times 10^{-17} \mu_B$ if the
measurement can be performed on neutrinos from a single source. In both cases,
the sensitivity strongly depends on the galactic resp. intergalactic magnetic
field profiles along the line of sight. Therefore, while a discovery is
possible down to very small values of the magnetic moment, the absence of a
discovery does not imply an equally strong limit. We also comment on the
dependence of our results on the right-handed neutrino mass, paying special
attention to the transition from coherent deflection by a classical magnetic
field to incoherent scattering on individual scattering targets. Finally, we
show that a measurement of Standard Model Dirac neutrino magnetic moments, of
order $10^{-19} \mu_B$, could be possible under rather optimistic, but not
completely outrageous, assumptions using flavour ratios of high-energy
astrophysical neutrinos.


  In the paper an efficient semi-analytical approach based on the method of
steps and differential transformation is proposed for numerical approximation
of solutions of retarded logistic models of delayed and neutral type, including
models with several constant delays. Algorithms for both commensurate and
non-commensurate delays are described, applications are shown in examples.
Validity and efficiency of the presented algorithms is compared with
variational iteration method, Adomian decomposition method and polynomial least
squares method numerically. Matlab package DDE23 is used to produce reference
numerical values.


  The Aw-Rascle-Zhang (ARZ) model can be interpreted as a generalization of the
Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) model, possessing a family of fundamental
diagram curves, each of which represents a class of drivers with a different
empty road velocity. A weakness of this approach is that different drivers
possess vastly different densities at which traffic flow stagnates. This
drawback can be overcome by modifying the pressure relation in the ARZ model,
leading to the generalized Aw-Rascle-Zhang (GARZ) model. We present an approach
to determine the parameter functions of the GARZ model from fundamental diagram
measurement data. The predictive accuracy of the resulting data-fitted GARZ
model is compared to other traffic models by means of a three-detector test
setup, employing two types of data: vehicle trajectory data, and sensor data.
This work also considers the extension of the ARZ and the GARZ models to models
with a relaxation term, and conducts an investigation of the optimal relaxation
time.


  Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) aims to acquire meta-knowledge for
quick adaptation to diverse tasks. However, applying these policies in
real-world environments presents a significant challenge in balancing rapid
adaptability with adherence to environmental constraints. Our novel approach,
Constraint Model Agnostic Meta Learning (C-MAML), merges meta learning with
constrained optimization to address this challenge. C-MAML enables rapid and
efficient task adaptation by incorporating task-specific constraints directly
into its meta-algorithm framework during the training phase. This fusion
results in safer initial parameters for learning new tasks. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of C-MAML in simulated locomotion with wheeled robot tasks of
varying complexity, highlighting its practicality and robustness in dynamic
environments.


  Let $\lambda$ and $\kappa$ be cardinal numbers such that $\kappa$ is infinite
and either $2\leq \lambda\leq \kappa$, or $\lambda=2^\kappa$. We prove that
there exists a lattice $L$ with exactly $\lambda$ many congruences, $2^\kappa$
many ideals, but only $\kappa$ many filters. Furthermore, if $\lambda\geq 2$ is
an integer of the form $2^m\cdot 3^n$, then we can choose $L$ to be a modular
lattice generating one of the minimal modular nondistributive congruence
varieties described by Ralph Freese in 1976, and this $L$ is even relatively
complemented for $\lambda=2$. Related to some earlier results of George
Gr\"atzer and the first author, we also prove that if $P$ is a bounded ordered
set (in other words, a bounded poset) with at least two elements, $G$ is a
group, and $\kappa$ is an infinite cardinal such that $\kappa\geq |P|$ and
$\kappa\geq |G|$, then there exists a lattice $L$ of cardinality $\kappa$ such
that (i) the principal congruences of $L$ form an ordered set isomorphic to
$P$, (ii) the automorphism group of $L$ is isomorphic to $G$, (iii) $L$ has
$2^\kappa$ many ideals, but (iv) $L$ has only $\kappa$ many filters.


  We used the OGLE-II and OGLE-III photometry of red giants in the Large
Magellanic Cloud to select and study objects revealing ellipsoidal variability.
We detected 1546 candidates for long period ellipsoidal variables and 121
eclipsing binary systems with clear ellipsoidal modulation. The ellipsoidal red
giants follow a period-luminosity (PL) relationship (sequence E), and the
scatter of the relation is correlated with the amplitude of variability: the
larger the amplitude, the smaller the scatter.
  We note that some of the ellipsoidal candidates exhibit simultaneously OGLE
Small Amplitude Red Giants pulsations. Thus, in some cases the Long Secondary
Period (LSP) phenomenon can be explained by the ellipsoidal modulation.
  We also select about 1600 red giants with distinct LSP, which are not
ellipsoidal variables. We discover that besides the sequence D in the PL
diagram known before, the LSP giants form additional less numerous sequence for
longer periods. We notice that the PL sequence of the ellipsoidal candidates is
a direct continuation of the LSP sequence toward fainter stars, what might
suggest that the LSP phenomenon is related to binarity but there are strong
arguments against such a possibility.
  About 10% of the presented light curves reveal clear deformation by the
eccentricity of the system orbits. The largest estimated eccentricity in our
sample is about 0.4.
  All presented data, including individual BVI observations and finding charts
are available from the OGLE Internet archive.


  This paper aims to disentangle the latent space in cVAE into the spatial
structure and the style code, which are complementary to each other, with one
of them $z_s$ being label relevant and the other $z_u$ irrelevant. The
generator is built by a connected encoder-decoder and a label condition mapping
network. Depending on whether the label is related with the spatial structure,
the output $z_s$ from the condition mapping network is used either as a style
code or a spatial structure code. The encoder provides the label irrelevant
posterior from which $z_u$ is sampled. The decoder employs $z_s$ and $z_u$ in
each layer by adaptive normalization like SPADE or AdaIN. Extensive experiments
on two datasets with different types of labels show the effectiveness of our
method.


  We investigate angular correlations in multi-jet final states at high-energy
colliders and discuss their sensitivity to initial-state showering effects,
including QCD coherence and corrections to collinear ordering.


  It is shown how to derive fractional supersymmetric quantum mechanics of
order k as a superposition of k-1 copies of ordinary supersymmetric quantum
mechanics.


  We study collective excitations in a superfluid neutron gas at zero
temperature within the quasiparticle random phase approximation. The
particle-hole residual interaction is obtained from a Skyrme functional, while
a separable interaction is used in the pairing channel which gives a realistic
density dependence of the pairing gap. In accordance with the Goldstone
theorem, we find an ungapped collective mode (analogous to the
Bogoliubov-Anderson mode). At low momentum, its dispersion relation is
approximately linear and its slope coincides with the hydrodynamic speed of
sound calculated with the Skyrme equation of state. The response functions are
compared with those obtained within the Landau approximation. We also compute
the contribution of the collective mode to the specific heat of the neutron
gas, which is relevant for the thermodynamic properties of the inner crust of
neutron stars.


  A general theory of photon-mediated energy and momentum transfer in N-body
planar systems out of thermal equilibrium is introduced. It is based on the
combination of the scattering theory and the fluctuational-electrodynamics
approach in many-body systems. By making a Landauer-like formulation of the
heat transfer problem, explicit formulas for the energy transmission
coefficients between two distinct slabs as well as the self-coupling
coefficients are derived and expressed in terms of the reflection and
transmission coefficients of the single bodies. We also show how to calculate
local equilibrium temperatures in such systems. An analogous formulation is
introduced to quantify momentum transfer coefficients describing
Casimir-Lifshitz forces out of thermal equilibrium. Forces at thermal
equilibrium are readily obtained as a particular case. As an illustration of
this general theoretical framework, we show on three-body systems how the
presence of a fourth slab can impact equilibrium temperatures in heat-transfer
problems and equilibrium positions resulting from the forces acting on the
system.


  The increasingly complex and rapidly changing global health and
socio-economic landscape requires fundamentally new ways of thinking, acting
and collaborating to solve growing systems challenges. Cross-sectoral
collaborations between governments, businesses, international organizations,
private investors, academia and non-profits are essential for lasting success
in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and securing a
prosperous future for the health and wellbeing of all people. Our aim is to use
data science and innovative technologies to map diverse stakeholders and their
initiatives around SDGs and specific health targets - with particular focus on
SDG 3 (Good Health & Well Being) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals) - to
accelerate cross-sector collaborations. Initially, the mapping tool focuses on
Geneva, Switzerland as the world center of global health diplomacy with over 80
key stakeholders and influencers present. As we develop the next level pilot,
we aim to build on users' interests, with a potential focus on non-communicable
diseases (NCDs) as one of the emerging and most pressing global health issues
that requires new collaborative approaches. Building on this pilot, we can
later expand beyond only SDG 3 to other SDGs.


  Typically the materialization of high energetic transverse partons to
hadronic jets is assumed to occur outside the reaction zone in a relativistic
heavy ion collision. In contrast, a quantum mechanical estimate yields a time
on the order of only a few fm/c for building up the hadronic wavefunction for
jets with typical transverse momenta of pT < 10 GeV as accessible at RHIC
facilities. The role of possible elastic or inelastic collisions of these high
pT particles with the bulk of hadrons inside the fireball is addressed by means
of an opacity expansion in the number of collisions. This analysis shows that
the hadronic final state interactions can in principle account for the
modification of the (moderate) high pT spectrum observed for central collisions
at RHIC.


  Recent studies have shown that a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN)
pretrained on a large image dataset can be used as a universal image
descriptor, and that doing so leads to impressive performance for a variety of
image classification tasks. Most of these studies adopt activations from a
single DCNN layer, usually the fully-connected layer, as the image
representation. In this paper, we proposed a novel way to extract image
representations from two consecutive convolutional layers: one layer is
utilized for local feature extraction and the other serves as guidance to pool
the extracted features. By taking different viewpoints of convolutional layers,
we further develop two schemes to realize this idea. The first one directly
uses convolutional layers from a DCNN. The second one applies the pretrained
CNN on densely sampled image regions and treats the fully-connected activations
of each image region as convolutional feature activations. We then train
another convolutional layer on top of that as the pooling-guidance
convolutional layer. By applying our method to three popular visual
classification tasks, we find our first scheme tends to perform better on the
applications which need strong discrimination on subtle object patterns within
small regions while the latter excels in the cases that require discrimination
on category-level patterns. Overall, the proposed method achieves superior
performance over existing ways of extracting image representations from a DCNN.


  Nominalization is a highly productive phenomena in most languages. The
process of nominalization ejects a verb from its syntactic role into a nominal
position. The original verb is often replaced by a semantically emptied support
verb (e.g., "make a proposal"). The choice of a support verb for a given
nominalization is unpredictable, causing a problem for language learners as
well as for natural language processing systems. We present here a method of
discovering support verbs from an untagged corpus via low-level syntactic
processing and comparison of arguments attached to verbal forms and potential
nominalized forms. The result of the process is a list of potential support
verbs for the nominalized form of a given predicate.


  Tone mapping operators and multi-exposure fusion methods allow us to enjoy
the informative contents of high dynamic range (HDR) images with standard
dynamic range devices, but also introduce distortions into HDR contents.
Therefore methods are needed to evaluate tone-mapped image quality. Due to the
complexity of possible distortions in a tone-mapped image, information from
different scales and different levels should be considered when predicting
tone-mapped image quality. So we propose a new no-reference method of
tone-mapped image quality assessment based on multi-scale and multi-layer
features that are extracted from a pre-trained deep convolutional neural
network model. After being aggregated, the extracted features are mapped to
quality predictions by regression. The proposed method is tested on the largest
public database for TMIQA and compared to existing no-reference methods. The
experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better performance.


  Gravitational wave searches for continuous-wave signals from neutron stars
are especially challenging when the star's spin frequency is unknown a priori
from electromagnetic observations and wanders stochastically under the action
of internal (e.g. superfluid or magnetospheric) or external (e.g. accretion)
torques. It is shown that frequency tracking by hidden Markov model (HMM)
methods can be combined with existing maximum likelihood coherent matched
filters like the F-statistic to surmount some of the challenges raised by spin
wandering. Specifically it is found that, for an isolated, biaxial rotor whose
spin frequency walks randomly, HMM tracking of the F-statistic output from
coherent segments with duration T_drift = 10d over a total observation time of
T_obs = 1yr can detect signals with wave strains h0 > 2e-26 at a noise level
characteristic of the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave
Observatory (Advanced LIGO). For a biaxial rotor with randomly walking spin in
a binary orbit, whose orbital period and semi-major axis are known
approximately from electromagnetic observations, HMM tracking of the
Bessel-weighted F-statistic output can detect signals with h0 > 8e-26. An
efficient, recursive, HMM solver based on the Viterbi algorithm is
demonstrated, which requires ~10^3 CPU-hours for a typical, broadband (0.5-kHz)
search for the low-mass X-ray binary Scorpius X-1, including generation of the
relevant F-statistic input. In a "realistic" observational scenario, Viterbi
tracking successfully detects 41 out of 50 synthetic signals without spin
wandering in Stage I of the Scorpius X-1 Mock Data Challenge convened by the
LIGO Scientific Collaboration down to a wave strain of h0 = 1.1e-25, recovering
the frequency with a root-mean-square accuracy of <= 4.3e-3 Hz.


  The Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) experiment is an
array of two 17-meter telescopes located in the Canary Island of La Palma that
observes the very-high energy (VHE) gamma-ray sky in stereoscopic mode since
2009. MAGIC is distinguished by its low-energy threshold of approximately 50
GeV, which grants the system a unique potential in the study of distant
extragalactic sources whose gamma-ray emission is significantly attenuated due
to absorption by the extragalactic background light (EBL). The observation of
non-thermal gamma rays in the GeV-TeV range from extragalactic sources is a
characteristic signature of their relativistic nature and therefore
fundamentally important for our understanding of the physics of these objects.
Since the beginning of its stereo operation, MAGIC has observed a large number
of active galactic nuclei (AGN) of different classes, including several blazars
and distant quasars. In this paper we will review some of the most important
results of these observations.


  The promising performance increase offered by quantum computing has led to
the idea of applying it to neural networks. Studies in this regard can be
divided into two main categories: simulating quantum neural networks with the
standard quantum circuit model, and implementing them based on hardware.
However, the ability to capture the non-linear behavior in neural networks
using a computation process that usually involves linear quantum mechanics
principles remains a major challenge in both categories. In this study, a
hardware-efficient quantum neural network operating as an open quantum system
is proposed, which presents non-linear behaviour. The model's compatibility
with learning processes is tested through the obtained analytical results. In
other words, we show that this dissipative model based on repeated
interactions, which allows for easy parametrization of input quantum
information, exhibits differentiable, non-linear activation functions.


  The known host galaxies of short-hard gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) to date are
characterized by low to moderate star-formation rates and a broad range of
stellar masses. In this paper, we positionally associate the recent
unambiguously short-hard Swift GRB 100206A with a disk galaxy at redshift
z=0.4068 that is rapidly forming stars at a rate of ~30 M_sun/yr, almost an
order of magnitude higher than any previously identified short GRB host. Using
photometry from Gemini, Keck, PAIRITEL, and WISE, we show that the galaxy is
very red (g-K = 4.3 AB mag), heavily obscured (A_V ~ 2 mag), and has the
highest metallicity of any GRB host to date (12 + log[O/H]_KD02 = 9.2): it is a
classical luminous infrared galaxy (LIRG), with L_IR ~ 4 x 10^11 L_sun. While
these properties could be interpreted to support an association of this GRB
with very recent star formation, modeling of the broadband spectral energy
distribution also indicates that a substantial stellar mass of mostly older
stars is present. The current specific star-formation rate is modest (specific
SFR ~ 0.5 Gyr^-1), the current star-formation rate is not substantially
elevated above its long-term average, and the host morphology shows no sign of
recent merger activity. Our observations are therefore equally consistent with
an older progenitor, similar to what is inferred for other short-hard GRBs.
Given the precedent established by previous short GRB hosts and the significant
fraction of the Universe's stellar mass in LIRG-like systems at z >~0.3, an
older progenitor represents the most likely origin of this event.


  The extensive use of online social media has highlighted the importance of
privacy in the digital space. As more scientists analyse the data created in
these platforms, privacy concerns have extended to data usage within the
academia. Although text analysis is a well documented topic in academic
literature with a multitude of applications, ensuring privacy of user-generated
content has been overlooked. Most sentiment analysis methods require emotion
labels, which can be obtained through crowdsourcing, where non-expert
individuals contribute to scientific tasks. The text itself has to be exposed
to third parties in order to be labelled. In an effort to reduce the exposure
of online users' information, we propose a privacy preserving text labelling
method for varying applications, based in crowdsourcing. We transform text with
different levels of privacy, and analyse the effectiveness of the
transformation with regards to label correlation and consistency. Our results
suggest that privacy can be implemented in labelling, retaining the
annotational diversity and subjectivity of traditional labelling.


  In this thesis, the synthesis of correct-by-construction controllers for
robots assisting in Search and Rescue (SAR) is considered. In recent years, the
development of robots assisting in disaster mitigation in urban environments
has been actively encouraged, since robots can be deployed in dangerous and
hazardous areas where human SAR operations would not be possible.
  In order to meet the reliability requirements in SAR, the specifications of
the robots are stated in Linear Temporal Logic and synthesized into finite
state machines that can be executed as controllers. The resulting controllers
are purely discrete and maintain an ongoing interaction with their environment
by changing their internal state according to the inputs they receive from
sensors or other robots.
  Since SAR robots have to cooperate in order to complete the required tasks,
the synthesis of controllers that together achieve a common goal is considered.
This distributed synthesis problem is provably undecidable, hence it cannot be
solved in full generality, but a set of design principles is introduced in
order to develop specialized synthesizable specifications. In particular,
communication and cooperation are resolved by introducing a verified
standardized communication protocol and preempting negotiations between robots.
  The robots move on a graph on which we consider the search for stationary and
moving targets. Searching for moving targets is cast into a game of cops and
robbers, and specifications implementing a winning strategy are developed so
that the number of robots required is minimized.
  The viability of the methods is demonstrated by synthesizing controllers for
robots performing search and rescue for stationary targets and searching for
moving targets. It is shown that the controllers are guaranteed to achieve the
common goal of finding and rescuing the targets.


  This paper is contributed to study the Cauchy problem of a new integrable
two-component system with peaked soliton (peakon) and weak kink solutions. We
first establish the local well-posedness result for the Cauchy problem in Besov
spaces, and then present a precise blow-up scenario and a new blow-up result
for strong solutions to the system.


  We report the results of self-gravitating simulations of spiral galaxies,
modeled by stellar and gaseous components, developed to investigate in
particular the role of dissipation in the evolution of galaxy disks. The gas
disk is simulated by the Beam-Scheme method, where it is considered as a
self-gravitating fluid. The results suggest that the gravitational coupling
between the stars and gas plays a fundamental role in the formation and
dissolution of stellar bars, depending on the gaseous mass concentration and on
the degree of dissipation. In addition we remark that initially concentrated
gas disks can be unstable to the one-armed (m=1) spiral perturbations, which
may explain the lopsided features observed in the gas distribution of the
late-type isolated galaxies. The development of the m=1 feature slows down the
radial gas flows towards the center, since the large-scale gravity torques are
then much weaker.


  Problem of reliable democratic governance is critical for survival of any
community, and it will be critical for communities powered with Artificial
Intelligence (AI) systems upon developments of the latter. Apparently, it will
be getting more and more critical because of increasing speeds and scales of
electronic communications and decreasing latencies in system responses. In
order to address this need, we present design and implementation of a
reputation system supporting "liquid democracy" principle. The system is based
on "weighted liquid rank" algorithm employing different sorts of explicit and
implicit ratings being exchanged by members of the society as well as implicit
assessments of of the members based on measures of their activity in the
society. The system is evaluated against live social network data with help of
simulation modelling for an online marketplace case.


  Machine learning based systems are reaching society at large and in many
aspects of everyday life. This phenomenon has been accompanied by concerns
about the ethical issues that may arise from the adoption of these
technologies. ML fairness is a recently established area of machine learning
that studies how to ensure that biases in the data and model inaccuracies do
not lead to models that treat individuals unfavorably on the basis of
characteristics such as e.g. race, gender, disabilities, and sexual or
political orientation. In this manuscript, we discuss some of the limitations
present in the current reasoning about fairness and in methods that deal with
it, and describe some work done by the authors to address them. More
specifically, we show how causal Bayesian networks can play an important role
to reason about and deal with fairness, especially in complex unfairness
scenarios. We describe how optimal transport theory can be used to develop
methods that impose constraints on the full shapes of distributions
corresponding to different sensitive attributes, overcoming the limitation of
most approaches that approximate fairness desiderata by imposing constraints on
the lower order moments or other functions of those distributions. We present a
unified framework that encompasses methods that can deal with different
settings and fairness criteria, and that enjoys strong theoretical guarantees.
We introduce an approach to learn fair representations that can generalize to
unseen tasks. Finally, we describe a technique that accounts for legal
restrictions about the use of sensitive attributes.


  The SNO+ detector operated initially as a water Cherenkov detector. The
implementation of a sealed covergas system midway through water data taking
resulted in a significant reduction in the activity of $^{222}$Rn daughters in
the detector and allowed the lowest background to the solar electron scattering
signal above 5 MeV achieved to date. This paper reports an updated SNO+ water
phase $^8$B solar neutrino analysis with a total livetime of 282.4 days and an
analysis threshold of 3.5 MeV. The $^8$B solar neutrino flux is found to be
$\left(2.32^{+0.18}_{-0.17}\text{(stat.)}^{+0.07}_{-0.05}\text{(syst.)}\right)\times10^{6}$
cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ assuming no neutrino oscillations, or
$\left(5.36^{+0.41}_{-0.39}\text{(stat.)}^{+0.17}_{-0.16}\text{(syst.)}
\right)\times10^{6}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ assuming standard neutrino oscillation
parameters, in good agreement with both previous measurements and Standard
Solar Model Calculations. The electron recoil spectrum is presented above 3.5
MeV.


  Unraveling the interplay of excitation and inhibition within
rhythm-generating networks remains a fundamental issue in neuroscience. We use
a biophysical model to investigate the different roles of local and long-range
inhibition in the respiratory network, a key component of which is the
pre-B\"otzinger complex inspiratory microcircuit. Increasing inhibition within
the microcircuit results in a limited number of out-of-phase neurons before
rhythmicity and synchrony degenerate. Thus, unstructured local inhibition is
destabilizing and cannot support the generation of more than one rhythm. A
two-phase rhythm requires restructuring the network into two microcircuits
coupled by long-range inhibition in the manner of a half-center. In this
context, inhibition leads to greater stability of the two out-of-phase rhythms.
We support our computational results with in vitro recordings from mouse
pre-B\"otzinger complex. Partial excitation block leads to increased rhythmic
variability, but this recovers following blockade of inhibition. Our results
support the idea that local inhibition in the pre-B\"otzinger complex is
present to allow for descending control of synchrony or robustness to adverse
conditions like hypoxia. We conclude that the balance of inhibition and
excitation determines the stability of rhythmogenesis, but with opposite roles
within and between areas. These different inhibitory roles may apply to a
variety of rhythmic behaviors that emerge in widespread pattern generating
circuits of the nervous system.


  Boundary dependent corrections to the spin energy eigenvalues of an electron
in a weak magnetic field and confined by a harmonic trapping potential are
investigated. The electromagnetic field is quantized through a normal mode
expansion obeying the Maxwell boundary conditions at the material surface. We
couple the electron to this photon field and a classical magnetic field in the
Dirac equation, to which we apply the unitary Foldy-Wouthuysen transformation
in order to generate a non-relativistic approximation of the Hamiltonian to the
desired order. We obtain the Schr\"odinger eigenstates of an electron subject
to double confinement by a harmonic potential and a classical magnetic field,
and then use these within second-order perturbation theory to calculate the
spin energy shift that is attributable to the surface-modified quantized field.
We find that a pole at the eigenfrequency of a set of generalized Landau
transitions gives dominant oscillatory contributions to the energy shift in the
limit of tight harmonic confinement in a weak magnetic field, which also make
the energy shift preferable to the magnetic moment for a physically meaningful
interpretation.


  In this work, we propose an automatic evaluation and comparison of the
browsing behavior of Wikipedia readers that can be applied to any language
editions of Wikipedia. As an example, we focus on English, French, and Russian
languages during the last four months of 2018. The proposed method has three
steps. Firstly, it extracts the most trending articles over a chosen period of
time. Secondly, it performs a semi-supervised topic extraction and thirdly, it
compares topics across languages. The automated processing works with the data
that combines Wikipedia's graph of hyperlinks, pageview statistics and
summaries of the pages.
  The results show that people share a common interest and curiosity for
entertainment, e.g. movies, music, sports independently of their language.
Differences appear in topics related to local events or about cultural
particularities. Interactive visualizations showing clusters of trending pages
in each language edition are available online
https://wiki-insights.epfl.ch/wikitrends


  The reweighted random series techniques provide finite-dimensional
approximations to the quantum density matrix of a physical system that have
fast asymptotic convergence. We study two special reweighted techniques that
are based upon the Levy-Ciesielski and Wiener-Fourier series, respectively. In
agreement with the theoretical predictions, we demonstrate by numerical
examples that the asymptotic convergence of the two reweighted methods is cubic
for smooth enough potentials. For each reweighted technique, we propose some
minimalist quadrature techniques for the computation of the path averages.
These quadrature techniques are designed to preserve the asymptotic convergence
of the original methods.


  We study the estimation of a planted signal hidden in a recently introduced
nested matrix-tensor model, which is an extension of the classical spiked
rank-one tensor model, motivated by multi-view clustering. Prior work has
theoretically examined the performance of a tensor-based approach, which relies
on finding a best rank-one approximation, a problem known to be computationally
hard. A tractable alternative approach consists in computing instead the best
rank-one (matrix) approximation of an unfolding of the observed tensor data,
but its performance was hitherto unknown. We quantify here the performance gap
between these two approaches, in particular by deriving the precise algorithmic
threshold of the unfolding approach and demonstrating that it exhibits a
BBP-type transition behavior. This work is therefore in line with recent
contributions which deepen our understanding of why tensor-based methods
surpass matrix-based methods in handling structured tensor data.


  The quark-meson coupling model for a nucleon is considered. The model
describes a nucleon as an MIT bag, in which quarks are coupled to scalar and
vector mesons. A set of coupled equations for the quark and the meson fields
are obtained and are solved in a self-consistent way. It is shown that the mass
of a nucleon as a dressed MIT bag interacting with sigma- and omega-meson
fields significantly differs from the mass of a free MIT bag. A few sets of
model parameters are obtained so that the mass of a dressed MIT bag becomes the
nucleon mass. The results of our calculations imply that the self-energy of the
bag in the quark-meson coupling model is significant and needs to be considered
in doing the nuclear matter calculations.


  We give a systematic exposition of memory-length algorithms for solving
equations in noncommutative groups. This exposition clarifies some points
untouched in earlier expositions. We then focus on the main ingredient in these
attacks: Length functions.
  After a self-contained introduction to Garside groups, we describe length
functions induced by the greedy normal form and by the rational normal form in
these groups, and compare their worst-case performances.
  Our main concern is Artin's braid groups, with their two known Garside
presentations, due to Artin and due to Birman-Ko-Lee (BKL). We show that in
$B_3$ equipped with the BKL presentation, the (efficiently computable) rational
normal form of each element is a geodesic, i.e., is a representative of minimal
length for that element. (For Artin's presentation of $B_3$, Berger supplied in
1994 a method to obtain geodesic representatives in $B_3$.)
  For an arbitrary number of strands, finding the geodesic length of an element
is NP-hard, by a 1991 result of by Paterson and Razborov. We show that a good
estimation of the geodesic length of a braid in Artin's presentation is
measuring the length of its rational form in the \emph{BKL} presentation. This
is proved theoretically for the worst case, and experimental evidence is
provided for the generic case.


  A comparative study of entropy dynamics as an indicator of physical behavior
in an open two-state system with balanced gain and loss is presented. We
distinguish the perspective taken in utilizing the conventional framework of
Hermitian-adjoint states from an approach that is based on biorthogonal-adjoint
states and a third case based on an isospectral mapping. In this it is
demonstrated that their differences are rooted in the treatment of the
environmental coupling mode. For unbroken $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry of the
system, a notable characteristic feature of the perspective taken is the
presence or absence of purity oscillations, with an associated entropy revival.
The description of the system is then continued from its
$\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric pseudo-Hermitian phase into the regime of
spontaneously broken symmetry, in the latter two approaches through a
non-analytic operator-based continuation, yielding a Lindblad master equation
based on the $\mathcal{PT}$ charge operator $\mathcal{C}$. This phase
transition indicates a general connection between the pseudo-Hermitian
closed-system and the Lindbladian open-system formalism through a spontaneous
breakdown of the underlying physical reflection symmetry.


  We analyze the physics of spin-3 Bose-Einstein condensates, and in particular
the new physics expected in on-going experiments with condensates of Chromium
atoms. We first discuss the ground-state properties, which, depending on still
unknown Chromium parameters, and for low magnetic fields can present various
types of phases. We also discuss the spinor-dynamics in Chromium spinor
condensates, which present significant qualitative differences when compared to
other spinor condensates. In particular, dipole-induced spin relaxation may
lead for low magnetic fields to transfer of spin into angular momentum similar
to the well-known Einstein-de Haas effect. Additionally, a rapid large
transference of population between distant magnetic states becomes also
possible.


  Our research aimed to present the design and evaluation of a mixed-initiative
system that aids the user in handling complex datasets and dense visualization
systems. We attempted to demonstrate this system with two trials of an online
between-groups, two-by-two study, measuring the effects of this
mixed-initiative system on user interactions and system usability. However, due
to flaws in the interface design and the expectations that we put on users, we
were unable to show that the adaptive system had an impact on user interactions
or system usability. In this paper, we discuss the unexpected findings that we
found from our "failed" experiments and examine how we can learn from our
failures to improve further research.


  A key challenge of the collaborative filtering (CF) information filtering is
how to obtain the reliable and accurate results with the help of peers'
recommendation. Since the similarities from small-degree users to large-degree
users would be larger than the ones opposite direction, the large-degree users'
selections are recommended extensively by the traditional second-order CF
algorithms. By considering the users' similarity direction and the second-order
correlations to depress the influence of mainstream preferences, we present the
directed second-order CF (HDCF) algorithm specifically to address the challenge
of accuracy and diversity of the CF algorithm. The numerical results for two
benchmark data sets, MovieLens and Netflix, show that the accuracy of the new
algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art CF algorithms. Comparing with the CF
algorithm based on random-walks proposed in the Ref.7, the average ranking
score could reach 0.0767 and 0.0402, which is enhanced by 27.3\% and 19.1\% for
MovieLens and Netflix respectively. In addition, the diversity, precision and
recall are also enhanced greatly. Without relying on any context-specific
information, tuning the similarity direction of CF algorithms could obtain
accurate and diverse recommendations. This work suggests that the user
similarity direction is an important factor to improve the personalized
recommendation performance.


  The correlation between the directions of optically-detected AGNs within 75
Mpc and the arrival directions of cosmic rays above 57 EeV detected by the
Auger collaboration up to August 2007 is examined using uniform-exposure plots
and a form of right ascension resonance which does not require choice of an
association window radius. Using the latter, the chance of accidental
correlation is found to be well below 1 in 10^5 even without using 3.2 degree
windows; the correlation with FRI-like radio galaxies within 75 Mpc, listed by
Nagar & Matulich (which are in AGN clusters), is separately just as
significant; and a correlation can also be found in other data at a lower
energy. Cen A is currently inactive at this energy, as more distant radio
galaxies are so prominent. The efficacy of a 57 EeV cut to select this
revelatory (proton) sample of the Auger data may be almost accidental and not
robust. The cosmic rays in the Auger sample seem to be scattered by ~3-4
degrees en route, from about 50 Mpc, and in one relatively well probed sky
region there may be a 4 degree systematic deflection in a Bz component of the
magnetic field in the galactic halo. The sources appear to be mostly within 120
Mpc. This is compatible with a GZK survival horizon, but only if (a) the Auger
energies are underestimated by ~25% and (b) the sudden fall in the energy
spectrum is not simply a GZK effect but essentially reflects an energy cut-off
in the sources.


  The four LEP collaborations, ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL, have searched for
the neutral Higgs bosons which are predicted by the Minimal Supersymmetric
Standard Model (MSSM). The data of the four collaborations are statistically
combined and examined for their consistency with the background hypothesis and
with a possible Higgs boson signal. The combined LEP data show no significant
excess of events which would indicate the production of Higgs bosons. The
search results are used to set upper bounds on the cross-sections of various
Higgs-like event topologies. The results are interpreted within the MSSM in a
number of "benchmark" models, including CP-conserving and CP-violating
scenarios. These interpretations lead in all cases to large exclusions in the
MSSM parameter space. Absolute limits are set on the parameter tanb and, in
some scenarios, on the masses of neutral Higgs bosons.


  Kadath is a library that implements spectral methods in a very modular
manner. It is designed to solve a wide class of problems that arise in the
context of theoretical physics. Several types of coordinates are implemented
and additional geometries can be easily encoded. Partial differential equations
of various types are discretized by means of spectral methods. The resulting
system is solved using a Newton-Raphson iteration. Doing so, Kadath is able to
deal with strongly non-linear situations. The algorithms are validated by
applying the library to four different problems of contemporary physics, in the
fields of gauge field theory and general relativity


  Mammalian tissues contain networks and ordered arrays of collagen fibrils
originating from the periodic self-assembly of helical 300 nm long
tropocollagen complexes. The fibril radius is typically between 25 to 250 nm,
and tropocollagen at the surface appears to exhibit a characteristic
twist-angle with respect to the fibril axis. Similar fibril radii and
twist-angles at the surface are observed in vitro, suggesting that these
features are controlled by a similar self-assembly process. In this work, we
propose a physical mechanism of equilibrium radius control for collagen fibrils
based on a radially varying double-twist alignment of tropocollagen within a
collagen fibril. The free-energy of alignment is similar to that of liquid
crystalline blue phases, and we employ an analytic Euler-Lagrange and numerical
free energy minimization to determine the twist-angle between the molecular
axis and the fibril axis along the radial direction. Competition between the
different elastic energy components, together with a surface energy, determines
the equilibrium radius and twist-angle at the fibril surface. A simplified
model with a twist-angle that is linear with radius is a reasonable
approximation in some parameter regimes, and explains a power-law dependence of
radius and twist-angle at the surface as parameters are varied. Fibril radius
and twist-angle at the surface corresponding to an equilibrium free-energy
minimum are consistent with existing experimental measurements of collagen
fibrils. Remarkably, in the experimental regime, all of our model parameters
are important for controlling equilibrium structural parameters of collagen
fibrils.


  Binary stars that are on close orbits around massive black holes (MBH) such
as Sgr A* in the center of the Milky Way are liable to undergo tidal disruption
and eject a hypervelocity star. We study the interaction between such a MBH and
circular binaries for general binary orientations and penetration depths (i.e.
binaries penetrate into the tidal radius around the BH). We show that for very
deep penetrators, all binaries are disrupted when the binary rotation axis is
roughly oriented toward the BH or it is in the opposite direction. The
surviving chance becomes significant when the angle between the binary rotation
axis and the BH direction is between \pi /4 and 3 \pi /4. The surviving chance
is as high as $\sim$ 20$\%$ when the binary rotation axis is perpendicular to
the BH direction. The angular dependence is opposite for very shallow
penetrators where coplanar prograde orbits have the lowest surviving chance (or
equivalently most vulnerable). We provide numerical fits to the disruption
probability and energy gain at the the BH encounter as a function of the
penetration depth. The latter can be simply rescaled in terms of binary masses,
their initial separation and the binary-to-BH mass ratio to evaluate the
ejection velocity of a binary members in various systems. We also investigate
the disruption of coplanar, eccentric binaries by a MBH. It is shown that for
highly eccentric binaries retrograde orbits have a significantly increased
disruption probability and ejection velocities compared to the circular
binaries.


  The electron-to-nucleon ratio or electron fraction is a key parameter in many
astrophysical studies. Its value is determined by weak-interaction rates that
are based on theoretical calculations subject to several nuclear physics
uncertainties. Consequently, it is important to have a model independent way of
constraining the electron fraction value in different astrophysical
environments. Here we show that nuclear statistical equilibrium combined with
beta equilibrium can provide such a constraint. We test the validity of this
approximation in presupernova models and give lower limits for the electron
fraction in type Ia supernova and accretion-induced collapse.


  The structure of $^{70}$Ge has been studied through in-beam gamma ray
spectroscopy. A new band structure is identified that leads to forking of the
ground-state band into two excited bands. Band structures have been
investigated using the microscopic triaxial projected shell model approach. The
observed forking is demonstrated to result from almost simultaneous band
crossing of the two neutron aligned and the \gamma-band built on this
two-quasiparticle configuration with the ground-state band.


  Understanding the mechanisms underlying ion channel function from the
atomic-scale requires accurate ab initio modelling as well as careful
experiments. Here, we present a density functional theory (DFT) study of the
ion channel gramicidin A, whose inner pore conducts only monovalent cations and
whose conductance has been shown to depend on the side chains of the amino
acids in the channel. We investigate the ground-state geometry and electronic
properties of the channel in vacuum, focusing on their dependence on the side
chains of the amino acids. We find that the side chains affect the ground state
geometry, while the electrostatic potential of the pore is independent of the
side chains. This study is also in preparation for a full, linear scaling DFT
study of gramicidin A in a lipid bilayer with surrounding water. We demonstrate
that linear scaling DFT methods can accurately model the system with reasonable
computational cost. Linear scaling DFT allows ab initio calculations with
10,000 to 100,000 atoms and beyond, and will be an important new tool for
biomolecular simulations.


  This paper provides an overview of the various projects carried out within
ISO committee TC 37/SC 4 dealing with the management of language (digital)
resources. On the basis of the technical experience gained in the committee and
the wider standardization landscape the paper identifies some possible trends
for the future.


  In this paper we study some frames associated to an $R$-module $M$. We define
semiprimitive submodules and we prove that they form an spatial frame
canonically isomorphic to the topology of $Max(M)$. We characterize the
soberness of $Max(M)$ in terms of the point space of that frame. Beside of
this, we study the regularity of an spatial frame associated to $M$ given by
annihilator conditions.


  A LMTO implementation of Aversa and Sipe's length-gauge formalism for
calculating the full frequency dependent second-harmonic generation in the
independent particle approximation is presented. It is applied to GaAs, GaP,
3C-SiC, c-BN and wurtzite and zincblende GaN and AlN. The use of the scissor's
operator for correcting LDA errors is discussed and compared to an alternative
approach in which the Hamiltonian is corrected. The latter is found to be
superior. Decomposition in omega and 2 omega resonances and in intra- and
inter-band contributions and in specific band-to-band contributions are
presented.


  We investigate the nature of trions, pairing and quantum phase transitions in
one-dimensional strongly attractive three-component ultracold fermions in
external fields. Exact results for the groundstate energy, critical fields,
magnetization and phase diagrams are obtained analytically from the Bethe
ansatz solutions. Driven by Zeeman splitting, the system shows exotic phases of
trions, bound pairs, a normal Fermi liquid and four mixtures of these states.
Particularly, a smooth phase transition from a trionic phase into a pairing
phase occurs as the highest hyperfine level separates from the two lower energy
levels. In contrast, there is a smooth phase transition from the trionic phase
into a normal Fermi liquid as the lowest level separates from the two higher
levels.


  The quantum Zeno effect reveals that the continuous observation of a quantum
system can result in significant alterations to its evolution. Here, we present
a method for establishing polarization entanglement between two initially
unentangled photons in coupled waveguides via the quantum Zeno effect. We
support our analytical investigation with numerical simulations of the
underlying Schrodinger equation describing the system. Further, we extend our
technique to three coupled waveguides in a planar configuration and determine
the parameter regime required to generate three-qubit W-states. Our findings
offer a powerful quantum state engineering approach for photonic quantum
information technologies.


  In this paper we ask whether one can take the limit of multiple SLE as the
number of slits goes to infinity. In the special case of $n$ slits that connect
$n$ points of the boundary to one fixed point, one can take the limit of the
Loewner equation that describes the growth of those slits in a simultaneous
way. In this case, the limit is a deterministic Loewner equation whose vector
field is determined by a complex Burgers equation.


  Taurids are an extensive stream of particles produced by comet 2P/Encke,
which can be observed mainly in October and November as a series of meteor
showers rich in bright fireballs. Several near-Earth asteroids have also been
linked with the meteoroid complex, and recently the orbits of two carbonaceous
meteorites were proposed to be related to the stream, raising interesting
questions about the origin of the complex and the composition of 2P/Encke. Our
aim is to investigate the nature and diversity of Taurid meteoroids by studying
their spectral, orbital, and physical properties determined from video meteor
observations. Here we analyze 33 Taurid meteor spectra captured during the
predicted outburst in November 2015 by stations in Slovakia and Chile,
including 14 multi-station observations for which the orbital elements,
material strength parameters, dynamic pressures, and mineralogical densities
were determined. It was found that while orbits of the 2015 Taurids show
similarities with several associated asteroids, the obtained spectral and
physical characteristics point towards cometary origin with highly
heterogeneous content. Observed spectra exhibited large dispersion of iron
content and significant Na intensity in all cases. The determined material
strengths are typically cometary in the $K_B$ classification, while $P_E$
criterion is on average close to values characteristic for carbonaceous bodies.
The studied meteoroids were found to break up under low dynamic pressures of
0.02 - 0.10 MPa, and were characterized by low mineralogical densities of 1.3 -
2.5 g cm$^{-3}$. The widest spectral classification of Taurid meteors to date
is presented.


  Let $K_{n,n}$ be the complete bipartite graph with $n$ vertices in each side.
For each vertex draw uniformly at random a list of size $k$ from a base set $S$
of size $s=s(n)$. In this paper we estimate the asymptotic probability of the
existence of a proper colouring from the random lists for all fixed values of
$k$ and growing $n$. We show that this property exhibits a sharp threshold for
$k\geq 2$ and the location of the threshold is precisely $s(n)=2n$ for $k=2$,
and approximately $s(n)=\frac{n}{2^{k-1}\ln 2}$ for $k\geq 3$.


  A parallel implementation of an eigensolver designed for electronic structure
calculations is presented. The method is applicable to computational tasks that
solve a sequence of eigenvalue problems where the solution for a particular
iteration is similar but not identical to the solution from the previous
iteration. Such problems occur frequently when performing electronic structure
calculations in which the eigenvectors are solutions to the Kohn-Sham
equations. The eigenvectors are represented in some type of basis but the
problem sizes are normally too large for direct diagonalization in that basis.
Instead a subspace diagonalization procedure is employed in which matrix
elements of the Hamiltonian operator are generated and the eigenvalues and
eigenvectors of the resulting reduced matrix are obtained using a standard
eigensolver from a package such as LAPACK or SCALAPACK. While this method works
well and is widely used, the standard eigensolvers scale poorly on massively
parallel computer systems for the matrix sizes typical of electronic structure
calculations. We present a new method that utilizes a partitioned folded
spectrum scheme (PFSM) that takes into account the iterative nature of the
problem and performs well on massively parallel systems. Test results for a
range of problems are presented that demonstrate an equivalent level of
accuracy when compared to the standard eigensolvers, while also executing up to
an order of magnitude faster. Unlike O(N) methods, the technique works equally
well for metals and systems with unoccupied orbitals as for insulators and
semiconductors. Timing and accuracy results are presented for a range of
systems, including a 512 atom diamond cell, a cluster of 13 C60 molecules, bulk
copper, a 216 atom silicon cell with a vacancy, using 40 unoccupied
states/atom, and a 4000 atom aluminum supercell.


  We construct a centerless W-infinity type of algebra in terms of a generator
of a centerless Virasoro algebra and an abelian spin-1 current. This algebra
conventionally emerges in the study of pseudo-differential operators on a
circle or alternatively within KP hierarchy with Watanabe's bracket.
Construction used here is based on a special deformation of the algebra
$w_{\infty}$ of area preserving diffeomorphisms of a 2-manifold. We show that
this deformation technique applies to the two-loop WZNW and conformal affine
Toda models, establishing henceforth $W_{\infty}$ invariance of these models.


  The Kolakoski sequence is the unique infinite sequence with values in
$\{1,2\}$ and first term $1$ which equals the sequence of run-lengths of
itself, we call this $K(1,2).$ We define $K(m,n)$ similarly. A well-known
conjecture is that the limiting density of $K(1,2)$ is one-half. We state a
natural generalization, the "generalized uniformness conjecture" (GUC). The GUC
seems intractable, but we prove a partial result. The GUC implies that members
of a certain family of directed graphs $G_{m,n,k}$ are all strongly connected.
We prove this unconditionally.
  For $d>0,$ let $cf(m,n,d)$ be the density of indices $i$ such that $K(m,
n)_i=K(m, n)_{i+d}.$ Essentially, $cf(m, n, d)$ is the autocorrelation function
of a stationary stochastic process with random variables
$\{X_t\}_{t\in\mathbb{Z}}$ whereby a sample of a finite window of this process
is formed by copying as many consecutive terms of $K(m,n)$ starting from a
"uniformly random index" $i\in\mathbb{Z}_+.$ Assuming the GUC, we prove that we
can compute $cf(m,n,d)$ exactly for quite large $d$ by constructing a periodic
sequence $S$ of period around $10^{8.5}$ such that for $d$ not too large, the
correlation frequency at distance $d$ in $K(m,n)$ equals that in $S.$ We
efficiently compute correlations in $S$ using polynomial multiplication via
FFT.
  We plot our estimates $cf(m,n,d)$ for several small values of $(m,n)$ and
$d\le10^5$ or $10^6$. We note many suggested patterns. For example, for the
three pairs $(m,n)\in\{(1,2),(2,3),(3,4)\},$ the function $cf(m,n,d)$ behaves
very differently as we restrict $d$ to the $m+n$ residue classes $\text{mod}$
$m+n.$ The plots of the three functions $cf(1,2,d),cf(2,3,d),$ and $cf(3,4,d)$
resemble waves which have common nodes. We consider this very unusual behavior
for an autocorrelation function. The pairs $(m,n)\in\{(1,4),(1,6),(2,5)\}$ show
wave-like patterns with much more noise.


  We develop a formalism to describe the discrete-time dynamics of systems
containing an arbitrary number of interacting species. The individual-based
model, which forms our starting point, is described by a Markov chain, which in
the limit of large system sizes is shown to be very well-approximated by a
Fokker-Planck-like equation, or equivalently by a set of stochastic difference
equations. This formalism is applied to the specific case of two species: one
predator species and its prey species. Quasi-cycles --- stochastic cycles
sustained and amplified by the demographic noise --- previously found in
continuous-time predator-prey models are shown to exist, and their behavior
predicted from a linear noise analysis is shown to be in very good agreement
with simulations. The effects of the noise on other attractors in the
corresponding deterministic map, such as periodic cycles, quasiperiodicity and
chaos, are also investigated.


  In this paper, we deal with the successive inner and outer radii with respect
to Orlicz Minkowski sum. The upper and lower bounds for the radii of the Orlicz
Minkowski sum of two convex bodies are established.


  We propose a novel approach to the analysis of covariance operators making
use of concentration inequalities. First, non-asymptotic confidence sets are
constructed for such operators. Then, subsequent applications including a k
sample test for equality of covariance, a functional data classifier, and an
expectation-maximization style clustering algorithm are derived and tested on
both simulated and phoneme data.


  In this paper, we present a collocation method for nonlinear Volterra
integral equation of the first kind. This method benefits from the idea of
$hp$-version projection methods. We provide an approximation based on the
Legendre polynomial interpolation. The convergence of the proposed method is
completely studied and an error estimate under the $L^2$-norm is provided.
Finally, several numerical experiments are presented in order to verify the
obtained theoretical results.


  The metric polytope m(n) is the polyhedron associated with all semimetrics on
n nodes. In 1992 Monique Laurent and Svatopluk Poljak conjectured that every
fractional vertex of the metric polytope is adjacent to some integral vertex.
The conjecture holds for n<9 and, in particular, for the 1 550 825 600 vertices
of m(8). While the overwhelming majority of the known vertices of m(9) satisfy
the Laurent-Poljak conjecture, we exhibit a fractional vertex not adjacent to
any integral vertex.


  We establish a lower bound for the cop number of graphs of high girth in
terms of the minimum degree, and more generally, in terms of a certain growth
condition. We show, in particular, that the cop number of any graph with girth
$g$ and minimum degree $\delta$ is at least $\tfrac{1}{g}(\delta - 1)^{\lfloor
\frac{g-1}{4}\rfloor}$. We establish similar results for directed graphs. While
exposing several reasons for conjecturing that the exponent $\tfrac{1}{4}g$ in
this lower bound cannot be improved to $(\tfrac{1}{4}+\varepsilon)g$, we are
also able to prove that it cannot be increased beyond $\frac{3}{8}g$. This is
established by considering a certain family of Ramanujan graphs. In our proof
of this bound, we also show that the "weak" Meyniel's conjecture holds for
expander graph families of bounded degree.


  In this position paper we address the Software Sustainability from the IN
perspective, so that the Software Engineering (SE) community is aware of the
need to contribute towards sustainable software companies, which need to adopt
a holistic approach to sustainability considering all its dimensions (human,
economic and environmental). A series of important challenges to be considered
in the coming years are presented, in order that advances in involved SE
communities on the subject can be harmonised and used to contribute more
effectively to this field of great interest and impact on society.


  Using Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) quasar spectra taken at multiple
epochs, we find that the composite flux density differences in the rest frame
wavelength range 1300-6000 AA can be fit by a standard thermal accretion disk
model where the accretion rate has changed from one epoch to the next (without
considering additional continuum emission components). The fit to the composite
residual has two free parameters: a normalizing constant and the average
characteristic temperature $\bar{T}^*$. In turn the characteristic temperature
is dependent on the ratio of the mass accretion rate to the square of the black
hole mass. We therefore conclude that most of the UV/optical variability may be
due to processes involving the disk, and thus that a significant fraction of
the UV/optical spectrum may come directly from the disk.


  The paper contains lower bounds on the counting function of the positive
eigenvalues of the interior transmission problem when the latter is elliptic.
In particular, these bounds justify the existence of an infinite set of
interior transmission eigenvalues and provide asymptotic estimates from above
on the counting function for the large values of the wave number. They also
lead to certain important upper estimates on the first few interior
transmission eigenvalues. We consider the classical transmission problem as
well as the case when the inhomogeneous medium contains an obstacle.


  The scaling relations between the black hole (BH) mass and soft lag
properties for both active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and BH X-ray binaries
(BHXRBs) suggest the same underlying physical mechanism at work in accreting BH
systems spanning a broad range of mass. However, the low-mass end of AGNs has
never been explored in detail. In this work, we extend the existing scaling
relations to lower-mass AGNs, which serve as anchors between the normal-mass
AGNs and BHXRBs. For this purpose, we construct a sample of low-mass AGNs
($M_{\rm BH}<3\times 10^{6} M_{\rm \odot}$) from the XMM-Newton archive and
measure frequency-resolved time delays between the soft (0.3-1 keV) and hard
(1-4 keV) X-ray emissions. We report that the soft band lags behind the hard
band emission at high frequencies $\sim[1.3-2.6]\times 10^{-3}$ Hz, which is
interpreted as a sign of reverberation from the inner accretion disc in
response to the direct coronal emission. At low frequencies ($\sim[3-8]\times
10^{-4}$ Hz), the hard band lags behind the soft band variations, which we
explain in the context of the inward propagation of luminosity fluctuations
through the corona. Assuming a lamppost geometry for the corona, we find that
the X-ray source of the sample extends at an average height and radius of $\sim
10r_{\rm g}$ and $\sim 6r_{\rm g}$, respectively. Our results confirm that the
scaling relations between the BH mass and soft lag amplitude/frequency derived
for higher-mass AGNs can safely extrapolate to lower-mass AGNs, and the
accretion process is indeed independent of the BH mass.


  To the first post--Newtonian order, the orbital angular momentum of the
fast--revolving inner binary of the triple system PSR J0337+1715, made of a
millisecond pulsar and a white dwarf, induces an annular gravitomagnetic field
which displaces the line of apsides of the slower orbit of the other, distant
white dwarf by $-1.2$ milliarcseconds per year. The current accuracy in
determining the periastron of the outer orbit is $63.9$ milliarcseconds after
1.38 years of data collection. By hypothesizing a constant rate of measurement
of the pulsar's times of arrivals over the next 10 years, assumed equal to the
present one, it can be argued that the periastron will be finally known to a
$\simeq 0.15$ milliarcseconds level, while its cumulative gravitomagnetic
retrograde shift will be as large as $-12$ milliarcseconds. The competing
post--Newtonian gravitolectric periastron advance due to the inner binary's
masses, nominally amounting to $74.3$ milliarcseconds per year, can be
presently modelled to an accuracy level as good as $\simeq 0.04$
milliarcseconds per year. The mismodelling in the much larger Newtonian
periastron rate due to the quadrupolar term of the multipolar expansion of the
gravitational potential of a massive ring, whose nominal size for PSR
J0337+1715 is $0.17$ degrees per year, might be reduced down to the $\simeq
0.5$ milliarcseconds per year level over the next 10 years. Thus, a first
measurement of such a novel form of gravitomagnetism, although challenging, may
be somehow feasible in a not too distant future.


  We present methods for the direct characterization of quantum dynamics (DCQD)
in which both the principal and ancilla systems undergo noisy processes. Using
a concatenated error detection code, we discriminate between located and
unlocated errors on the principal system in what amounts to filtering of
ancilla noise. The example of composite noise involving amplitude damping and
depolarizing channels is used to demonstrate the method, while we find the rate
of noise filtering is more generally dependent on code distance. Our results
indicate the accuracy of quantum process characterization can be greatly
improved while remaining within reach of current experimental capabilities.


  We propose that the TeV scale mirage mediation in the Next-to-Minimal
Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) is a novel solution for the little
hierarchy problem in supersymmetry. The 125 GeV Higgs boson can be accommodated
with the new quartic coupling or the mixing with the singlet. The fine-tuning
measures are estimated numerically and found as low as 10\% or below for $1.5$
TeV gluino and $1$ TeV stop. The higgsino can be as heavy as 500 GeV without
deteriorating the fine-tuning. An undesirable singlet-doublet mixing in the
Higgs sector is suppressed due to approximate scale symmetries. We investigate
the couplings of the Higgs bosons and discuss the prospects for studying them
at LHC and ILC.


  Context. Modern Code Review (MCR) is being adopted in both open source and
commercial projects as a common practice. MCR is a widely acknowledged quality
assurance practice that allows early detection of defects as well as poor
coding practices. It also brings several other benefits such as knowledge
sharing, team awareness, and collaboration.
  Problem. In practice, code reviews can experience significant delays to be
completed due to various socio-technical factors which can affect the project
quality and cost. For a successful review process, peer reviewers should
perform their review tasks in a timely manner while providing relevant feedback
about the code change being reviewed. However, there is a lack of tool support
to help developers estimating the time required to complete a code review prior
to accepting or declining a review request.
  Objective. Our objective is to build and validate an effective approach to
predict the code review completion time in the context of MCR and help
developers better manage and prioritize their code review tasks.
  Method. We formulate the prediction of the code review completion time as a
learning problem. In particular, we propose a framework based on regression
models to (i) effectively estimate the code review completion time, and (ii)
understand the main factors influencing code review completion time.


  We apply the Velocity Distribution Function (VDF) to a sample of
Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ)-selected clusters, and we report preliminary
cosmological constraints in the $\sigma_8$-$\Omega_m$ cosmological parameter
space. The VDF is a forward-modeled test statistic that can be used to
constrain cosmological models directly from galaxy cluster dynamical
observations. The method was introduced in Ntampaka et al. (2017) and employs
line-of-sight velocity measurements to directly constrain cosmological
parameters; it is less sensitive to measurement error than a standard halo mass
function approach. The method is applied to the Hectospec Survey of
Sunyaev-Zeldovich-Selected Clusters (HeCS-SZ) sample, which is a spectroscopic
follow up of a Planck-selected sample of 83 galaxy clusters. Credible regions
are calculated by comparing the VDF of the observed cluster sample to that of
mock observations, yielding $\mathcal{S}_8 \equiv \sigma_8
\left(\Omega_m/0.3\right)^{0.25} = 0.751\pm0.037$. These constraints are in
tension with the Planck Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) TT fiducial value,
which lies outside of our 95% credible region, but are in agreement with some
recent analyses of large scale structure that observe fewer massive clusters
than are predicted by the Planck fiducial cosmological parameters.


  We describe a quantum algorithm to estimate the $\alpha$-Renyi entropy of an
unknown density matrix $\rho\in\mathcal{C}^{d\times d}$ for $\alpha\neq 1$ by
combining the recent technique of quantum singular value transformations with
the method of estimating normalised traces in the one clean qubit model. We
consider an oracular input model where the input state is prepared via a
quantum oracle that outputs a purified version of the state, assumed to be
non-singular. Our method outputs an estimate of the $\alpha$-Renyi entropy to
additive precision $\epsilon$, using an expected total number
$O\left(\frac{1}{(x\epsilon)^2}\right)$ of independent applications of a
quantum circuit which coherently queries the input unitary
$O\left(\frac{1}{\delta}\log \frac{d}{\epsilon}\right)$ times, in each case
measuring a single output qubit. Here $\delta$ is a lower cutoff on the
smallest eigenvalue of $\rho$ and $x=\frac{1}{d}\!\mathop{Tr}{\rho^\alpha}$.
The expected number of measurements made in this method can be compared to
results in the sample complexity model that generally require
$\Theta(d^2/\epsilon^2)$ samples. Furthermore, we also show that multiplicative
approximations can be obtained by iteratively using additive approximations,
with an overhead logarithmic in the dimension $d$.


  Autonomous obstacle avoidance is of vital importance for an intelligent agent
such as a mobile robot to navigate in its environment. Existing
state-of-the-art methods train a spiking neural network (SNN) with deep
reinforcement learning (DRL) to achieve energy-efficient and fast inference
speed in complex/unknown scenes. These methods typically assume that the
environment is static while the obstacles in real-world scenes are often
dynamic. The movement of obstacles increases the complexity of the environment
and poses a great challenge to the existing methods. In this work, we approach
robust dynamic obstacle avoidance twofold. First, we introduce the neuromorphic
vision sensor (i.e., event camera) to provide motion cues complementary to the
traditional Laser depth data for handling dynamic obstacles. Second, we develop
an DRL-based event-enhanced multimodal spiking actor network (EEM-SAN) that
extracts information from motion events data via unsupervised representation
learning and fuses Laser and event camera data with learnable thresholding.
Experiments demonstrate that our EEM-SAN outperforms state-of-the-art obstacle
avoidance methods by a significant margin, especially for dynamic obstacle
avoidance.


  We show that Floer cohomology of an immersed Lagrangian brane is invariant
under smoothing of a self-intersection point if the quantum valuation of the
weakly bounding cochain vanishes and the Lagrangian has dimension at least two.
The chain-level map replaces the two orderings of the self-intersection point
with meridianal and longitudinal cells on the handle created by the surgery,
and uses a bijection between holomorphic disks developed by Fukaya-Oh-Ohta-Ono.
Our result generalizes invariance of potentials for certain Lagrangian surfaces
in Dimitroglou-Rizell--Ekholm--Tonkonog, and implies the invariance of Floer
cohomology under mean curvature flow with this type of surgery, as conjectured
by Joyce.


  We explore the ultrafast reflectivity response from photo-generated coupled
phonon-surface Dirac plasmons in Sb$_2$Te$_3$ topological insulators several
quintuple layers thick. The transient coherent phonon spectra obtained at
different time frames exhibit a Fano-like asymmetric line shape of the
$A^2_{1g}$ mode, which is attributed to quantum interference between
continuum-like coherent Dirac-plasmons and phonons. By analyzing the
time-dependent asymmetric line shape using the two-temperature model (TTM), it
was determined that a Fano-like resonance persisted up to $\approx$1 ps after
photo-excitation with a relaxation profile dominated by Gaussian decay at
$\leq$200 fs. The asymmetry parameter could be well described by the TTM for
$\geq$200 fs, therefore suggesting the coherence time of the Dirac plasmon is
$\approx$200 fs.


  Using molecular dynamics simulation, we study structural and dynamical
heterogeneities at melting in two-dimensional one-component systems with 36000
particles. Between crystal and liquid we find intermediate hexatic states,
where the density fluctuations are enhanced at small wave number k as well as
those of the six-fold orientational order parameter. Their structure factors
both grow up to the smallest wave number equal to the inverse system length.
The intermediate scattering function of the density S(k,t) is found to relax
exponentially with decay rate Gamma_k ~ k^z with z~2.6 at small k in the
hexatic phase.


  We present design and experimental validation of the system for the
generation of the Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) states using 3D-printed
low-loss metamaterial phase plates for application in the terahertz (THz)
wireless communications. By azimuthally varying the hole pattern density within
the phase plate, the local effective refractive index is varied, thus also
changing the local propagation constant in the azimuthal direction. The OAM of
any topological charge can be created by simply varying the thickness of the
phase plate. The phase plate with topological charge (m=1) is 3D printed and
the amplitude and the phase of the terahertz signal after passing the plate is
characterized using the THz-time domain imaging system. Finally, we present the
experimental setup and theoretical simulation on the multiplexing and
de-multiplexing of several different OAM states for applications in wireless
terahertz communication.


  Developing natural language processing (NLP) systems for social media
analysis remains an important topic in artificial intelligence research. This
article introduces RoBERTweet, the first Transformer architecture trained on
Romanian tweets. Our RoBERTweet comes in two versions, following the base and
large architectures of BERT. The corpus used for pre-training the models
represents a novelty for the Romanian NLP community and consists of all tweets
collected from 2008 to 2022. Experiments show that RoBERTweet models outperform
the previous general-domain Romanian and multilingual language models on three
NLP tasks with tweet inputs: emotion detection, sexist language identification,
and named entity recognition. We make our models and the newly created corpus
of Romanian tweets freely available.


  Among geometrically rational surfaces, del Pezzo surfaces of degree two over
a field k containing at least one point are arguably the simplest that are not
known to be unirational over k. Looking for k-rational curves on these
surfaces, we extend some earlier work of Manin on this subject. We then focus
on the case where k is a finite field, where we show that all except possibly
three explicit del Pezzo surfaces of degree two are unirational over k.


  Due to the limitations of capture devices and scenarios, egocentric videos
frequently have low visual quality, mainly caused by high compression and
severe motion blur. With the increasing application of egocentric videos, there
is an urgent need to enhance the quality of these videos through
super-resolution. However, existing Video Super-Resolution (VSR) works,
focusing on third-person view videos, are actually unsuitable for handling
blurring artifacts caused by rapid ego-motion and object motion in egocentric
videos. To this end, we propose EgoVSR, a VSR framework specifically designed
for egocentric videos. We explicitly tackle motion blurs in egocentric videos
using a Dual Branch Deblur Network (DB$^2$Net) in the VSR framework. Meanwhile,
a blurring mask is introduced to guide the DB$^2$Net learning, and can be used
to localize blurred areas in video frames. We also design a MaskNet to predict
the mask, as well as a mask loss to optimize the mask estimation. Additionally,
an online motion blur synthesis model for common VSR training data is proposed
to simulate motion blurs as in egocentric videos. In order to validate the
effectiveness of our proposed method, we introduce an EgoVSR dataset containing
a large amount of fast-motion egocentric video sequences. Extensive experiments
demonstrate that our EgoVSR model can efficiently super-resolve low-quality
egocentric videos and outperform strong comparison baselines. Our code,
pre-trained models and data can be found at https://github.com/chiyich/EGOVSR/.


  Thermal scaling and relaxation of the interface width in an electrophoretic
deposition of polymer chains is examined by a three-dimensional Monte Carlo
simulation on a discrete lattice. Variation of the equilibrium interface width
$W_r$ with the temperature $T$ shows deroughening $W_r \propto T^{-\delta}$,
with $\delta \sim 1/4$, at low temperatures and roughening $W_r \propto
T^{\nu}$, with $\nu \sim 0.4$ at high temperatures. The roughening-deroughening
transition temperature $T_t$ increases with longer chain lengths and is reduced
by using the slower segmental dynamics.


  Computing the roots of a univariate polynomial is a fundamental and
long-studied problem of computational algebra with applications in mathematics,
engineering, computer science, and the natural sciences. For isolating as well
as for approximating all complex roots, the best algorithm known is based on an
almost optimal method for approximate polynomial factorization, introduced by
Pan in 2002. Pan's factorization algorithm goes back to the splitting circle
method from Schoenhage in 1982. The main drawbacks of Pan's method are that it
is quite involved and that all roots have to be computed at the same time. For
the important special case, where only the real roots have to be computed, much
simpler methods are used in practice; however, they considerably lag behind
Pan's method with respect to complexity.
  In this paper, we resolve this discrepancy by introducing a hybrid of the
Descartes method and Newton iteration, denoted ANEWDSC, which is simpler than
Pan's method, but achieves a run-time comparable to it. Our algorithm computes
isolating intervals for the real roots of any real square-free polynomial,
given by an oracle that provides arbitrary good approximations of the
polynomial's coefficients. ANEWDSC can also be used to only isolate the roots
in a given interval and to refine the isolating intervals to an arbitrary small
size; it achieves near optimal complexity for the latter task.


  The linear conjugate gradient method is widely used in physical simulation,
particularly for solving large-scale linear systems derived from Newton's
method. The nonlinear conjugate gradient method generalizes the conjugate
gradient method to nonlinear optimization, which is extensively utilized in
solving practical large-scale unconstrained optimization problems. However, it
is rarely discussed in physical simulation due to the requirement of multiple
vector-vector dot products. Fortunately, with the advancement of GPU-parallel
acceleration techniques, it is no longer a bottleneck. In this paper, we
propose a Jacobi preconditioned nonlinear conjugate gradient method for elastic
deformation using interior-point methods. Our method is straightforward,
GPU-parallelizable, and exhibits fast convergence and robustness against large
time steps. The employment of the barrier function in interior-point methods
necessitates continuous collision detection per iteration to obtain a
penetration-free step size, which is computationally expensive and challenging
to parallelize on GPUs. To address this issue, we introduce a line search
strategy that deduces an appropriate step size in a single pass, eliminating
the need for additional collision detection. Furthermore, we simplify and
accelerate the computations of Jacobi preconditioning and Hessian-vector
product for hyperelasticity and barrier function. Our method can accurately
simulate objects comprising over 100,000 tetrahedra in complex self-collision
scenarios at real-time speeds.


  A criterion on the similarity of a (bounded, linear) operator $T$ on a
(complex, separable) Hilbert space $\mathcal H$ in terms of shift-type
invariant subspaces of $T$ to a contraction of class $C_{\cdot 0}$ with finite
unequal defects is given. Namely, $T$ is similar to such a contraction if and
only if the minimal quantity of (closed) invariant subspaces $\mathcal M$ of
$T$ such that the restriction $T|_{\mathcal M}$ of $T$ on $\mathcal M$ is
similar to the simple unilateral shift, whose linear span is $\mathcal H$, is
finite. A sufficient condition for the similarity of an absolutely continuous
polynomially bounded operator $T$ to a contraction of class $C_{\cdot 0}$ with
finite equal defects is given. Namely, $T$ is similar to such a contraction if
the (spectral) multiplicity of $T$ is finite and $B(T)=\mathbb O$, where $B$ is
a finite product of Blaschke products with simple zeros satisfying the Carleson
interpolating condition (a Carleson--Newman product).


  The aim of this paper is to study two-weight norm inequalities for fractional
maximal functions and fractional Bergman operator defined on the upper-half
space. Namely, we characterize those pairs of weights for which these maximal
operators satisfy strong and weak type inequalities. Our characterizations are
in terms of Sawyer and B\'ekoll\'e-Bonami type conditions. We also obtain a
$\Phi$-bump characterization for these maximal functions, where $\Phi$ is a
Orlicz function. As a consequence, we obtain two-weight norm inequalities for
fractional Bergman operators. Finally, we provide some sharp weighted
inequalities for the fractional maximal functions.


  This paper corrects an earlier work suggesting that the quantum expectation
value of the proper length is bounded from below by the Planck length. The
original calculation examined fluctuations of the conformal factor of
Einstein-Hilbert gravity. However, in Einstein-Hilbert gravity, the conformal
factor is not a dynamical field subject to fluctuations. This paper performs
the same calculation using the trace anomaly-induced effective action for the
conformal factor and finds that, while conformal fluctuations modify the
short-distance behavior of the interval, the interval still approaches zero in
the coincidence limit.


  We have carried out a detailed analysis of the NANTEN 12CO(J=1-0) dataset in
two large areas of ~25 square degrees towards SS433 (l~40 degree) and of ~18
square degrees towards l~348.5 degree, respectively. We have discovered two
groups of remarkably aligned molecular clouds at |b|~1--5 degree in the two
regions. In SS433, we have detected 10 clouds in total, which are well aligned
nearly along the axis of the X-ray jet emanating from SS433. These clouds have
similar line-of-sight velocities of 42--56 km s^-1 and the total projected
length of the feature is ~300 pc, three times larger than that of the X-ray
jet, at a distance of 3 kpc. Towards l~348.5 degree, we have detected four
clouds named as MJG348.5 at line-of-sight velocities of -80 -- -95 km s^-1 in
V_LSR, which also show alignment nearly perpendicular to the Galactic plane.
The total length of the feature is ~400 pc at a kinematic distance of 6 kpc. In
the both cases, the CO clouds are distributed at high galactic latitudes where
such clouds are very rare. In addition, their alignments and coincidence in
velocity should be even rarer, suggesting that they are physically associated.
We tested a few possibilities to explain these clouds, including protostellar
outflows, supershells, and interactions with energetic jets. Among them, a
favorable scenario is that the interaction between relativistic jet and the
interstellar medium induced the formation of molecular clouds over the last
~10^5-6 yrs. It is suggested that the timescale of the relativistic jet may be
considerably larger, in the order of 10^5-6 yrs, than previously thought in
SS433. The driving engine of the jet is obviously SS433 itself in SS433,
although the engine is not yet identified in MJG348.5 among possible several
candidates detected in the X-rays and TeV gamma rays.


  Human perception of surroundings is often guided by the various poses present
within the environment. Many computer vision tasks, such as human action
recognition and robot imitation learning, rely on pose-based entities like
human skeletons or robotic arms. However, conventional Vision Transformer (ViT)
models uniformly process all patches, neglecting valuable pose priors in input
videos. We argue that incorporating poses into RGB data is advantageous for
learning fine-grained and viewpoint-agnostic representations. Consequently, we
introduce two strategies for learning pose-aware representations in ViTs. The
first method, called Pose-aware Attention Block (PAAB), is a plug-and-play ViT
block that performs localized attention on pose regions within videos. The
second method, dubbed Pose-Aware Auxiliary Task (PAAT), presents an auxiliary
pose prediction task optimized jointly with the primary ViT task. Although
their functionalities differ, both methods succeed in learning pose-aware
representations, enhancing performance in multiple diverse downstream tasks.
Our experiments, conducted across seven datasets, reveal the efficacy of both
pose-aware methods on three video analysis tasks, with PAAT holding a slight
edge over PAAB. Both PAAT and PAAB surpass their respective backbone
Transformers by up to 9.8% in real-world action recognition and 21.8% in
multi-view robotic video alignment. Code is available at
https://github.com/dominickrei/PoseAwareVT.


  New unification theories predict Large Extra Dimensions (LEDs). If that is
the case, gravity would be stronger at short ranges than what Newtonian gravity
predicts. LEDs could also have effects at atomic level. In this paper we
propose a new method to constrain the size of gravity-only LEDs by analyzing
how these LEDs modify the energy of the atomic transitions 1s-2s and 2s-2p
(Lamb shift), for the particular case of the hydrogen and muonium atoms. We
estimate these effects by using Bethe's non-relativistic treatment of Lamb
shift. For the particular case of three LEDs, which may be a candidate to
explain the interaction mechanism of dark matter particles, we have found that
current knowledge in atomic spectroscopy could constrain their sizes to be less
than 10 * 10^(-6) m. Although our contributions do not reach the sensitivity
given by SN1987a, they are still slightly better than recent constraints given
by Inverse Square Law tests of Eot-Wash group at Washington University, which
gave R3 < 36.6 * 10^(-6) m.


  The Simons Array (SA) project is a ground-based Cosmic Microwave Background
(CMB) polarization experiment. The SA observes the sky using three telescopes,
and POLARBEAR-2A (PB-2A) is the receiver system on the first telescope. For the
ground-based experiment, atmospheric fluctuation is the primary noise source
that could cause polarization leakage. In the PB-2A receiver system, a
continuously rotating half-wave plate (HWP) is used to mitigate the
polarization leakage. However, due to the rapid modulation of the polarization
signal, the uncertainty in the time constant of the detector results in an
uncertainty in the polarization angle. For PB-2A, the time constant of each
bolometer needs to be calibrated at the sub-millisecond level to avoid
introducing bias to the polarization signal. We have developed a new calibrator
system that can be used to calibrate the time constants of the detectors. In
this study, we present the design of the calibration system and the preliminary
results of the time constant calibration for PB-2A.


  We describe the experiment PHELEX (PHoton-ELectron EXperiment) on the search
for dark photons of cold dark matter using a technique of multi-cathode counter
developed by us for this task. We present the new data, the new upper limit for
the constant of kinetic mixing and also first results of measurements of the
diurnal variations in solar and stellar frames. We outline the perspectives of
this method for the search of dark photons


  Meteoroids originating from the local interstellar medium, traverse the solar
system. This has been proven by in situ measurements by interplanetary
spacecraft as well as highly sensitive radar measurements. Early attempts to
detect interstellar meteoroids using the instruments on board the Pioneer 8 and
9 spacecraft failed. More sensitive detectors on board the joint ESA/NASA
mission Ulysses as well as on board the NASA spacecraft Galileo, however,
unambiguously detected meteoroids of interstellar origin. This discovery has
started efforts to compare the results from the in situ measurements with
highly sophisticated models of interstellar dust properties derived from
astronomical absorption and extinction measurements. It was found that, at
least locally, is more mass locked up in meteoroids than expected from the
astronomical measurements. So far the in situ measurements only allow to derive
composition information indirectly via the meteoroid's dynamics.


  By the twelfth century, northern European scholars gradually embraced Arabic
innovations in science and technology. England naturally developed into a
significant centre of the new learning in western Europe. Hereford, and
specifically its cathedral school, played a particularly important role in the
transition of English scholarship to the new learning. Hereford cathedral
developed into a focal point for high-level scholarship, attracting numerous
scholars from across the continent. Roger of Hereford stands out among his
peers as an enlightened scholar who made more practical use than most of the
full astronomical and astrological knowledge base available in England at the
time. A significant body of recent scholarship focuses on twelfth-century
ecclesiastical developments, including those relating to Roger of Hereford's
Computus. However, much less scholarly emphasis is placed on Roger's
astronomical calculations, particularly those which allowed him to establish an
important reference meridian at Hereford. Those aspects are the focus of this
paper.


  In this paper we define 3-crossed modules for commutative (Lie) algebras and
investigate the relation between this construction and the simplicial algebras.
Also we define the projective 3-crossed resolution for investigate a higher
dimensional homological information and show the existence of this resolution
for an arbitrary $\mathbf{k}$-algebra.


  Statisticians have warned us since the early days of their discipline that
experimental correlation between two observations by no means implies the
existence of a causal relation. The question about what clues exist in
observational data that could informs us about the existence of such causal
relations is nevertheless more that legitimate. It lies actually at the root of
any scientific endeavor. For decades however the only accepted method among
statisticians to elucidate causal relationships was the so called Randomized
Controlled Trial. Besides this notorious exception causality questions remained
largely taboo for many. One reason for this state of affairs was the lack of an
appropriate mathematical framework to formulate such questions in an
unambiguous way. Fortunately thinks have changed these last years with the
advent of the so called Causality Revolution initiated by Judea Pearl and
coworkers. The aim of this pedagogical paper is to present their ideas and
methods in a compact and self-contained fashion with concrete business examples
as illustrations.


  The total mass of distant star clusters is often derived from the virial
theorem, using line-of-sight velocity dispersion measurements and half-light
radii. Although most stars form in binary systems, this is mostly ignored when
interpreting the observations. The components of binary stars exhibit orbital
motion, which may increase the measured velocity dispersion, and may therefore
result in a dynamical mass overestimation. In this paper we quantify the effect
of neglecting the binary population on the derivation of the dynamical mass of
a star cluster. We simulate star clusters numerically, and study the dependence
of the derived dynamical mass on the properties of the binary population. We
find that the presence of binaries plays a crucial role for very sparse
clusters with a stellar density comparable to that of the field star population
(~0.1 stars/pc3), as the velocity dispersion is fully dominated by the binary
orbital motion. For such clusters, the dynamical mass may overestimate the true
mass by up to an order of magnitude. For very dense clusters (>10^7 stars/pc3),
binaries do not affect the dynamical mass estimation significantly. For
clusters of intermediate density (0.1-10^7 stars/pc3), the dynamical mass can
be overestimated by 10-100%, depending on the properties of the binary
population.