  We call a function $f: X\to Y$ $P$-preserving if, for every subspace $A
\subset X$ with property $P$, its image $f(A)$ also has property $P$. Of
course, all continuous maps are both compactness- and connectedness-preserving
and the natural question about when the converse of this holds, i.e. under what
conditions is such a map continuous, has a long history.
  Our main result is that any non-trivial product function, i.e. one having at
least two non-constant factors, that has connected domain, $T_1$ range, and is
connectedness-preserving must actually be continuous. The analogous statement
badly fails if we replace in it the occurrences of "connected" by "compact". We
also present, however, several interesting results and examples concerning maps
that are compactness-preserving and/or continuum-preserving.


  The investigation of light nuclei with ab-initio methods provides an optimal
setting to probe our knowledge on nuclear forces, because the few-nucleon
problem can be solved accurately. Nucleons interact not only in pairs but also
via many-body forces. Theoretical efforts need to be taken towards the
identification of nuclear observables sensitive to the less known many-nucleon
forces. Electromagnetic reactions can potentially provide useful information on
this. We present results on photo-absorption and electron scattering off light
nuclei, emphasizing the role of three-body forces and the comparison with
experimental data. On the other hand, reactions induced by weak probes, like
neutrino interactions with nucleonic matter, are relevant to astrophysics and
can be calculated with few-body techniques. In this case, since often no
experiment is possible, ab-initio predictions provide valuable input for
astrophysical simulations.


  Surface strain is widely used in gas phase catalysis and electrocatalysis to
control the binding energies of adsorbates on metal surfaces. However, $in$
$situ$ or $operando$ strain measurements are experimentally challenging,
especially on nanomaterials. Here, we take advantage of the 4$^{th}$ generation
Extremely Brilliant Source at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
(ESRF-EBS, Grenoble, France) to quantify the distribution of strain inside a Pt
nanoparticle, and to determine its morphology in an electrochemical
environment. Our results show for the first time evidence of heterogeneous and
potential-dependent strain distribution between highly-coordinated ({100} and
{111} facets) and under-coordinated atoms (edges and corners) as well as
evidence of strain propagation from the surface to the bulk of the
nanoparticle. These results provide dynamic structural insights to better
simulate and design efficient nanocatalysts for energy storage and conversion
applications.


  Let $k>2$ be a prime such that $2^k-1$ is a Mersenne prime. Let $n =
2^{\alpha-1}p$, where $\alpha>1$ and $p<3\cdot 2^{\alpha-1}-1$ is an odd prime.
Continuing the work of Cai et al. and Jiang, we prove that $n\ |\ \sigma_k(n)$
if and only if $n$ is an even perfect number $\neq 2^{k-1}(2^k-1)$.
Furthermore, if $n = 2^{\alpha-1}p^{\beta-1}$ for some $\beta>1$, then $n\ |\
\sigma_5(n)$ if and only if $n$ is an even perfect number $\neq 496$.


  The recommendation of appropriate development pathways, also known as
ecological civilization patterns for achieving Sustainable Development Goals
(namely, sustainable development patterns), are of utmost importance for
promoting ecological, economic, social, and resource sustainability in a
specific region. To achieve this, the recommendation process must carefully
consider the region's natural, environmental, resource, and economic
characteristics. However, current recommendation algorithms in the field of
computer science fall short in adequately addressing the spatial heterogeneity
related to environment and sparsity of regional historical interaction data,
which limits their effectiveness in recommending sustainable development
patterns. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a method called
User Graph after Pruning and Intent Graph (UGPIG). Firstly, we utilize the
high-density linking capability of the pruned User Graph to address the issue
of spatial heterogeneity neglect in recommendation algorithms. Secondly, we
construct an Intent Graph by incorporating the intent network, which captures
the preferences for attributes including environmental elements of target
regions. This approach effectively alleviates the problem of sparse historical
interaction data in the region. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate
that UGPIG outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms like KGCN,
KGAT, and KGIN in sustainable development pattern recommendations, with a
maximum improvement of 9.61% in Top-3 recommendation performance.


  Electrical vehicle (EV) raises to promote an eco-sustainable society.
Nevertheless, the "range anxiety" of EV hinders its wider acceptance among
customers. This paper proposes a novel solution to range anxiety based on a
federated-learning model, which is capable of estimating battery consumption
and providing energy-efficient route planning for vehicle networks.
Specifically, the new approach extends the federated-learning structure with
two components: anomaly detection and sharing policy. The first component
identifies preventing factors in model learning, while the second component
offers guidelines for information sharing amongst vehicle networks when the
sharing is necessary to preserve learning efficiency. The two components
collaborate to enhance learning robustness against data heterogeneities in
networks. Numerical experiments are conducted, and the results show that
compared with considered solutions, the proposed approach could provide higher
accuracy of battery-consumption estimation for vehicles under heterogeneous
data distributions, without increasing the time complexity or transmitting raw
data among vehicle networks.


  While large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3, appear to be robust and
general, their reasoning ability is not at a level to compete with the best
models trained for specific natural language reasoning problems. In this study,
we observe that a large language model can serve as a highly effective few-shot
semantic parser. It can convert natural language sentences into a logical form
that serves as input for answer set programs, a logic-based declarative
knowledge representation formalism. The combination results in a robust and
general system that can handle multiple question-answering tasks without
requiring retraining for each new task. It only needs a few examples to guide
the LLM's adaptation to a specific task, along with reusable ASP knowledge
modules that can be applied to multiple tasks. We demonstrate that this method
achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP benchmarks, including
bAbI, StepGame, CLUTRR, and gSCAN. Additionally, it successfully tackles robot
planning tasks that an LLM alone fails to solve.


  We investigate in this work the leading contributions of the MSSM with
R-parity violation and of Left-Right models to the low-energy five-leg
photon-neutrino processes.
  We discuss the results and compare them to the Standard Model ones.


  A giant diamagnetism in the Co$_{2}$CrAl compounds, in both bulk and thin
film, below a certain temperature ($T_z$) was observed. Above $T_z$, the
compound behaves as an ordinary ferromagnet. The diamagnetic alignment might be
initiated by the Landau diamagnetism because of the half-metallic properties
and the pinning of the diamagnetism is preserved by the peculiar electronic
structures.


  We consider integrals on unitary groups $U_d$ of the form
$$\int_{U_d}U_{i_1j_1}... U_{i_qj_q}U^*_{j'_{1}i'_{1}} ...
U^*_{j'_{q'}i'_{q'}}dU$$
  We give an explicit formula in terms of characters of symmetric groups and
Schur functions, which allows us to rederive an asymptotic expansion as
$d\to\infty$. Using this we rederive and strenghthen a result of asymptotic
freeness due to Voiculescu.
  We then study large $d$ asymptotics of matrix model integrals and of the
logarithm of Itzykson-Zuber integrals and show that they converge towards a
limit when considered as power series. In particular we give an explicit
formula for $$\lim_{d\to\infty}\frac{\partial^n}{\partial z^n}d^{-2}
\log\int_{U_d} e^{zd Tr (XUYU^*)}dU|_{z=0}$$ assuming that the normalized
traces $d^{-1} Tr(X^k)$ and $d^{-1} Tr (Y^k)$ converge in the large $d$ limit.
We consider as well a different scaling and relate its asymptotics to
Voiculescu's R-transform.


  As a corollary to our main theorem we give a new proof of the result that the
norm of the Hilbert transform on L^2(w) has norm bounded by a the A_2
characteristic of a weight to the first power, a theorem of one of us. This new
proof begins as the prior proofs do, by passing to Haar shifts. Then, we apply
a deep two-weight T1 theorem of Nazarov-Treil-Volberg, to reduce the matter to
checking a certain carleson measure condition. This condition is checked with a
corona decomposition of the weight. Prior proofs of this type have used Bellman
functions, while this proof is flexible enough to address all Haar shifts at
the same time.


  X ray clusters are conventionally divided into two classes: "cool core" (CC)
and "non cool core" (NCC) objects, on the basis of the observational properties
of their central regions. Recent results have shown that the cluster population
is bimodal (Cavagnolo et al. 2009). We want to understand whether the observed
distribution of clusters is due to a primordial division into two distinct
classes rather than to differences in how these systems evolve across cosmic
time. We systematically search the ICM of NCC clusters in a subsample of the
B55 flux limited sample of clusters for regions which have some characteristics
typical of cool cores, namely low entropy gas and high metal abundance We find
that most NCC clusters in our sample host regions reminiscent of CC, i. e.
characterized by relative low entropy gas (albeit not as low as in CC systems)
and a metal abundance excess. We have dubbed these structures "cool core
remnants", since we interpret them as what remains of a cool core after a
heating event (AGN giant outbursts in a few cases and more commonly mergers).
We infer that most NCC clusters have undergone a cool core phase during their
life. The fact that most cool core remnants are found in dynamically active
objects provides strong support to scenarios where cluster core properties are
not fixed "ab initio" but evolve across cosmic time.


  J.Eells and L. Lemaire introduced k-harmonic maps, and T. Ichiyama, J.
Inoguchi and H.Urakawa showed the first variation formula.
  In this paper, we describe the ordinary differential equations of
$3$-harmonic curves into a Riemannian manifold with constant sectional
curvature, and show biharmonic curve is k-harmonic curve $(k\geq 2)$.


  The assumptions inherent to global 21-cm signal analyses are rarely
delineated. In this paper, we formulate a general list of suppositions
underlying a given claimed detection of the global 21-cm signal. Then, we
specify the form of these assumptions for two different analyses: 1) the one
performed by the EDGES team showing an absorption trough in brightness
temperature that they modeled separately from the sky foreground and 2) a new,
so-called Minimum Assumption Analysis (MAA), that makes the most conservative
assumptions possible for the signal. We show fits using the EDGES analysis on
various beam-weighted foreground simulations from the EDGES latitude with no
signal added. Depending on the beam used, these simulations produce large false
troughs due to the invalidity of the foreground model to describe the
combination of beam chromaticity and the shape of the Galactic plane in the
sky, the residuals of which are captured by the ad hoc flattened Gaussian
signal model. On the other hand, the MAA provides robust fits by including many
spectra at different time bins and allowing any possible 21-cm spectrum to be
modeled exactly. We present uncertainty levels and example signal
reconstructions found with the MAA for different numbers of time bins. With
enough time bins, one can determine the true 21-cm signal with the MAA to $<10$
times the noise level.


  We derive fundamental precision bounds for single-point axial localization.
For the case of a Gaussian beam, this ultimate limit can be achieved with a
single intensity scan, provided the camera is placed at one of two optimal
transverse detection planes. Hence, for axial localization there is no need of
more complicated detection schemes. The theory is verified with an experimental
demonstration of axial resolution three orders of magnitude below the classical
depth of focus.


  Let $M$ be a compact Riemannian manifold not containing any totally geodesic
surface. Our main result shows that then the area of any complete surface
immersed into $M$ is bounded by a multiple of its extrinsic curvature energy,
i.e. by a multiple of the integral of the squared norm of its second
fundamental form.


  The structure of the gauge invariant (particle number preserving) C*-algebra
generated by the resolvents of a non-relativistic Bose field is analyzed. It is
shown to form a dense subalgebra of the bounded inverse limit of a system of
approximately finite dimensional C*-algebras. Based on this observation, it is
proven that the closure of the gauge invariant algebra is stable under the
dynamics induced by Hamiltonians involving pair potentials. These facts allow
to proceed to a description of interacting Bosons in terms of C*-dynamical
systems. It is outlined how the present approach leads to simplifications in
the construction of infinite bosonic states and sheds new light on topics in
many body theory.


  Recent advances in microscopy have enabled the rapid generation of terabytes
of image data in cell biology and biomedical research. Vision-language models
(VLMs) offer a promising solution for large-scale biological image analysis,
enhancing researchers' efficiency, identifying new image biomarkers, and
accelerating hypothesis generation and scientific discovery. However, there is
a lack of standardized, diverse, and large-scale vision-language benchmarks to
evaluate VLMs' perception and cognition capabilities in biological image
understanding. To address this gap, we introduce {\mu}-Bench, an expert-curated
benchmark encompassing 22 biomedical tasks across various scientific
disciplines (biology, pathology), microscopy modalities (electron,
fluorescence, light), scales (subcellular, cellular, tissue), and organisms in
both normal and abnormal states. We evaluate state-of-the-art biomedical,
pathology, and general VLMs on {\mu}-Bench and find that: i) current models
struggle on all categories, even for basic tasks such as distinguishing
microscopy modalities; ii) current specialist models fine-tuned on biomedical
data often perform worse than generalist models; iii) fine-tuning in specific
microscopy domains can cause catastrophic forgetting, eroding prior biomedical
knowledge encoded in their base model. iv) weight interpolation between
fine-tuned and pre-trained models offers one solution to forgetting and
improves general performance across biomedical tasks. We release {\mu}-Bench
under a permissive license to accelerate the research and development of
microscopy foundation models.


  Several past studies have described how absorption spectroscopy can be used
to determine spatial temperature variations along the optical path by measuring
the unique, nonlinear response to temperature of many molecular absorption
transitions and performing an inversion. New laser absorption spectroscopy
techniques are well-suited to this nonuniformity measurement, yet present
analysis approaches use only isolated features rather than a full broadband
spectral measurement. In this work, we develop a constrained spectral fitting
technique called E"-binning to fit an absorption spectrum arising from a
nonuniform environment. The information extracted from E"-binning is then input
to the inversion approach from the previous paper in this series (Malarich and
Rieker, JQSRT 107455) to determine the temperature distribution. We demonstrate
this approach by using dual frequency comb laser measurements to resolve
convection cells in a tube furnace. The recovered temperature distributions at
each measurement height agree with an existing natural convection model.
Finally, we show that for real-world measurements with noise and absorption
model error, increasing the bandwidth and the number of measured absorption
transitions may improve the temperature distribution precision. We make the
fitting code publicly available for use with any broadband absorption
measurement.


  We address the task of evaluating image description generation systems. We
propose a novel image-aware metric for this task: VIFIDEL. It estimates the
faithfulness of a generated caption with respect to the content of the actual
image, based on the semantic similarity between labels of objects depicted in
images and words in the description. The metric is also able to take into
account the relative importance of objects mentioned in human reference
descriptions during evaluation. Even if these human reference descriptions are
not available, VIFIDEL can still reliably evaluate system descriptions. The
metric achieves high correlation with human judgments on two well-known
datasets and is competitive with metrics that depend on human references


  The gravitational effect on the chiral phase structure at finite temperature
and density is investigated in the framework of Nambu--Jona-Lasinio model in
$D$-dimensional ultrastatic Einstein universe. In mean field approximation, the
thermodynamic potential and the gap equation determining the curvature,
temperature and density dependence of the chiral condensate are analytically
derived. In the sense of chiral symmetry restoration and the order of the phase
transition, the scalar curvature of the space-time plays similar role as the
temperature.


  In this paper we establish weak continuity results for the distribution
Jacobian minors in fractional sobolev spaces, which can be seen as a extension
of recent work of Brezis and Nguyen on the distributional Jacobian determinant.
Then we apply results to introduce the currents associated with graphs of maps
in fractional Sobolev spaces and study some relevant properties such as
structure properties, weak continuity and so on. As another application, we
extend the definition of functions of bounded higher variation, which defined
by Jerrard and Soner in $W^{1,N-1}\cap L^{\infty}(\Omega,\mathbb{R}^N)$ (
$\mbox{dim}\Omega\geq N$), to $W^{1-\frac{1}{N},N}(\Omega,\mathbb{R}^N)$ and
give some results including weak coarea formula, strong coarea formula and
chain rule.


  The impact of spin-orbit interactions in NdNiO2/SrTiO3(001) and
NdNiO2/KTaO3(001) is explored by performing density functional theory
simulations including a Coulomb repulsion term. Polarity mismatch drives the
emergence of an interfacial two-dimensional electron gas in NdNiO2/KTaO3(001)
involving the occupation of Ta $5d$ conduction-band states, which is twice as
pronounced as in NdNiO2/SrTiO3(001). We identify a significant anisotropic
$k^3$ Rashba spin splitting of the respective $d_{xy}$ states in both systems
that results from the broken inversion symmetry at the nickelate-substrate
interface and exceeds the width of the superconducting gap. In
NdNiO2/KTaO3(001), the splitting reaches 210 meV, which is comparable to
Bi(111) surface states. At the surface, the Ni $3d_{x^2-y^2}$-derived states
exhibit a linear Rashba effect with $\alpha_\text{R} \sim$ 125 meV \r{A},
exemplifying its orbital selectivity. The corresponding Fermi sheets present a
reconstructed circular shape due to the electrostatic doping, but undergo a
Lifshitz transition towards a cuprate-like topology deeper in the film that
coincides with a realignment of their spin texture. These results promote
surface and interface polarity as interesting design parameters to control
spin-orbit physics in infinite-layer nickelate heterostructures.


  Wireless sensor network consists of large number of tiny sensor nodes which
are usually deployed in a harsh environment. Self configuration and
infrastructure less are the two fundamental properties of sensor networks.
Sensor nodes are highly energy constrained devices because they are battery
operated devices and due to harsh environment deployment it is impossible to
change or recharge their battery. Energy conservation and prolonging the
network life are two major challenges in a sensor network. Communication
consumes the large portion of WSN energy. Several protocols have been proposed
to realize power- efficient communication in a wireless sensor network. Cluster
based routing protocols are best known for increasing energy efficiency,
stability and network lifetime of WSNs. Low Energy Adaptive Clustering
Hierarchy (LEACH) is an important protocol in this class. One of the
disadvantages of LEACH is that it does not consider the nodes energy and
distance for the election of cluster head. This paper proposes a new energy
efficient clustering protocol DE-LEACH for homogeneous wireless sensor network
which is an extension of LEACH. DE-LEACH elects cluster head on the basis of
distance and residual energy of the nodes. Proposed protocol increases the
network life, stability and throughput of sensor network and simulations result
shows that DE-LEACH is better than LEACH.


  The presence of strong interactions in a many-body quantum system can lead to
a variety of exotic effects. Here we show that even in a comparatively simple
setup consisting of a charged impurity in a weakly interacting bosonic medium
the competition of length scales gives rise to a highly correlated mesoscopic
state. Using quantum Monte Carlo simulations, we unravel its vastly different
polaronic properties compared to neutral quantum impurities. Moreover, we
identify a transition between the regime amenable to conventional perturbative
treatment in the limit of weak atom-ion interactions and a many-body bound
state with vanishing quasi-particle residue composed of hundreds of atoms. In
order to analyze the structure of the corresponding states we examine the
atom-ion and atom-atom correlation functions which both show nontrivial
properties. Our findings are directly relevant to experiments using hybrid
atom-ion setups that have recently attained the ultracold regime.


  We experimentally study equilibration across the sample edge at high
fractional filling factors 4/3, 5/3 under experimental conditions, which allow
us to obtain high imbalance conditions. We find a lack of the full
equilibration across the edge even in the flat-band situation, where no
potential barrier survives at the sample edge. We interpret this result as the
manifestation of complicated edge excitation structure at high fractional
filling factors 4/3, 5/3. Also, a mobility gap in the $\nu_c=1$ incompressible
strip is determined in normal and tilted magnetic fields.


  We consider the photon-assisted tunneling (PAT) and the
Landau-Zener-Stueckelberg (LZS) interference for double quantum dots induced
electrostatically along a semiconducting carbon nanotube. An atomistic
tight-binding approach and the time-dependent configuration interaction method
are employed for description of the systems of a few confined electrons and
holes. We reproduce the patterns of the LZS interference recently observed for
the quantum double dots describing transport across hole-localized states.
Moreover, we indicate that for charge configurations for which the ground-state
is Pauli blocked PAT can be used for resolution of the transitions that involve
spin-flip or intervalley transitions without the spin-valley conserving
background signal.


  Heavy-tailed error distributions and predictors with anomalous values are
ubiquitous in high-dimensional regression problems and can seriously jeopardize
the validity of statistical analyses if not properly addressed. For more
reliable estimation under these adverse conditions, we propose a new robust
regularized estimator for simultaneous variable selection and coefficient
estimation. This estimator, called adaptive PENSE, possesses the oracle
property without prior knowledge of the scale of the residuals and without any
moment conditions on the error distribution. The proposed estimator gives
reliable results even under very heavy-tailed error distributions and aberrant
contamination in the predictors or residuals. Importantly, even in these
challenging settings variable selection by adaptive PENSE remains stable.
Numerical studies on simulated and real data sets highlight superior
finite-sample performance in a vast range of settings compared to other robust
regularized estimators in the case of contaminated samples and competitiveness
compared to classical regularized estimators in clean samples.


  The fcc Lennard-Jones crystal is used as a generic model of solid to study
the elastic properties of thin films as a function of thickness and
temperature. The Monte Carlo algorithm is used to calculate the average
deformations along the axes in the isostress-isothermal ensemble that mimics a
real uniaxial loading experiment. The four independent parameters (tetragonal
symmetry The fcc Lennard-Jones crystal is used as a generic model of solid to
study the elastic properties of thin films as a function of thickness and
temperature. The Monte Carlo algorithm is used to calculate the average
deformations along the axes in the isostress-isothermal ensemble that mimics a
real uniaxial loading experiment. The four independent parameters (tetragonal
symmetry without shear) have been calculated for film thicknesses ranging from
4 to 12 atomic layers, and for five reduced temperatures between 0 and 0.5
sigma/kB, where sigma is the energetic parameter of the Lennard Jones potential
and kB is Boltzmann's constant. These parameters (Poisson's ratio and moduli)
give the compliance matrix, which is inverted to get the stiffness
coefficients. It is shown that the three Poisson's ratios exhibit a good
linearity with the inverse of the film thickness, while this is not the case
for the moduli and the compliance coefficients. Remarkably, the stiffness
coefficients do exhibit a good linearity with the inverse of the film
thickness, including the limiting value of infinite thickness (bulk solid)
obtained by applying periodic boundary conditions in all directions. This
linearity suggests to interpret the results in terms of a bulk+surface
decomposition. However, the surface stiffness matrix deduced from the slopes
has nonzero components along the out-of-plane direction, an unexpected
observation in the framework of the surface stress theory.


  The hypothesis that direct human intention can modulate the concurrent
outcomes of a stochastic process has been under test for over 35 years,
surrounded by inconclusive evidence and a great amount of ambiguity. An
increased interest has recently and prematurely risen concerning possible
scientific applications of such effects. The amassed information around the
purported phenomena, as presented in a meta-analysis, is thoroughly re-examined
here through the application of several recognised mathematical tools. It is
shown that there exists no validation of the hypothesis of brain-machine
interaction precisely in absence of interface devices. It is concluded that any
evidence in favour of the alleged intangible brain-machine effects, must have
resulted from unintended errors during data collection and treatment, known as
the experimenter expectancy effect.


  Conversational agents are consistently growing in popularity and many people
interact with them every day. While many conversational agents act as personal
assistants, they can have many different goals. Some are task-oriented, such as
providing customer support for a bank or making a reservation. Others are
designed to be empathetic and to form emotional connections with the user. The
Alexa Prize Challenge aims to create a socialbot, which allows the user to
engage in coherent conversations, on a range of popular topics that will
interest the user. Here we describe Athena 2.0, UCSC's conversational agent for
Amazon's Socialbot Grand Challenge 4. Athena 2.0 utilizes a novel
knowledge-grounded discourse model that tracks the entity links that Athena
introduces into the dialogue, and uses them to constrain named-entity
recognition and linking, and coreference resolution. Athena 2.0 also relies on
a user model to personalize topic selection and other aspects of the
conversation to individual users.


  The history of rivers on Mars is an important constraint on Martian climate
evolution. The timing of relatively young, alluvial fan-forming rivers is
especially important, as Mars' Amazonian atmosphere is thought to have been too
thin to consistently support surface liquid water. Previous regional studies
suggested that alluvial fans formed primarily between the Early Hesperian and
the Early Amazonian. In this study, we describe how a combination of a global
impact crater database, a global geologic map, a global alluvial fan database,
and statistical models can be used to estimate the timing of alluvial fan
formation across Mars. Using our global approach and improved statistical
modeling, we find that alluvial fan formation likely persisted into the last
~2.5 Gyr, well into the Amazonian period. However, the data we analyzed was
insufficient to place constraints on the duration of alluvial fan formation.
Going forward, more crater data will enable tighter constraints on the
parameters estimated in our models and thus further inform our understanding of
Mars' climate evolution.


  Fast and accurate path planning is important for ground robots to achieve
safe and efficient autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments.
However, most existing methods exploiting either 2D or 2.5D maps struggle to
balance the efficiency and safety for ground robots navigating in such
challenging scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid map
representation by fusing a 2D grid and a 2.5D digital elevation map. Based on
it, a novel path planning method is proposed, which considers the robot poses
during traversability estimation. By doing so, our method explicitly takes
safety as a planning constraint enabling robots to navigate unstructured
environments smoothly.The proposed approach has been evaluated on both
simulated datasets and a real robot platform. The experimental results
demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method. Compared
to state-of-the-art baseline methods, the proposed approach consistently
generates safer and easier paths for the robot in different unstructured
outdoor environments. The implementation of our method is publicly available at
https://github.com/nubot-nudt/T-Hybrid-planner.


  Liquid Argon time projection chamber (LArTPC) is a promising detector
technology for future neutrino experiments. MicroBooNE is an upcoming LArTPC
neutrino experiment which will be located on-axis of Booster Neutrino Beam
(BNB) at Fermilab, USA. The R&D efforts on this detection method and related
neutrino interaction measurements are discussed.


  A new anomaly-free gauged $U(1)_\ell$ lepton-number model is studied. Two
standard model lepton generations acquire the same but oppositive sign
$U(1)_\ell$ charges, while four exotic chiral leptons cancel the anomalies of
the remaining lepton family. We discuss a simplified case which has the
universal Yukawa couplings. It agrees with all the experimental constraints and
predicts $m_e, m_\mu \ll m_\tau$, and the latter is of the electroweak scale.
Due to the interference between the SM and $U(1)_\ell$ gauge interactions, this
model robustly predicts that $e,\mu,\tau$ have distinctive forward-backward
asymmetries at the $e^+e^-$ colliders. It can be searched for at the $e^+e^-$
machine with $\sim$ TeV center-of-mass energy and an integrated luminosity
$\sim ab^{-1}$.


  Integral symplectic 4-manifolds may be described in terms of Lefschetz
fibrations. In this note we give a formula for the signature of any Lefschetz
fibration in terms of the second cohomology of the moduli space of stable
curves. As a consequence we see that the sphere in moduli space defined by any
(not necessarily holomorphic) Lefschetz fibration has positive "symplectic
volume"; it evaluates positively with the Kahler class. Some other applications
of the signature formula and some more general results for genus two fibrations
are discussed.


  We perform a detailed study of temperature, bias and doping dependance of
interlayer transport in the layered high temperature superconductor
Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+\delta}$. We observe that the shape of interlayer
characteristics in underdoped crystals exhibit a remarkable crossover at the
superconducting transition temperature: from thermal activation-type at
$T>T_c$, to almost $T-$independent quantum tunneling-type, at $T<T_c$. Our data
indicates that the interlayer transport mechanism may change with doping: from
the conventional single quasiparticle tunneling in overdoped, to a
progressively increasing Cooper pair contribution in underdoped crystals.


  Visual Place Recognition (VPR) has seen significant advances at the frontiers
of matching performance and computational superiority over the past few years.
However, these evaluations are performed for ground-based mobile platforms and
cannot be generalized to aerial platforms. The degree of viewpoint variation
experienced by aerial robots is complex, with their processing power and
on-board memory limited by payload size and battery ratings. Therefore, in this
paper, we collect $8$ state-of-the-art VPR techniques that have been previously
evaluated for ground-based platforms and compare them on $2$ recently proposed
aerial place recognition datasets with three prime focuses: a) Matching
performance b) Processing power consumption c) Projected memory requirements.
This gives a birds-eye view of the applicability of contemporary VPR research
to aerial robotics and lays down the the nature of challenges for aerial-VPR.


  In present work it is suggested the concept of continual multi-electrode
system being realized on the elongated electrically conducting element immersed
into electrolyte. Conjugation of such kind of system with the point-contact
structure creates the unique electrode architecture and permits realizing of
the auto-oscillation process of electrochemical commutation at atomic scale.
During this process the nanostructure is being realized in a form of point
contact at the place of the mutual touching of the dendrite top and
counter-electrode. The ability of point contacts to concentrate the electric
field in assemblage with the peculiar properties of elongated element causes
unambiguously the localization of all the electrochemical transformations at
the dendrite top, where contact is forming.


  Listed as No. 53 among the one hundred famous unsolved problems in [J. A.
Bondy, U. S. R. Murty, Graph Theory, Springer, Berlin, 2008] is Steinberg's
conjecture, which states that every planar graph without 4- and 5-cycles is
3-colorable. In this paper, we show that plane graphs without 4- and 5-cycles
are 3-colorable if they have no ext-triangular 7-cycles. This implies that (1)
planar graphs without 4-, 5-, 7-cycles are 3-colorable, and (2) planar graphs
without 4-, 5-, 8-cycles are 3-colorable, which cover a number of known results
in the literature motivated by Steinberg's conjecture.


  The polymer phases of AC60 form distinct crystal structures characterized by
the mutual orientations of the (C60-)n chains. We show that the direct electric
quadrupole interaction between chains always favors the orthorhombic structure
Pmnn with alternating chain orientations. However the specific quadrupolar
polarizability of the alkali metal ions leads to an indirect interchain
coupling which favors the monoclinic structure I2/m with equal chain
orientations. The competition between direct and indirect interactions explains
the structural difference between KC60 and RbC60, CsC60.


  The Pierre Auger Observatory has a unique potential to search for ultra-high
energy photons (above ~1 EeV). First experimental limits on photons were
obtained during construction of the southern part of the Observatory.
Remarkably, already these limits have proven useful to falsify proposals about
the origin of cosmic rays, and to perform fundamental physics by constraining
Lorentz violation. A final discovery of photons at the upper end of the
electromagnetic spectrum is likely to impact various branches of physics and
astronomy.


  We consider the effect of warping on the distribution of type IIB flux vacua
constructed with Calabi-Yau orientifolds. We derive an analytical form of the
distribution that incorporates warping and find close agreement with the
results of a Monte Carlo enumeration of vacua. Compared with calculations that
neglect warping, we find that for any finite volume compactification, the
density of vacua is highly diluted in close proximity to the conifold point,
with a steep drop-off within a critical distance.


  The Lyman continuum (LyC) flux escaping from high-z galaxies into the IGM is
a fundamental quantity to understand the physical processes involved in the
reionization epoch. We have investigated a sample of star-forming galaxies at
z~3.3 in order to search for possible detections of LyC photons escaping from
galaxy halos. UV deep imaging in the COSMOS field obtained with the prime focus
camera LBC at the LBT telescope was used together with a catalog of
spectroscopic redshifts obtained by the VIMOS Ultra Deep Survey (VUDS) to build
a sample of 45 galaxies at z~3.3 with L>0.5L*. We obtained deep LBC images of
galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts in the interval 3.27<z<3.40 both in the R
and deep U bands. A sub-sample of 10 galaxies apparently shows escape
fractions>28% but a detailed analysis of their properties reveals that, with
the exception of two marginal detections (S/N~2) in the U band, all the other 8
galaxies are most likely contaminated by the UV flux of low-z interlopers
located close to the high-z targets. The average escape fraction derived from
the stacking of the cleaned sample was constrained to fesc_rel<2%. The implied
HI photo-ionization rate is a factor two lower than that needed to keep the IGM
ionized at z~3, as observed in the Lyman forest of high-z QSO spectra or by the
proximity effect. These results support a scenario where high redshift,
relatively bright (L>0.5L*) star-forming galaxies alone are unable to sustain
the level of ionization observed in the cosmic IGM at z~3. Star-forming
galaxies at higher redshift and at fainter luminosities (L<<L*) can be the
major contributors to the reionization of the Universe only if their physical
properties are subject to rapid changes from z~3 to z~6-10. Alternatively,
ionizing sources could be discovered looking for fainter sources among the AGN
population at high-z.


  LiBC, a semiconducting ternary borocarbide constituted of the lightest
elements only, has been synthesized and characterized by x-ray powder
diffraction, dielectric spectroscopy, and conductivity measurements. Utilizing
an infrared microscope the phonon spectrum has been investigated in single
crystals. The in-plane B-C stretching mode has been detected at 150 meV,
noticeably higher than in AlB2, a non-superconducting isostructural analog of
MgB2. It is this stretching mode, which reveals a strong electron-phonon
coupling in MgB2, driving it into a superconducting state below 40 K, and is
believed to mediate predicted high-temperature superconductivity in hole-doped
LiBC [H. Rosner, A. Kitaigorodsky, and W. E. Pickett, Phys. Rev. Lett. 88,
127001 (2002)].


  I propose an extension to Boltzmann BGK equation for Hard Spheres. The
present model has an $H$-theorem and it allows choice of Prandtl number as an
independent parameter. I show that similar to Enskog equation this equation can
reproduce dynamics of hard spheres in dense systems.


  For every genus $g\geq 2$, we construct an infinite family of strongly
quasipositive fibred knots having the same Seifert form as the torus knot
$T(2,2g+1)$. In particular, their signatures and four-genera are maximal and
their homological monodromies (hence their Alexander module structures) agree.
On the other hand, the geometric stretching factors are pairwise distinct and
the knots are pairwise not ribbon concordant.


  The mass and age of substellar objects are degenerate parameters leaving the
evolutionary state of brown dwarfs ambiguous without additional information.
Theoretical models are normally used to help distinguish between old, massive
brown dwarfs and young, low mass brown dwarfs but these models have yet to be
properly calibrated. We have carried out an infrared high-contrast imaging
program with the goal of detecting substellar objects as companions to nearby
stars to help break degeneracies in inferred physical properties such as mass,
age, and composition. Rather than using imaging observations alone, our targets
are pre-selected based on the existence of dynamical accelerations informed
from years of stellar radial velocity (RV) measurements. In this paper, we
present the discovery of a rare benchmark brown dwarf orbiting the nearby
($d=18.69\pm0.19$ pc), solar-type (G9V) star HD 4747 ([Fe/H]=$-0.22\pm0.04$)
with a projected separation of only $\rho=11.3\pm0.2$ AU ($\theta \approx$
0.6"). Precise Doppler measurements taken over 18 years reveal the companion's
orbit and allow us to place strong constraints on its mass using dynamics ($m
\sin(i) = 55.3\pm1.9M_J$). Relative photometry ($\Delta K_s=9.05\pm0.14$,
$M_{K_s}=13.00\pm0.14$, $K_s - L' = 1.34\pm0.46$) indicates that HD 4747 B is
most-likely a late-type L-dwarf and, if near the L/T transition, an intriguing
source for studying cloud physics, variability, and polarization. We estimate a
model-dependent mass of $m=72^{+3}_{-13}M_J$ for an age of $3.3^{+2.3}_{-1.9}$
Gyr based on gyrochronology. Combining astrometric measurements with RV data,
we calculate the companion dynamical mass ($m=60.2\pm3.3M_J$) and orbit
($e=0.740\pm0.002$) directly. As a new mass, age, and metallicity benchmark, HD
4747 B will serve as a laboratory for precision astrophysics to test
theoretical models that describe the emergent radiation of brown dwarfs.


  We solve the optimal control problem of a one-dimensional reflected
stochastic differential equation, whose coefficients can be path dependent. The
value function of this problem is characterized by a backward stochastic
partial differential equation (BSPDE) with Neumann boundary conditions. We
prove the existence and uniqueness of sufficiently regular solution for this
BSPDE, which is then used to construct the optimal feedback control. In fact we
prove a more general result: The existence and uniqueness of strong solution
for the Neumann problem for general nonlinear BSPDEs, which might be of
interest even out of the current context.


  We study the dynamics of semiclassical electrons in (gapped) graphene in two
complementary limits, i.e. in the Klein tunneling and valley Hall effect
regimes, by scattering wave packets off armchair step potentials and by
exposing wave packets to a uniform electric field, respectively. Our numerical
wave packet simulation goes beyond semiclassical analytical approximations and
standard Klein tunneling treatments and allows to study intra- and intervalley
scattering processes. We find distinct Klein tunneling characteristics for low
and tall steps, which include unusual Berry curvature induced side shifts of
the scattered wave packet trajectories. In the presence of a uniform field, our
simulations capture the semiclassical valley Hall effect which manifests in the
form of laterally shifted Bloch oscillations. Such anomalous trajectory
corrections can be relevant for Klein tunneling experiments and electron optics
devices. We present detailed simulation results.


  Let $X$ and $Y$ be Banach spaces such that the ideal of operators which
factor through $Y$ has codimension one in the Banach algebra $\mathscr{B}(X)$
of all bounded operators on $X$, and suppose that $Y$ contains a complemented
subspace which is isomorphic to $Y\oplus Y$ and that $X$ is isomorphic to
$X\oplus Z$ for every complemented subspace $Z$ of $Y$. Then the $K_0$-group of
$\mathscr{B}(X)$ is isomorphic to the additive group $\mathbb{Z}$ of integers.
  A number of Banach spaces which satisfy the above conditions are identified.
Notably, it follows that $K_0(\mathscr{B}(C([0,\omega_1])))\cong\mathbb{Z}$,
where $C([0,\omega_1])$ denotes the Banach space of scalar-valued, continuous
functions defined on the compact Hausdorff space of ordinals not exceeding the
first uncountable ordinal $\omega_1$, endowed with the order topology.


  We consider a system of anisotropic plates in the three-dimensional
continuum, interacting via purely hard core interactions. We assume that the
particles have a finite number of allowed orientations. In a suitable range of
densities, we prove the existence of a uni-axial nematic phase, characterized
by long range orientational order (the minor axes are aligned parallel to each
other, while the major axes are not) and no translational order. The proof is
based on a coarse graining procedure, which allows us to map the plate model
into a contour model, and in a rigorous control of the resulting contour
theory, via Pirogov-Sinai methods.


  This paper describes the submissions of the "Marian" team to the WNMT 2018
shared task. We investigate combinations of teacher-student training,
low-precision matrix products, auto-tuning and other methods to optimize the
Transformer model on GPU and CPU. By further integrating these methods with the
new averaging attention networks, a recently introduced faster Transformer
variant, we create a number of high-quality, high-performance models on the GPU
and CPU, dominating the Pareto frontier for this shared task.


  We propose a novel method for protecting trained models with a secret key so
that unauthorized users without the correct key cannot get the correct
inference. By taking advantage of transfer learning, the proposed method
enables us to train a large protected model like a model trained with ImageNet
by using a small subset of a training dataset. It utilizes a learnable
encryption step with a secret key to generate learnable transformed images.
Models with pre-trained weights are fine-tuned by using such transformed
images. In experiments with the ImageNet dataset, it is shown that the
performance of a protected model was close to that of a non-protected model
when the correct key was given, while the accuracy tremendously dropped when an
incorrect key was used. The protected model was also demonstrated to be robust
against key estimation attacks.


  We propose Auger-like process assisted by quantum defects in metal halide
perovskite quantum dots, where a charge carrier in the ground state of the
quantum dot is trapped by quantum defects, resulting in another charge carrier
in defect is excited and returns back to the ground state of the quantum dot.
We find that the whole process is on the femtosecond scale. More importantly,
the process is independent of the depth and species of the defects, which is in
good agreement with the recent theoretical prediction using ab initio
nonadiabatic molecular dynamics simulation. This Auger-like process may provide
a potential explanation of high defect tolerance in metal halide perovskite
materials.


  Impurity scattering is found to lead to quasi-one dimensional nanoscale
modulation of the local density of states in the iron pnictides and
chalcogenides. This `quasiparticle interference' feature is remarkably similar
across a wide variety of pnictide and chalcogenide phases, suggesting a common
origin. We show that a unified understanding of the experiments can be obtained
by simply invoking a four-fold symmetry breaking $d_{xz}-d_{yz}$ orbital
splitting, of a magnitude already suggested by the experiments. This can
explain the one-dimensional characteristics in the local density of states
observed in the orthorhombic nematic, tetragonal paramagnetic, as well as the
spin-density wave and superconducting states in these materials.


  The paper addresses a two-temperature model for simulating compressible
two-phase flow taking into account diffusion processes related to the heat
conduction and viscosity of the phases. This model is reduced from the
two-phase Baer-Nunziato model in the limit of complete velocity relaxation and
consists of the phase mass and energy balance equations, the mixture momentum
equation, and a transport equation for the volume fraction.Terms describing
effects of mechanical relaxation, temperature relaxation, and thermal
conduction on volume fraction evolution are derived and demonstrated to be
significant for heat conduction problems. The thermal conduction leads to
instantaneous thermal relaxation so that the temperature equilibrium is always
maintained in the interface region with meeting the entropy relations. A
numerical method is developed to solve the model governing equations that
ensures the pressure-velocity-temperature (PVT) equilibrium condition in its
high-order extension. We solve the hyperbolic part of the governing equations
with the Godunov method with the HLLC approximate Riemann solver. The
non-linear parabolic part is solved with an efficient Chebyshev explicit
iterative method without dealing with large sparse matrices. To verify the
model and numerical methods proposed,we demonstrate numerical results of
several numerical tests such as the multiphase shock tube problem, the
multiphase impact problem, and the planar ablative Rayleigh-Taylor instability
problem.


  We study different architectures for a photonic crystal in the microwave
regime based on superconducting transmission lines interrupted by Josephson
junctions, both in one and two dimensions. A study of the scattering properties
of a single junction in the line shows that the junction behaves as a perfect
mirror when the photon frequency matches the Josephson plasma frequency. We
generalize our calculations to periodic arrangements of junctions,
demonstrating that they can be used for tunable band engineering, forming what
we call a quantum circuit crystal. Two applications are discussed in detail. In
a two-dimensional structure we demonstrate the phenomenon of negative
refraction. We finish by studying the creation of stationary entanglement
between two superconducting qubits interacting through a disordered media.


  We have studied the characteristic timescales of 80 AGNs at 22, 37 and 90 GHz
examining the properties of the wavelet method and comparing them to
traditional Fourier-based methods commonly used in astronomy. We used the
continuous wavelet transform with the Morlet wavelet to study the
characteristic timescales. We also gain information when the timescale is
present in the flux curve and if it is persistent or not. Our results show that
the sources are not periodic and changes in the timescales over a long time are
common. The property of wavelets to be able to distinguish when the timescale
has been present is superior to the Fourier-based methods. Therefore we
consider it appropriate to use wavelets when the quasi-periodicities in AGNs
are studied.


  Differential cross sections for top quark pair ($\mathrm{t\bar{t}}$)
production are measured in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy
of 13 TeV using a sample of events containing two oppositely charged leptons.
The data were recorded with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC and correspond to
an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{-1}$. The differential cross sections are
measured as functions of kinematic observables of the $\mathrm{t\bar{t}}$
system, the top quark and antiquark and their decay products, as well as of the
number of additional jets in the event. The results are presented as functions
of up to three variables and are corrected to the parton and particle levels.
When compared to standard model predictions based on quantum chromodynamics at
different levels of accuracy, it is found that the calculations do not always
describe the observed data. The deviations are found to be largest for the
multi-differential cross sections.


  We report photometric and spectroscopic observations of the eclipsing SU
UMa-type dwarf nova ASASSN-18aan. We observed the 2018 superoutburst with 2.3
mag brightening and found the orbital period ($P_{\rm orb}$) to be 0.149454(3)
d, or 3.59 hr. This is longward of the period gap, establishing ASASSN-18aan as
one of a small number of long-$P_{\rm orb}$ SU UMa-type dwarf novae. The
estimated mass ratio, ($q=M_2/M_1 = 0.278(1)$), is almost identical to the
upper limit of tidal instability by the 3:1 resonance. From eclipses, we found
that the accretion disk at the onset of the superoutburst may reach the 3:1
resonance radius, suggesting that the superoutburst of ASASSN-18aan results
from the tidal instability. Considering the case of long-$P_{\rm orb}$ WZ
Sge-type dwarf novae, we suggest that the tidal dissipation at the tidal
truncation radius is enough to induce SU UMa-like behavior in relatively
high-$q$ systems such as SU UMa-type dwarf novae, but that this is no longer
effective in low-$q$ systems such as WZ Sge-type dwarf novae. The unusual
nature of the system extends to the secondary star, for which we find a
spectral type of G9, much earlier than typical for the orbital period, and a
secondary mass $M_2$ of around 0.18 M$_{\odot}$, smaller than expected for the
orbital period and the secondary's spectral type. We also see indications of
enhanced sodium abundance in the secondary's spectrum. Anomalously hot
secondaries are seen in a modest number of other CVs and related objects. These
systems evidently underwent significant nuclear evolution before the onset of
mass transfer. In the case of ASASSN-18aan, this apparently resulted in a mass
ratio lower than typically found at the system's $P_{\rm orb}$, which may
account for the occurrence of a superoutburst at this relatively long period.


  For a general formulation of linearised hybrid inverse problems in impedance
tomography, the qualitative properties of the solutions are analysed. Using an
appropriate scalar pseudo-differential formulation, the problems are shown to
permit propagating singularities under certain non-elliptic conditions, and the
associated directions of propagation are precisely identified relative to the
directions in which ellipticity is lost. The same result is found in the
setting for the corresponding normal formulation of the scalar
pseudo-differential equations. A numerical reconstruction procedure based of
the least squares finite element method is derived, and a series of numerical
experiments visualise exactly how the loss of ellipticity manifests itself as
propagating singularities.


  This note treats the notion of Lagrange derivative for the third order
mechanics in the context of covariant Riemannian geometry. The variational
differential equation for geodesic circles in two dimensions is obtained. The
influence of the curvature tensor on the Lagrange derivative leads to the
emergence of the notion of quasiclassical spin in the pseudo-Riemannian case.


  South Africa is in the fortunate position of having access to high-quality
wind and solar resources promising energy production costs well below the ones
projected for future installations of thermal generation; yet the feasibility
of a low carbon energy system is still under scrutiny. This study introduces a
spatially and temporally resolved techno-economic model co-optimising
generation and transmission capacity investments and operation. 27 supply
regions in South Africa are equipped with a year of time-series in hourly
resolution based on the IRP2016 base-case assumptions. Eight different
scenarios representing different restrictions on renewable generation and
mitigation efforts of GHG emissions are evaluated and discussed. 70% of energy
from renewable sources were found to be cost-optimally integrated using
flexible gas generation and the expansion of several transmission corridors. A
95% CO${}_2$ reduction leads to a moderate 20% cost increase. The open-source
nature of the model and restriction to freely available data encourages an
accessible and transparent discussion about the future South African energy
system, primarily based on renewable wind and solar resources.


  For the search for additional Higgs bosons in the Minimal Supersymmetric
Standard Model (MSSM) as well as for future precision analyses in the Higgs
sector a precise knowledge of their decay properties is mandatory. We evaluate
all two-body decay modes of the Higgs bosons into charginos and neutralinos in
the MSSM with complex parameters (cMSSM). The evaluation is based on a full
one-loop calculation of all decay channels, also including hard QED radiation.
We restricted ourselves to a version of our renormalization scheme which is
valid for |M_1| < |M_2|, |mu| and M_2 != mu to simplify the analysis, even
though we are able to switch to other parameter regions. The dependence of the
Higgs boson predictions on the relevant cMSSM parameters is analyzed
numerically. We find sizable contributions to many partial decay widths. They
are roughly of 10% of the tree-level results, but can go up to 20% or higher.
The full one-loop contributions are important for the correct interpretation of
heavy Higgs boson search results at the LHC and, if kinematically allowed, at a
future linear e+e- collider. It is planned to implement the evaluation of the
branching ratios of the Higgs bosons into the Fortran code FeynHiggs, together
with an automated choice of the renormalization scheme valid for the full cMSSM
parameter space.


  We explore constraints on inflationary models employing data on large scale
structure mainly from COBE temperature anisotropies and IRAS selected galaxy
surveys, taking care not to apply linear perturbation theory to data in the
non-linear regime. In models where the tensor contribution to the COBE signal
is negligible, we find the spectral index of density fluctuations $n$ must
exceed 0.7. Furthermore the COBE signal cannot be dominated by the tensor
component, implying $n>0.85$ in such models. The data favors cold plus hot dark
matter models with $n$ close to unity and $\Omega_{HDM} \sim 0.20 - 0.35$. We
present realistic grand unified theories, including supersymmetric versions,
which produce inflation with these properties.


  Recently several datasets have been proposed to encourage research in
Question Answering domains where commonsense knowledge is expected to play an
important role. Recent language models such as ROBERTA, BERT and GPT that have
been pre-trained on Wikipedia articles and books have shown reasonable
performance with little fine-tuning on several such Multiple Choice
Question-Answering (MCQ) datasets. Our goal in this work is to develop methods
to incorporate additional (commonsense) knowledge into language model-based
approaches for better question-answering in such domains. In this work, we
first categorize external knowledge sources, and show performance does improve
on using such sources. We then explore three different strategies for knowledge
incorporation and four different models for question-answering using external
commonsense knowledge. We analyze our predictions to explore the scope of
further improvements.


  The experimental data of BELLE Collaboration on the exclusive charmed meson
pair production in the process of monophotonic $e^+e^-$-annihilation
($e^+e^-\to \gamma^* \to D\bar D$) has been studied. It has been shown that
these data is described satisfactorily in the frame work of constituent quark
model. Our studies have demonstrated that the central production process
$e^+e^-\to e^+e^-\gamma\gamma \to e^+e^-D\bar D +X$ and the process of
monophotonic $e^+e^-$-annihilation yield comparable numbers of the charmed
meson pairs.


  Molecular surface representations have been advertised as a great tool to
study protein structure and functions, including protein-ligand binding
affinity modeling. However, the conventional surface-area-based methods fail to
deliver a competitive performance on the energy scoring tasks. The main reason
is the lack of crucial physical and chemical interactions encoded in the
molecular surface generations. We present novel molecular surface
representations embedded in different scales of the element interactive
manifolds featuring the dramatically dimensional reduction and accurately
physical and biological properties encoders. Those low-dimensional
surface-based descriptors are ready to be paired with any advanced machine
learning algorithms to explore the essential structure-activity relationships
that give rise to the element interactive surface area-based scoring functions
(EISA-score). The newly developed EISA-score has outperformed many
state-of-the-art models, including various well-established surface-related
representations, in standard PDBbind benchmarks.


  We give a new description to obtain the shear viscosity in QCD at finite
temperature. Firstly, we obtain the correlation function of the renormalized
energy-momentum tensor using the gradient flow method. Secondly, we estimate
the spectral function from the smeared correlation functions using the sparse
modeling method. The combination of these two methods looks promising to
determine the shear viscosity precisely.


  As processes around hybrid work, spatially distant collaborations, and
work-life boundaries grow increasingly complex, managing workers' schedules for
synchronous meetings has become a critical aspect of building successful global
teams. However, gaps remain in our understanding of workers' scheduling
preferences and practices, which we aim to fill in this large-scale,
mixed-methods study of individuals calendars in a multinational organization.
Using interviews with eight participants, survey data from 165 respondents, and
telemetry data from millions of meetings scheduled by 211 thousand workers, we
characterize scheduling preferences, practices, and their relationship with
each other and organizational factors. We find that temporal preferences can be
broadly classified as either cyclical, such as suitability of certain days, or
relational, such as dispersed meetings, at various time scales. Furthermore,
our results suggest that these preferences are disconnected from actual
practice--albeit with several notable exceptions--and that individual
differences are associated with factors like meeting load, time-zones,
importance of meetings to job function, and job titles. We discuss key themes
for our findings, along with the implications for calendar and scheduling
systems and socio-technical systems more broadly.


  We compare level-set percolation for Gaussian free fields (GFFs) defined on a
rectangular subset of $\delta \mathbb{Z}^2$ to level-set percolation for GFFs
defined on the corresponding metric graph as the mesh size $\delta$ goes to 0.
In particular, we look at the probability that there is a path that crosses the
rectangle in the horizontal direction on which the field is positive. We show
this probability is strictly larger in the discrete graph. In the metric graph
case, we show that for appropriate boundary conditions the probability that
there exists a closed pivotal edge for the horizontal crossing event decays
logarithmically in $\delta$. In the discrete graph case, we compute the limit
of the probability of a horizontal crossing for appropriate boundary
conditions.


  We study the correlations of directions $P_0 P$ in the Euclidean plane, where
$P_0$ is a point in a fixed disc, $P$ is an integer lattice point in the square
$[-Q,Q]^2$, and $Q\to \infty$.


  We revise the steady vortex surface theory following the recent finding of
asymmetric vortex sheets (AM,2021). These surfaces avoid the Kelvin-Helmholtz
instability by adjusting their discontinuity and shape. The vorticity collapses
to the sheet only in an exceptional case considered long ago by Burgers and
Townsend, where it decays as a Gaussian on both sides of the sheet. In generic
asymmetric vortex sheets (Shariff,2021), vorticity leaks to one side or
another, making such sheets inadequate for vortex sheet statistics and
anomalous dissipation.
  We conjecture that the vorticity in a turbulent flow collapses on a special
kind of surface (confined vortex surface, or CVS), satisfying some equations
involving the tangent components of the local strain tensor.
  The most important qualitative observation is that the inequality needed for
this solution's stability breaks the Euler dynamics' time reversibility. We
interpret this as dynamic irreversibility. We have also represented the
enstrophy as a surface integral, conserved in the Navier-Stokes equation in the
turbulent limit, with vortex stretching and viscous diffusion terms exactly
canceling each other on the CVS surfaces.
  We have studied the CVS equations for the cylindrical vortex surface for an
arbitrary constant background strain with two different eigenvalues. This
equation reduces to a particular version of the stationary Birkhoff-Rott
equation for the 2D flow with an extra nonanalytic term. We study some general
properties of this equation and reduce its solution to a fixed point of a map
on a sphere, guaranteed to exist by the Brouwer theorem.


  The recent development of the Velocity Gradient Technique allows observers to
map magnetic field orientations and magnetization using the direction of
velocity gradients. Aside from the directions, amplitudes of velocity gradients
also contain valuable information about the underlying properties of
magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. In this paper, we explore what physical
information is contained in the amplitudes of velocity gradients and discuss
how this information can be used to diagnose properties of turbulence in both
diffuse and self-gravitating interstellar media. We identify the relations
between amplitudes of both intensity and velocity centroid gradients and the
sonic Mach number $M_s$ and they are consistent with the theory's predictions.
We test the robustness of the method and discuss how to utilize the amplitudes
of gradients into self-gravitating media. To extend the velocity gradient
technique we also discuss the usage of amplitude method to Position-Position
Velocity (PPV) space as a possible way to retrieve the velocity channel maps
before the contamination of thermal broadening. We discuss that the Velocity
Gradient Technique with these advancements could potentially give a
significantly more accurate statistical insight into the properties magnetized
turbulence.


  The standard paradigm for the analysis of genome-wide association studies
involves carrying out association tests at both typed and imputed SNPs. These
methods will not be optimal for detecting the signal of association at SNPs
that are not currently known or in regions where allelic heterogeneity occurs.
We propose a novel association test, complementary to the SNP-based approaches,
that attempts to extract further signals of association by explicitly modeling
and estimating both unknown SNPs and allelic heterogeneity at a locus. At each
site we estimate the genealogy of the case-control sample by taking advantage
of the HapMap haplotypes across the genome. Allelic heterogeneity is modeled by
allowing more than one mutation on the branches of the genealogy. Our use of
Bayesian methods allows us to assess directly the evidence for a causative SNP
not well correlated with known SNPs and for allelic heterogeneity at each
locus. Using simulated data and real data from the WTCCC project, we show that
our method (i) produces a significant boost in signal and accurately identifies
the form of the allelic heterogeneity in regions where it is known to exist,
(ii) can suggest new signals that are not found by testing typed or imputed
SNPs and (iii) can provide more accurate estimates of effect sizes in regions
of association.


  In this paper, we study the regularity of solutions to the $p$-Poisson
equation for all $1<p<\infty$. In particular, we are interested in smoothness
estimates in the adaptivity scale $ B^\sigma_{\tau}(L_{\tau}(\Omega))$, $1/\tau
= \sigma/d+1/p$, of Besov spaces. The regularity in this scale determines the
order of approximation that can be achieved by adaptive and other nonlinear
approximation methods. It turns out that, especially for solutions to
$p$-Poisson equations with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions on bounded
polygonal domains, the Besov regularity is significantly higher than the
Sobolev regularity which justifies the use of adaptive algorithms. This type of
results is obtained by combining local H\"older with global Sobolev estimates.
In particular, we prove that intersections of locally weighted H\"older spaces
and Sobolev spaces can be continuously embedded into the specific scale of
Besov spaces we are interested in. The proof of this embedding result is based
on wavelet characterizations of Besov spaces.


  Constraint languages that arise from finite algebras have recently been the
object of study, especially in connection with the Dichotomy Conjecture of
Feder and Vardi. An important class of algebras are those that generate
congruence distributive varieties and included among this class are lattices,
and more generally, those algebras that have near-unanimity term operations. An
algebra will generate a congruence distributive variety if and only if it has a
sequence of ternary term operations, called Jonsson terms, that satisfy certain
equations.
  We prove that constraint languages consisting of relations that are invariant
under a short sequence of Jonsson terms are tractable by showing that such
languages have bounded relational width.


  In this paper, we propose a fixed-complexity sphere encoder (FSE) for
multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems. The proposed FSE accomplishes a scalable
tradeoff between performance and complexity. Also, because it has a parallel
tree-search structure, the proposed encoder can be easily pipelined, leading to
a tremendous reduction in the precoding latency. The complexity of the proposed
encoder is also analyzed, and we propose two techniques that reduce it.
Simulation and analytical results demonstrate that in a 4 by 4 MU-MIMO system,
the proposed FSE requires only 11.5% of the computational complexity needed by
the conventional QRD-M encoder (QRDM-E). Also, the encoding throughput of the
proposed encoder is 7.5 times that of the QRDM-E with tolerable degradation in
the BER performance, while achieving the optimum diversity order.


  In this article we study certain notions of `tameness' for the persistence
modules studied in topological data analysis. In particular, we show that after
adding infinitary points the so called finitely determined modules become
finitely presented.


  With the growing significance of digital libraries and the Internet, more and
more electronic texts become accessible to a wide and geographically disperse
public. This requires adequate tools to facilitate indexing, storage, and
retrieval of documents written in different languages. We present a method for
semi-automatic indexing of electronic documents and construction of a
multilingual thesaurus, which can be used for query formulation and information
retrieval. We use special dictionaries and user interaction in order to solve
ambiguities and find adequate canonical terms in the language and adequate
abstract language-independent terms. The abstract thesaurus is updated
incrementally by new indexed documents and is used to search document
concerning terms in a query to the document base.


  When two droplets with different surface tensions collide, the shape
evolution of the merging droplets is asymmetric. Using experimental and
numerical techniques, we reveal that this asymmetry is caused by asymmetric
capillary waves, which are the result of the different surface tensions of the
droplets. We show that the asymmetry is enhanced by increasing the surface
tension difference, and suppressed by increasing the inertia of the colliding
droplets. Furthermore, we study capillary waves in the limit of no inertia. We
reveal that the asymmetry is not directly caused by Marangoni forces. In fact,
somehow counterintuitive, asymmetry is strongly reduced by the Marangoni
effect. Rather, the different intrinsic capillary wave amplitudes and
velocities associated with the different surface tensions of the droplets lie
at the origin of the asymmetry during droplet coalescence.


  We present evidence for eight new clumps of blue horizontal branch (BHB)
stars discovered in a catalogue of these stars compiled from the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey (SDSS) by Sirko et al. published in 2004. Clumps are identified by
selecting pairs of stars separated by distances <= 2 kpc and with differences
in galactocentric radial velocities < 25 km/s. Each clump contains four or more
stars. Four of the clumps have supporting evidence: two of them also contain
overdensities of RR Lyrae stars which makes their reality very likely. At least
one of the clumps is likely to be associated with the tidal debris of the
Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy. We emphasize that more accurate
observations of the radial velocities or proper motions of the stars in the
clumps as well as the identification of other halo stars in these regions are
required to establish the reality of the remaining clumps.


  In discrete logarithm based cryptography, a method by Pohlig and Hellman
allows solving the discrete logarithm problem efficiently if the group order is
known and has no large prime factors. The consequence is that such groups are
avoided. In the past, there have been proposals for cryptography based on
cyclic infrastructures. We will show that the Pohlig-Hellman method can be
adapted to certain cyclic infrastructures, which similarly implies that certain
infrastructures should not be used for cryptography. This generalizes a result
by M\"uller, Vanstone and Zuccherato for infrastructures obtained from
hyperelliptic function fields.
  We recall the Pohlig-Hellman method, define the concept of a cyclic
infrastructure and briefly describe how to obtain such infrastructures from
certain function fields of unit rank one. Then, we describe how to obtain
cyclic groups from discrete cyclic infrastructures and how to apply the
Pohlig-Hellman method to compute absolute distances, which is in general a
computationally hard problem for cyclic infrastructures. Moreover, we give an
algorithm which allows to test whether an infrastructure satisfies certain
requirements needed for applying the Pohlig-Hellman method, and discuss whether
the Pohlig-Hellman method is applicable in infrastructures obtained from number
fields. Finally, we discuss how this influences cryptography based on cyclic
infrastructures.


  Camera-based 3D semantic scene completion (SSC) is pivotal for predicting
complicated 3D layouts with limited 2D image observations. The existing
mainstream solutions generally leverage temporal information by roughly
stacking history frames to supplement the current frame, such straightforward
temporal modeling inevitably diminishes valid clues and increases learning
difficulty. To address this problem, we present HTCL, a novel Hierarchical
Temporal Context Learning paradigm for improving camera-based semantic scene
completion. The primary innovation of this work involves decomposing temporal
context learning into two hierarchical steps: (a) cross-frame affinity
measurement and (b) affinity-based dynamic refinement. Firstly, to separate
critical relevant context from redundant information, we introduce the pattern
affinity with scale-aware isolation and multiple independent learners for
fine-grained contextual correspondence modeling. Subsequently, to dynamically
compensate for incomplete observations, we adaptively refine the feature
sampling locations based on initially identified locations with high affinity
and their neighboring relevant regions. Our method ranks $1^{st}$ on the
SemanticKITTI benchmark and even surpasses LiDAR-based methods in terms of mIoU
on the OpenOccupancy benchmark. Our code is available on
https://github.com/Arlo0o/HTCL.


  Shadows are frequently encountered natural phenomena that significantly
hinder the performance of computer vision perception systems in practical
settings, e.g., autonomous driving. A solution to this would be to eliminate
shadow regions from the images before the processing of the perception system.
Yet, training such a solution requires pairs of aligned shadowed and
non-shadowed images which are difficult to obtain. We introduce a novel weakly
supervised shadow removal framework UnShadowNet trained using contrastive
learning. It is composed of a DeShadower network responsible for the removal of
the extracted shadow under the guidance of an Illumination network which is
trained adversarially by the illumination critic and a Refinement network to
further remove artefacts. We show that UnShadowNet can be easily extended to a
fully-supervised set-up to exploit the ground-truth when available. UnShadowNet
outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches on three publicly available
shadow datasets (ISTD, adjusted ISTD, SRD) in both the weakly and fully
supervised setups.


  The communication complexity of a quantum channel is the minimal amount of
classical communication required for classically simulating a process of state
preparation, transmission through the channel and subsequent measurement. It
establishes a limit on the power of quantum communication in terms of classical
resources. We show that classical simulations employing a finite amount of
communication can be derived from a special class of hidden variable theories
where quantum states represent statistical knowledge about the classical state
and not an element of reality. This special class has attracted strong interest
very recently. The communication cost of each derived simulation is given by
the mutual information between the quantum state and the classical state of the
parent hidden variable theory. Finally, we find that the communication
complexity for single qubits is smaller than 1.28 bits. The previous known
upper bound was 1.85 bits.


  We use a sequential $R$-matrix model to describe the breakup of the Hoyle
state into three $\alpha$ particles via the ground state of $^8\mathrm{Be}$. It
is shown that even in a sequential picture, features resembling a direct
breakup branch appear in the phase-space distribution of the $\alpha$
particles. We construct a toy model to describe the Coulomb interaction in the
three-body final state and its effects on the decay spectrum are investigated.
The framework is also used to predict the phase-space distribution of the
$\alpha$ particles emitted in a direct breakup of the Hoyle state and the
possibility of interference between a direct and sequential branch is
discussed. Our numerical results are compared to the current upper limit on the
direct decay branch determined in recent experiments.


  The shape of the futures term structure is essential to commodity hedgers and
speculators as futures prices serve as a forecast of future spot prices.
Commodity markets quotes futures prices on a selection of maturities and
delivery periods. In this note, we investigate a Bayesian technique known as
Kriging to build a term structure of futures prices by embedding trends and
seasonalities and by taking into account bid-ask spreads of market quotations
on different delivery periods.


  We propose a max-pooling based loss function for training Long Short-Term
Memory (LSTM) networks for small-footprint keyword spotting (KWS), with low
CPU, memory, and latency requirements. The max-pooling loss training can be
further guided by initializing with a cross-entropy loss trained network. A
posterior smoothing based evaluation approach is employed to measure keyword
spotting performance. Our experimental results show that LSTM models trained
using cross-entropy loss or max-pooling loss outperform a cross-entropy loss
trained baseline feed-forward Deep Neural Network (DNN). In addition,
max-pooling loss trained LSTM with randomly initialized network performs better
compared to cross-entropy loss trained LSTM. Finally, the max-pooling loss
trained LSTM initialized with a cross-entropy pre-trained network shows the
best performance, which yields $67.6\%$ relative reduction compared to baseline
feed-forward DNN in Area Under the Curve (AUC) measure.


  The coannihilation mechanism is a well-motivated alternative to the simple
thermal freeze-out mechanism, where the dark matter relic density can be
obtained through the coannihilation with a partner particle of similar mass
with dark matter. When the partner particle is neutral, the inelastic nature of
dark matter can help it to escape the direct detection limits. In this work, we
focus on the coannihilation scenario in which the annihilation cross section is
dominated by the partner-partner pair annihilation. We pay special interest on
the parameter space where the coannihilation partner is long-lived, which leads
to displaced signatures at the collider. In such case, it opens the heavy mass
parameter space for the coannihilation dark matter, comparing with those
dominated by the partner-dark matter annihilation. Specifically, we propose an
inelastic scalar dark matter model with a broken symmetry, which realizes the
domination of partner-partner pair annihilation. Then, we study two different
realizations of the coannihilation partner decay and the existing constraints
from the relic abundance, direct and indirect dark matter detection and the
collider searches. We focus on the channel that the long-lived coannihilation
partner decays to dark matter plus leptons. The high-luminosity LHC can reach
good sensitivities for such heavy dark matter and coannihilation partner around
100--700 GeV.


  We present a new method of generating mixture models for data with
categorical attributes. The keys to this approach are an entropy-based density
metric in categorical space and annealing of high-entropy/low-density
components from an initial state with many components. Pruning of low-density
components using the entropy-based density allows GALILEO to consistently find
high-quality clusters and the same optimal number of clusters. GALILEO has
shown promising results on a range of test datasets commonly used for
categorical clustering benchmarks. We demonstrate that the scaling of GALILEO
is linear in the number of records in the dataset, making this method suitable
for very large categorical datasets.


  The mass spectra of light-heavy tetraquarks $cq\bar{c}\bar{q}$ (q= u, d) are
computed in a non-relativistic diquark model with one-gluon exchange plus
confining potential. In the diquark model, a $cq\bar{c}\bar{q}$ state is
regarded to be made of a light-heavy diquark (qc) and an antidiquark
$\bar{q}\bar{c}$ in triplet and antitriplet colour configuration respectively.
The masses of charm mesons were calculated in order to fit the model parameters
used to create the masses of tetraquarks and therefore enhance the model's
reliability. The masses of $(cq\bar{c}\bar{q})$ tetra-quark states are
determined to be in the range of 3.8 GeV - 4.7 GeV, which is consistent with
the experimentally reported charmonium-like states. In particular, the
$Z_{c}(3900)$, $Z_{c}(4430)$, and $\psi(4660)$ tetraquarks, which have been
seen experimentally, may all be described by our model.


  We analyze the spectral structure of the one dimensional quantum mechanical
system with point interaction, which is known to be parametrized by the group
U(2). Based on the classification of the interactions in terms of symmetries,
we show, on a general ground, how the fermion-boson duality and the spectral
anholonomy recently discovered can arise. A vital role is played by a hidden
su(2) formed by a certain set of discrete transformations, which becomes a
symmetry if the point interaction belongs to a distinguished U(1) subfamily in
which all states are doubly degenerate. Within the U(1), there is a particular
interaction which admits the interpretation of the system as a supersymmetric
Witten model.


  This paper introduces and develops novel coderivative-based Newton methods
with Wolfe linesearch conditions to solve various classes of problems in
nonsmooth optimization. We first propose a generalized regularized Newton
method with Wolfe linesearch (GRNM-W) for unconstrained $C^{1,1}$ minimization
problems (which are second-order nonsmooth) and establish global as well as
local superlinear convergence of their iterates. To deal with convex composite
minimization problems (which are first-order nonsmooth and can be constrained),
we combine the proposed GRNM-W with two algorithmic frameworks: the
forward-backward envelope and the augmented Lagrangian method resulting in the
two new algorithms called CNFB and CNAL, respectively. Finally, we present
numerical results to solve Lasso and support vector machine problems appearing
in, e.g., machine learning and statistics, which demonstrate the efficiency of
the proposed algorithms.


  Multicast is an efficient way to realize one-to-many group communications in
large-scale networks such as the Internet. However, the deployment of IP
multicast services over the Internet has not been as rapid as expected and
needed. Excepting the fatal defects in designing IPv4 address structure.
Another main reason that contributes to this slow deployment is the lack of
carrier-grade multicast-enabled switches and routers that can be as to scale as
their unicast counterparts. Implementing a high-performance switch/router
relies on a polynomial-time group membership query algorithm within the Packet
Forwarding Engines (PFEs) to determine whether or not a packet is forwarded
through an egress. Among these, Bloom filter (BF)-based and Residue Number
System (RNS)-based are being considered as two representations of the
membership query algorithms. However, both approaches suffer from some fatal
weaknesses such as space and time inefficiencies, especially for a
carrier-grade PFE with high port-density features. According to similar
properties of the prime theorem, we propose a simplified forwarding scheme in
this paper, named Per-Port Prime Filter Array (P3FA). The simulation results
indicate that the P3FA can significantly improve space efficiencies under
specific lower egress-diversities conditions. Under the same space constraints,
compared with the SVRF, the multicast time efficiencies, the unicast time
efficiency of the P3FA are respectively increased by 12x-17234x and 19x-2038x
at a range of port-densities 16-1024, but at the expense of hardware cost,
which increased by \r{ho}/2x. A PFE designer that attempts to adopt P3FA should
trade-off between required performance and cost.


  I review the properties of starburst galaxies, compare the properties of the
local ones with more distant starburts and examine their role in the metal
enrichment of the interstellar medium and the intergalactic-intracluster
medium. Metallicity is not an arrow of time and contrary to current belief
metal rich galaxies can also be found at high redshift.


  We present near-IR (1.1-2.4 micron) position-position-velocity cubes of the
500-year-old Orion BN/KL explosive outflow with spatial resolution 1" and
spectral resolution 86 km/s. We construct integrated intensity maps free of
continuum sources of 15 H2 and [Fe II] lines while preserving kinematic
information of individual outflow features. Included in the detected H2 lines
are the 1-0 S(1) and 1-0 Q(3) transitions, allowing extinction measurements
across the outflow. Additionally, we present dereddened flux ratios for over
two dozen outflow features to allow for the characterization of the true
excitation conditions of the BN/KL outflow. All ratios show the dominance of
shock excitation of the H2 emission, although some features exhibit signs of
fluorescent excitation from stellar radiation or J-type shocks. We also detect
tracers of the PDR/ionization front north of the Trapezium stars in [O I] and
[Fe II] and analyze other observed outflows not associated with the BN/KL
outflow.


  The recent evidence for neutrino oscillations opens a new and exciting era in
neutrino physics. The next generation of accelerator based neutrino oscillation
experiments are expected to confirm the nature of the oscillations, and begin
to measure some of the associated oscillation parameters. However, these
experiments will not be able to completely determine the mixing matrix,
determine the pattern of neutrino masses, or search for CP violation in the
lepton sector. Therefore we are motivated to consider the neutrino beams that
will be needed beyond the next generation of experiments. With this in mind the
physics case for a neutrino factory is discussed. It is shown that this new
type of neutrino source would enable the crucial questions to be addressed, and
perhaps provide enough information to discriminate between Grand Unified
Theories, or lead us to an alternative theoretical framework. It is possible
that measurements at a neutrino factory will point the way towards an
understanding of the origin of quark and lepton flavors.


  We present a new algorithm for model predictive control of non-linear systems
with respect to multiple, conflicting objectives. The idea is to provide a
possibility to change the objective in real-time, e.g.~as a reaction to changes
in the environment or the system state itself. The algorithm utilises elements
from various well-established concepts, namely multiobjective optimal control,
economic as well as explicit model predictive control and motion planning with
motion primitives. In order to realise real-time applicability, we split the
computation into an online and an offline phase and we utilise symmetries in
the open-loop optimal control problem to reduce the number of multiobjective
optimal control problems that need to be solved in the offline phase. The
results are illustrated using the example of an electric vehicle where the
longitudinal dynamics are controlled with respect to the concurrent objectives
arrival time and energy consumption.


  We study the problem of embedding edgeless nodes such as users who newly
enter the underlying network, while using graph neural networks (GNNs) widely
studied for effective representation learning of graphs. Our study is motivated
by the fact that GNNs cannot be straightforwardly adopted for our problem since
message passing to such edgeless nodes having no connections is impossible. To
tackle this challenge, we propose Edgeless-GNN, a novel inductive framework
that enables GNNs to generate node embeddings even for edgeless nodes through
unsupervised learning. Specifically, we start by constructing a proxy graph
based on the similarity of node attributes as the GNN's computation graph
defined by the underlying network. The known network structure is used to train
model parameters, whereas a topology-aware loss function is established in such
a way that our model judiciously learns the network structure by encoding
positive, negative, and second-order relations between nodes. For the edgeless
nodes, we inductively infer embeddings by expanding the computation graph. By
evaluating the performance of various downstream machine learning tasks, we
empirically demonstrate that Edgeless-GNN exhibits (a) superiority over
state-of-the-art inductive network embedding methods for edgeless nodes, (b)
effectiveness of our topology-aware loss function, (c) robustness to incomplete
node attributes, and (d) a linear scaling with the graph size.


  Hepatitis C is a viral infection that appears as a result of the Hepatitis C
Virus (HCV), and it has been recognized as the main reason for liver diseases.
HCV incidence is growing as an important issue in the epidemiology of
infectious diseases. In the present study, a mathematical model is employed for
simulating the dynamics of HCV outbreak in a population. The total population
is divided into five compartments, including unaware and aware susceptible,
acutely and chronically infected, and treated classes. Then, a Lyapunov-based
nonlinear adaptive method is proposed for the first time to control the HCV
epidemic considering modelling uncertainties. A positive definite Lyapunov
candidate function is suggested, and adaptation and control laws are attained
based on that. The main goal of the proposed control strategy is to decrease
the population of unaware susceptible and chronically infected compartments by
pursuing appropriate treatment scenarios. As a consequence of this decrease in
the mentioned compartments, the population of aware susceptible individuals
increases and the population of acutely infected and treated humans decreases.
The Lyapunov stability theorem and Barbalat's lemma are employed in order to
prove the tracking convergence to desired population reduction scenarios. Based
on the acquired numerical results, the proposed nonlinear adaptive controller
can achieve the above-mentioned objective by adjusting the inputs (rates of
informing the susceptible people and treatment of chronically infected ones)
and estimating uncertain parameter values based on the designed control and
adaptation laws, respectively. Moreover, the proposed strategy is designed to
be robust in the presence of different levels of parametric uncertainties.


  A general and rigorous method to deal with singularities at the origin of a
polar coordinate system is presented. Its power derives from a clear
distinction between the radial distance and the radial coordinate variable,
which makes that all delta-functions and their derivatives are automatically
generated, and insures that the Gauss theorem is correct for any distribution
with a finite number of isolated point-like singularities.
  The method is applied to the Coulomb field, and to show the intrinsic
differences between the dipole and dimonopole fields in classical
electrodynamics.
  In all cases the method directly leads to the general expressions required by
the internal consistency of classical electrodynamics.


  Based on a non-equilibrium mechanism for spatial pattern formation we study
how position information can be controlled by locally coupled discrete
dynamical networks, similar to gene regulation networks of cells in a
developing multicellular organism. As an example we study the developmental
problems of domain formation and proportion regulation in the presence of
noise, as well as in the presence of cell flow. We find that networks that
solve this task exhibit a hierarchical structure of information processing and
are of similar complexity as developmental circuits of living cells. Proportion
regulation is scalable with system size and leads to sharp, precisely localized
boundaries of gene expression domains, even for large numbers of cells. A
detailed analysis of noise-induced dynamics, using a mean-field approximation,
shows that noise in gene expression states stabilizes (rather than disrupts)
the spatial pattern in the presence of cell movements, both for stationary as
well as growing systems. Finally, we discuss how this mechanism could be
realized in the highly dynamic environment of growing tissues in multi-cellular
organisms.


  We calculate the effective action for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) in D=2,3
dimensions at the quadratic approximation in the gauge fields. We analyse the
analytic structure of the corresponding nonlocal boson propagators
nonperturbatively in k/m. In two dimensions for any nonzero fermion mass, we
end up with one massless pole for the gauge boson . We also calculate in D=2
the effective potential between two static charges separated by a distance L
and find it to be a linearly increasing function of L in agreement with the
bosonized theory (massive Sine-Gordon model). In three dimensions we find
nonperturbatively in k/m one massive pole in the effective bosonic action
leading to screening. Fitting the numerical results we derive a simple
expression for the functional dependence of the boson mass upon the
dimensionless parameter e^{2}/m .


  This superbly organized workshop invited the participants to focus on four
outstanding questions in weak interactions: i) is the electroweak model correct
at the quantum level? ii)supersymmetry? iii) neutrino mass? iv) what is the
nature of CP-violation? The meeting demonstrated how weak-interaction physics
has become a terrain successfully covered by accelerator and non-accelerator
experiments in a very complimentary way.


  The possibility is examined for the inclusive $\Lambda$ in unpolarized
electron-positron annihilation to be transversely polarized. Due to final-state
interactions, there exists a novel structure function $\hat F(z,Q^2)$ for the
inclusive $\Lambda$ hyperon (or any other baryons) production from the
unpolarized time-like photon fragmentation, which makes contribution to the
transverse $\Lambda$ polarization in the unpolarized electron-positron
annihilation.


  We summarize several decades of work in finding values for the percolation
threshold p_c for site percolation on the square lattice, the universal
correction-to-scaling exponent Omega, and the susceptibility amplitude ratio
C^+/C^-, in two dimensions. Recent studies have yielded the precise values p_c
= 0.59274602(4), Omega = 72/91 = 0.791, and C^+/C^- = 161.5(1.5), resolving
long-standing controversies about the last two quantities and verifying the
widely used value p_c = 0.592746 for the first.