  Coarse-graining microscopic models of biological neural networks to obtain
mesoscopic models of neural activities is an essential step towards multi-scale
models of the brain. Here, we extend a recent theory for mesoscopic population
dynamics with static synapses to the case of dynamic synapses exhibiting
short-term plasticity (STP). Under the assumption that spike arrivals at
synapses have Poisson statistics, we derive analytically stochastic mean-field
dynamics for the effective synaptic coupling between finite-size populations
undergoing Tsodyks-Markram STP. The novel mean-field equations account for both
finite number of synapses and correlations between the neurotransmitter release
probability and the fraction of available synaptic resources. Comparisons with
Monte Carlo simulations of the microscopic model show that in both feedforward
and recurrent networks the mesoscopic mean-field model accurately reproduces
stochastic realizations of the total synaptic input into a postsynaptic neuron
and accounts for stochastic switches between Up and Down states as well as for
population spikes. The extended mesoscopic population theory of spiking neural
networks with STP may be useful for a systematic reduction of detailed
biophysical models of cortical microcircuits to efficient and mathematically
tractable mean-field models.


  The spectrum of hadrons is important for understanding the confinement of
quantum chromodynamics. Many new puzzles arose since 2003 due to the abundance
of experimental discoveries with the $XYZ$ structures in the heavy quarkonium
mass region being the outstanding examples. Hadronic resonances correspond to
poles of the $S$-matrix, which has other types of singularities such as the
triangle singularity due to the simultaneous on-shellness of three intermediate
particles. Here we briefly discuss a few possible manifestations of triangle
singularities in the $XYZ$ physics, paying particular attention to the
formalism that can be used to analyze the data for charged $Z_c$ structures in
the $\psi\pi$ distributions of the reaction $e^+e^-\to \psi\pi^+\pi^-$.


  In this paper, we systematically develop the "ghost" symmetry of the BKP
hierarchy through its actions on the Lax operator $L$, the eigenfunctions and
the $\tau$ function. In this process, the spectral representation of the
eigenfunctions and a new potential are introduced by using squared
eigenfunction potential(SEP) of the BKP hierarchy. Moreover, the bilinear
identity of the constrained BKP hierarchy and Adler-Shiota-van-Moerbeke formula
of the BKP hierarchy are re-derived compactly by means of the spectral
representation and "ghost" symmetry.


  Different rain models and novel network structures have been proposed to
remove rain streaks from single rainy images. In this work, we bring attention
to the intrinsic priors and multi-scale features of the rainy images, and
develop several intrinsic loss functions to train a CNN deraining network. We
first study the sparse priors of rainy images, which have been verified to
preserve unbroken edges in image decomposition. However, its mathematical
formulation usually leads to an intractable solution, we propose quasi-sparsity
priors to decrease complexity, so that our network can be trained under the
supervision of sparse properties of rainy images. Quasi-sparsity supervises
network training in different gradient domain which is still ill-posed to
decompose a rainy image into rain layer and background layer. We develop
another $L_1$ loss based on the intrinsic low-value property of rain layer to
restore image contents together with the commonly-used $L_1$ similarity loss.
Multi-scale features are further explored via a multi-scale auxiliary decoding
structure to show which kinds of features contribute the most to the deraining
task, and the corresponding multi-scale auxiliary loss improves the deraining
performance further. In our network, more efficient group convolution and
feature sharing are utilized to obtain an one order of magnitude improvement in
network running speed. The proposed deraining method performs favorably against
state-of-the-art deraining approaches.


  We show that the use of the fourth-root trick in lattice QCD with staggered
fermions corresponds to a non-local theory at non-zero lattice spacing, but
argue that the non-local behavior is likely to go away in the continuum limit.
We give examples of this non-local behavior in the free theory, and for the
case of a fixed topologically non-trivial background gauge field. In both
special cases, the non-local behavior indeed disappears in the continuum limit.
Our results invalidate a recent claim that at non-zero lattice spacing an
additive mass renormalization is needed because of taste-symmetry breaking.


  The criteria for chiral doublet bands based on one particle and one hole
coupled to a triaxial rotor have been summarized. Two representative cases in
$A\sim100$ odd-odd nuclei, nearly degenerate $\Delta I =1$ doublet bands in
$^{104}$Rh and $^{106}$Rh are checked against these chiral criteria. It is
shown that $^{106}$Rh possesses better chiral geometry than $^{104}$Rh,
although the energy near degeneracy is achieved in $^{104}$Rh in comparison
with the constant energy separation of doublet bands in $^{106}$Rh.


  We present evolutionary tracks of binary systems with high mass companion
stars and stellar-through-intermediate mass BHs. Using Eggleton's stellar
evolution code, we compute the luminosity produced by accretion from the donor
during its entire evolution. We compute also the evolution of the optical
spectrum of the binary system taking the disc contribution and irradiation
effects into account. The calculations presented here can be used to constrain
the properties of the donor stars in Ultraluminous X-ray Sources by comparing
their position on the HR or color-magnitude diagrams with the evolutionary
tracks of massive BH binaries. This approach may actually provide interesting
clues also on the properties of the binary system itself, including the BH
mass. We found that, on the basis of their position on the color-magnitude
diagram, some of the candidate counterparts considered can be ruled out and
more stringent constraints can be applied to the donor masses.


  In this paper we focus on the problem of estimating the directions of arrival
(DOA) of a set of incident plane waves. Unlike many previous works, which
assume that the received observations are only affected by additive noise, we
consider the setup where some phase noise also corrupts the data (as for
example observed in atmospheric sound propagation or underwater acoustics). We
propose a new methodology to solve this problem in a Bayesian framework by
resorting to a variational mean-field approximation. Our simulation results
illustrate the benefits of carefully accounting for the phase noise in the DOA
estimation process.


  Topological invariants are crucial quantities for classifying materials with
topological phases. Hence, their connections with experimentally measurable
quantities are extremely important. In this context, circular dichroism (CD)
provides a protocol to detect the Chern number $\mathcal{C}_0$ of the lowest
energy Bloch band (LBB) of a semimetal. This hinges on the unequal depletion
rates of the Bloch electrons from a filled LBB, under the action of a
time-periodic circular drive, depending on the chirality of the polarization.
According to the dimensionality of the system (i.e., whether it is two- or
three-dimensional), the integrated differential rate for depletion has to be
formulated a bit differently in order to relate it to $\mathcal{C}_0$. Our aim
is to capture the nature of the CD response for semimetals with anisotropic
band dispersions. We show that while the quantization of the CD response for
the three-dimensional cases is strongly sensitive to anisotropy, the
two-dimensional counterparts show a perfectly quantized response.


  We study the irreducibility of the characteristic polynomial of the energy
graph of the non linear Schr\"{o}dinger equation (NLS). This will be useful to
the verification of the second Melnikov condition for NLS.


  We derive equations of motion for the mean-squared displacement (MSD) of an
active Brownian particle (ABP) in a crowded environment modeled by a dense
system of passive Brownian particles, and of a passive tracer particle in a
dense active-Brownian particle system, using a projection-operator scheme. The
interaction of the tracer particle with the dense host environment gives rise
to strong memory effects. Evaluating these approximately in the framework of a
recently developed mode-coupling theory for the glass transition in active
Brownian particles (ABP-MCT), we discuss the various regimes of
activity-induced super-diffusive motion and density-induced sub-diffusive
motion. The predictions of the theory are shown to be in good agreement with
results from an event-driven Brownian dynamics simulation scheme for the
dynamics of two-dimensional active Brownian hard disks.


  We construct new topological invariants of three-dimensional manifolds which
can, in particular, distinguish homotopy equivalent lens spaces L(7,1) and
L(7,2). The invariants are built on the base of a classical (not quantum)
solution of pentagon equation, i.e.algebraic relation corresponding to a ``2
tetrahedra to 3 tetrahedra'' local re-building of a manifold triangulation.
This solution, found earlier by one of the authors, is expressed in terms of
metric characteristics of Euclidean tetrahedra.


  In the context of networked discrete-event systems (DESs), communication
delays and losses exist between the plant and the supervisor for observation
and between the supervisor and the actuator for control. In this paper, we
first introduce a new framework for supervisory control of networked DESs.
Under the introduced framework, we address the state estimation problem for
supervisor synthesis of networked DESs with both communication delays and
losses. The estimation algorithm considers the effect of the controls imposed
on the system. Additionally, the estimation algorithm is based on the control
decisions available up to the moment, and all the future control decisions are
assumed to be unknowable. Two notions, called "observation channel
configuration" for tracking observation delays and losses and "control channel
configuration" for tracking control delays and losses, are defined. Then, we
introduce an online approach for state estimation of the controlled system.
Compared with the existing approach, the proposed approach under the introduced
framework can estimate the state of the controlled system more accurately. As
an application of the proposed approach, we finally show that the existing
methods can be easily applied to synthesize maximally permissible and safe
networked supervisors.


  In this paper is proposed a geometric solution to the dark energy, assuming
that the space can be divided into regions of size $\sim L_{p}$ and energy
$\sim E_{p}$. Significantly this assumption generate a energy density similar
to the energy density observed for the vaccum energy, the correct solution for
the coincidence problem and the state equation characteristic of quintessence
in the comoving coordinates. Similarly is studied the ultraviolet and infrarred
limits and the amount of dark energy in the Universe.


  With the rapid development of automatic fake news detection technology, fact
extraction and verification (FEVER) has been attracting more attention. The
task aims to extract the most related fact evidences from millions of
open-domain Wikipedia documents and then verify the credibility of
corresponding claims. Although several strong models have been proposed for the
task and they have made great progress, we argue that they fail to utilize
multi-view contextual information and thus cannot obtain better performance. In
this paper, we propose to integrate multi-view contextual information (IMCI)
for fact extraction and verification. For each evidence sentence, we define two
kinds of context, i.e. intra-document context and inter-document context}.
Intra-document context consists of the document title and all the other
sentences from the same document. Inter-document context consists of all other
evidences which may come from different documents. Then we integrate the
multi-view contextual information to encode the evidence sentences to handle
the task. Our experimental results on FEVER 1.0 shared task show that our IMCI
framework makes great progress on both fact extraction and verification, and
achieves state-of-the-art performance with a winning FEVER score of 72.97% and
label accuracy of 75.84% on the online blind test set. We also conduct ablation
study to detect the impact of multi-view contextual information. Our codes will
be released at https://github.com/phoenixsecularbird/IMCI.


  We employ a novel method to analyze Euclidean correlation functions entering
the calculation of hadron energies in lattice QCD. The method is based on the
sampling of all possible solutions allowed by the spectral decomposition of the
hadron correlators. We demonstrate the applicability of the method by studying
the nucleon excited states in the positive and negative parity channels over a
pion mass range of about 400~MeV to 150~MeV. The results are compared to the
standard variational approach routinely used to study excited states within
lattice QCD. The main advantage of our new approach is its ability to
unambiguously determine all excited states for which the Euclidean time
correlation function is sensitive on.


  We present results of first simultaneous optical and X-ray observations of
peculiar binary system SS433. For the first time, chaotic variability of SS433
in the optical spectral band (R band) on time scales as small as tens of
seconds was detected. We find that the X-ray flux of SS433 is delayed with
respect to the optical emission by approximately 80 sec. Such a delay can be
interpreted as the travel time of mass accretion rate perturbations from the
jet base to the observed X-ray emitting region. In this model, the length of
the supercritical accretion disk funnel in SS433 is ~1e12 cm.


  Large urban communication networks such as smart cities are an ecosystem of
devices and services cooperating to address multiple issues that greatly
benefit end users, cities and the environment. LinkNYC is a first-of-its-kind
urban communications network aiming to replace all payphones in the five
boroughs of New York City (NYC) with kiosk-like structures providing free
public Wi-Fi. We consolidate these networks with standalone edge cloud devices
known as cloudlets and introduce geographically distributed content delivery
cloudlets (CDCs) to store popular Internet content closer to end users;
essential in environments with diverse and dynamic content interests. A
content-centric and delivery framework is proposed leveraging NYC's population
densities and CDCs for interest-based in-network caching. Analysis shows that
although the adoption of multiple CDCs dramatically improves overall network
performance, advanced caching policies are needed when considering increased
content heterogeneity. Thus, we propose popularity-driven (pLFU) and
cooperation-based (sLFU) caching policies at individual CDCs to account for
user and content dynamics over time. The amalgamation of urban population
densities, multiple CDC placements and smarter caching techniques help exploit
the ultimate benefits of a content-centric urban communications network and
dramatically improves overall network performance and responsiveness. Our
proposed solutions are validated using LinkNYC as a use-case.


  As a fundamental component in location-based services, inferring the
relationship between points-of-interests (POIs) is very critical for service
providers to offer good user experience to business owners and customers. Most
of the existing methods for relationship inference are not targeted at POI,
thus failing to capture unique spatial characteristics that have huge effects
on POI relationships. In this work we propose PRIM to tackle POI relationship
inference for multiple relation types. PRIM features four novel components,
including a weighted relational graph neural network, category taxonomy
integration, a self-attentive spatial context extractor, and a
distance-specific scoring function. Extensive experiments on two real-world
datasets show that PRIM achieves the best results compared to state-of-the-art
baselines and it is robust against data sparsity and is applicable to unseen
cases in practice.


  We consider the asymptotic behaviour of positive solutions $u(t,x)$ of the
fast diffusion equation $u_t=\Delta (u^{m}/m)={\rm div} (u^{m-1}\nabla u)$
posed for $x\in\RR^d$, $t>0$, with a precise value for the exponent
$m=(d-4)/(d-2)$. The space dimension is $d\ge 3$ so that $m<1$, and even $m=-1$
for $d=3$. This case had been left open in the general study \cite{BBDGV} since
it requires quite different functional analytic methods, due in particular to
the absence of a spectral gap for the operator generating the linearized
evolution.
  The linearization of this flow is interpreted here as the heat flow of the
Laplace-Beltrami operator of a suitable Riemannian Manifold $(\RR^d,{\bf g})$,
with a metric ${\bf g}$ which is conformal to the standard $\RR^d$ metric.
Studying the pointwise heat kernel behaviour allows to prove {suitable
Gagliardo-Nirenberg} inequalities associated to the generator. Such
inequalities in turn allow to study the nonlinear evolution as well, and to
determine its asymptotics, which is identical to the one satisfied by the
linearization. In terms of the rescaled representation, which is a nonlinear
Fokker--Planck equation, the convergence rate turns out to be polynomial in
time. This result is in contrast with the known exponential decay of such
representation for all other values of $m$.


  Unravelling apparent paradoxes has proven to be a powerful tool for
understanding the complexities of special relativity. In this paper, we focus
upon one such paradox, namely Bell's spaceship paradox, examining the relative
motion of two uniformly accelerating spaceships. We consider the view from
either spaceship, with the exchange of photons between the two. This recovers
the well known result that the leading spaceship loses sight of the trailing
spaceship as it is redshifted and disappears behind what is known as the
`Rindler horizon'. An immediate impact of this is that if either spaceship
tries to measure the separation through `radar ranging', bouncing photons off
one another, they would both eventually fail to receive any of the photon
`pings' that they emit. We find that the view from this trailing spaceship is,
however, starkly different, initially, seeing the leading spaceship with an
increasing blueshift, followed by a decreasing blueshift. We conclude that,
while the leading spaceship loses sight of the trailing spaceship, for the
trailing spaceship the view of the separation between the two spaceships, and
the apparent angular size of the leading spaceship, approach asymptotic values.
Intriguingly, for particular parametrization of the journey of the two
spaceships, these asymptotic values are identical to those properties seen
before the spaceships began accelerating, and the view from the trailing
spaceship becomes identical to when the two spaceships were initially at rest.


  We illustrate the potential of massive MIMO for communication with unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs). We consider a scenario where multiple single-antenna
UAVs simultaneously communicate with a ground station (GS) equipped with a
large number of antennas. Specifically, we discuss the achievable uplink (UAV
to GS) capacity performance in the case of line-of-sight (LoS) conditions. We
develop a realistic geometric model which incorporates an arbitrary orientation
of the GS and UAV antenna elements to characterize the polarization mismatch
loss which occurs due to the movement and orientation of the UAVs. A
closed-form expression for a lower bound on the ergodic rate for a
maximum-ratio combining receiver with estimated channel state information is
derived. The optimal antenna spacing that maximizes the ergodic rate achieved
by an UAV is also determined for uniform linear and rectangular arrays. It is
shown that when the UAVs are spherically uniformly distributed around the GS,
the ergodic rate per UAV is maximized for an antenna spacing equal to an
integer multiple of one-half wavelength.


  We consider tropical hemispaces, defined as tropically convex sets whose
complements are also tropically convex, and tropical semispaces, defined as
maximal tropically convex sets not containing a given point. We introduce the
concept of $(P,R)$-decomposition. This yields (to our knowledge) a new kind of
representation of tropically convex sets extending the classical idea of
representing convex sets by means of extreme points and rays. We characterize
tropical hemispaces as tropically convex sets that admit a (P,R)-decomposition
of certain kind. In this characterization, with each tropical hemispace we
associate a matrix with coefficients in the completed tropical semifield,
satisfying an extended rank-one condition. Our proof techniques are based on
homogenization (lifting a convex set to a cone), and the relation between
tropical hemispaces and semispaces.


  Biomedical knowledge is growing in an astounding pace with a majority of this
knowledge is represented as scientific publications. Text mining tools and
methods represents automatic approaches for extracting hidden patterns and
trends from this semi structured and unstructured data. In Biomedical Text
mining, Literature Based Discovery (LBD) is the process of automatically
discovering novel associations between medical terms otherwise mentioned in
disjoint literature sets. LBD approaches proven to be successfully reducing the
discovery time of potential associations that are hidden in the vast amount of
scientific literature. The process focuses on creating concept profiles for
medical terms such as a disease or symptom and connecting it with a drug and
treatment based on the statistical significance of the shared profiles. This
knowledge discovery approach introduced in 1989 still remains as a core task in
text mining. Currently the ABC principle based two approaches namely open
discovery and closed discovery are mostly explored in LBD process. This review
starts with general introduction about text mining followed by biomedical text
mining and introduces various literature resources such as MEDLINE, UMLS, MESH,
and SemMedDB. This is followed by brief introduction of the core ABC principle
and its associated two approaches open discovery and closed discovery in LBD
process. This review also discusses the deep learning applications in LBD by
reviewing the role of transformer models and neural networks based LBD models
and its future aspects. Finally, reviews the key biomedical discoveries
generated through LBD approaches in biomedicine and conclude with the current
limitations and future directions of LBD.


  In these lectures we describe how a theory of quantum gravity may be
constructed in terms of a lattice formulation based on so-called causal
dynamical triangulations (CDT). We discuss how the continuum limit can be
obtained and how to define and measure diffeomorphism-invariant correlators. In
four dimensions, which has our main interest, the lattice theory has an
infrared limit which can be identified with de Sitter spacetime. We explain why
this infrared property of the quantum spacetime is nontrivial and due to
"entropic" effects encoded in the nonperturbative path integral measure. This
makes the appearance of the de Sitter universe an example of true emergence of
classicality from microscopic quantum laws. We also discuss nontrivial aspects
of the UV behaviour, and show how to investigate quantum fluctuations around
the emergent background geometry. Finally, we consider the connection to the
asymptotic safety scenario, and derive from it a new, conjectured scaling
relation in CDT quantum gravity.


  We apply the Levenberg-Marquardt minimization algorithm to seismic and
classical observables of the Alpha Cen binary system in order to derive the
fundamental parameters of Alpha Cen A+B and to analyze the dependence of these
parameters on the chosen observables, on their uncertainty and on the physics
used in stellar modelling. The seismological data are those by Bouchy & Carrier
(2002) for Alpha Cen A, and those by Carrier & Bourban (2003) for Alpha Cen B.
We show that while the fundamental stellar parameters do not depend on the
treatment of convection adopted (Mixing Length Theory -- MLT -- or ``Full
Spectrum of Turbulence'' -- FST), the age of the system depends on the
inclusion of gravitational settling, and is deeply biased by the small
frequency separation of component B.
  We try to answer the question of the universality of the mixing length
parameter, and we find a statistically reliable dependence of the
alpha--parameter on the HR diagram location (with a trend similar to the one
predicted by Ludwig et al.1999).
  We propose the frequency separation ratios introduced by Roxburgh &
Voronstsov (2003) as better observables to determine the fundamental stellar
parameters, and to use the large frequency separation and frequencies to
extract information about the stellar structure. The effects of diffusion and
equation of state on the oscillation frequencies are also studied, but present
seismic data do not allow their detection.


  The problem of learning a minimal consistent model from a set of labeled
sequences of symbols is addressed from a satisfiability modulo theories
perspective. We present two encodings for deterministic finite automata and
extend one of these for Moore and Mealy machines. Our experimental results show
that these encodings improve upon the state-of-the-art, and are useful in
practice for learning small models.


  CP violation in supersymmetric models is reviewd with focus on explicit CP
violation in the MSSM. The topics covered in particular are CP-mixing in the
Higgs sector and its measurement at the LHC, CP-odd observables in the gaugino
sector at the ILC, EDM constraints, and the neutralino relic density.


  We generalize former results of Zuo and the first author showing some
hyperbolicity properties of varieties supporting a variation of Hodge
structure. Our proof only uses the special curvature properties of period
domains. In particular, in contrast to the former approaches, it does not use
any result on the asymptotic behaviour of the Hodge metric.


  Weak optimal transport has been recently introduced by Gozlan et al. The
original motivation stems from the theory of geometric inequalities; further
applications concern numerics of martingale optimal transport and stability in
mathematical finance.
  In this note we provide a complete geometric characterization of the 'weak'
version of the classical monotone rearrangement between measures on the real
line, complementing earlier results of Alfonsi, Corbetta, and Jourdain.


  We present a learning-based method for detecting real and fake deepfake
multimedia content. To maximize information for learning, we extract and
analyze the similarity between the two audio and visual modalities from within
the same video. Additionally, we extract and compare affective cues
corresponding to perceived emotion from the two modalities within a video to
infer whether the input video is "real" or "fake". We propose a deep learning
network, inspired by the Siamese network architecture and the triplet loss. To
validate our model, we report the AUC metric on two large-scale deepfake
detection datasets, DeepFake-TIMIT Dataset and DFDC. We compare our approach
with several SOTA deepfake detection methods and report per-video AUC of 84.4%
on the DFDC and 96.6% on the DF-TIMIT datasets, respectively. To the best of
our knowledge, ours is the first approach that simultaneously exploits audio
and video modalities and also perceived emotions from the two modalities for
deepfake detection.


  We answer an open problem posed by Mossel--Oleszkiewicz--Sen regarding
relations between $p$-log-Sobolev inequalities for $p\in(0,1]$. We show that
for any interval $I\subset(0,1]$, there exist $q,p\in I$, $q<p$, and a measure
$\mu$ for which the $q$-log-Sobolev inequality holds, while the $p$-log-Sobolev
inequality is violated. As a tool we develop certain necessary and closely
related sufficient conditions characterizing those inequalities in the case of
birth-death processes on $\mathbb{N}$.


  Let $X$ be a toric surface and $u$ be a normalized symplectic potential on
the corresponding polygon $P$. Suppose that the Riemannian curvature is bounded
by a constant $C_1$ and $\int_{\partial P} u ~ d \sigma < C_2, $ then there
exists a constant $C_3$ depending only on $C_1, C_2$ and $P$ such that the
diameter of $X$ is bounded by $C_3$. Moreoever, we can show that there is a
constant $M > 0$ depending only on $C_1, C_2$ and $P$ such that Donaldson's
$M$-condition holds for $u$. As an application, we show that if $(X,P)$ is
(analytic) relative $K$-stable, then the modified Calabi flow converges to an
extremal metric exponentially fast by assuming that the Calabi flow exists for
all time and the Riemannian curvature is uniformly bounded along the Calabi
flow.


  Multibubble solutions for a cosmological model which lead to thermal
inflationary states due to a semi-classical tunneling of gravity are
calculated.


  Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion is an important task in automatic speech
recognition and text-to-speech systems. Recently, G2P conversion is viewed as a
sequence to sequence task and modeled by RNN or CNN based encoder-decoder
framework. However, previous works do not consider the practical issues when
deploying G2P model in the production system, such as how to leverage
additional unlabeled data to boost the accuracy, as well as reduce model size
for online deployment. In this work, we propose token-level ensemble
distillation for G2P conversion, which can (1) boost the accuracy by distilling
the knowledge from additional unlabeled data, and (2) reduce the model size but
maintain the high accuracy, both of which are very practical and helpful in the
online production system. We use token-level knowledge distillation, which
results in better accuracy than the sequence-level counterpart. What is more,
we adopt the Transformer instead of RNN or CNN based models to further boost
the accuracy of G2P conversion. Experiments on the publicly available CMUDict
dataset and an internal English dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our
proposed method. Particularly, our method achieves 19.88% WER on CMUDict
dataset, outperforming the previous works by more than 4.22% WER, and setting
the new state-of-the-art results.


  In this paper, we first establish the Bott-type iteration formulas and some
abstract precise iteration formulas of the Maslov-type index theory associated
with a Lagrangian subspace for symplectic paths. As an application, we prove
that there exist at least $[\frac{n}{2}]+1$ geometrically distinct brake orbits
on every $C^2$ compact convex symmetric hypersurface $\Sigma$ in
$\mathbb{R}^{2n}$ satisfying the reversible condition $N\Sigma=\Sigma$,
furthermore, if all brake orbits on this hypersurface are nondegenerate, then
there are at least $n$ geometrically distinct brake orbits on it. As a
consequence, we show that there exist at least $[\frac{n}{2}]+1$ geometrically
distinct brake orbits in every bounded convex symmetric domain in
$\mathbb{R}^{n}$, furthermore, if all brake orbits in this domain are
nondegenerate, then there are at least $n$ geometrically distinct brake orbits
in it. In the symmetric case, we give a positive answer to the Seifert
conjecture of 1948 under a generic condition.


  In this study, a variational method for the inverse problem of self-assembly,
i.e., a reconstruction of the interparticle interaction potential of a given
structure, is applied to three-dimensional crystals. According to the method,
the interaction potential is derived as a function that maximizes the
free-energy functional of the one- and two-particle density distribution
functions. The interaction potentials of the target crystals, including those
with face-centered cubic (fcc), body-centered cubic (bcc), and simple hexagonal
(shx) lattices, are obtained by numerical maximization of the functional. Monte
Carlo simulations for the systems of particles with these interactions were
carried out, and the self-assembly of the target crystals was confirmed for the
bcc and shx cases. However, in the many-particle system with the predicted
interaction for the fcc lattice, the fcc lattice did not spontaneously form and
was metastable.


  In this paper the notion of a superconformal structure on a supermanifold is
introduced in an effort to study the superparticle sigma-model. There are, in
particular, two main aspects of the sigma-model which are investigated. The
first is on the relationship between the superparticle Lagrangian and the
component Lagrangian; and the second is on the problem of integrating
infinitesimal variations to globally-defined variations of the component
Lagrangian, which leads naturally to a notion of consistency. Throughout this
paper illustrations are provided on the complex projective line.


  We present the results from the search for Lyman Alpha emitters (LAEs) in the
proximity of 11 CIV absorption systems at $z > 4.7$ in the spectrum of the QSO
J1030+0524, using data from MUSE. We have found multiple LAE candidates close
to four CIV systems at $z_{CIV} = 4.94$-5.74 with log$_{10}$(N CIV[cm$^{-2}$])$
> 13.5.$ At z = 5-6, CIV systems with W0(CIV) $> 0.2$ {\AA} seem more likely to
have galaxies with Ly${\alpha}$ emission within $\rho < 200$ proper kpc (4/5
cases), than the CIV systems with W0(CIV)$ < 0.2$ {\AA} (0/6 cases). The impact
parameter of LAE-CIV systems with equivalent widths W0(CIV)$ > 0.5 $ {\AA} is
in the range 11 $ < \rho <$ 200 proper kpc (pkpc). Furthermore, all candidates
are in the luminosity range 0.18-1.15 L*$(Ly{ \alpha }, z = 5.7)$ indicating
that the environment of CIV systems within 200 pkpc is populated by the faint
end of the Ly${\alpha}$ luminosity function. We report a 0.28 L*$(Ly{\alpha})$
galaxy at a separation of $\rho = 10$ pkpc from a strong CIV absorption
(log10(NCIV[cm$^{-2}$]) = 14.52) at $z_{CIV} = 5.72419$. The prevalence of
sub-L*(Ly$\alpha$) galaxies in the proximity of z $> 4.9$ CIV systems suggest
that the absorbing material is rather young, likely ejected in the recent past
of the galaxies at these redshifts. The connection between faint LAEs and
high-ionization absorption systems reported in this work, is potentially a
consequence of the role of low mass galaxies in the early evolution of the
circum-galactic and intergalactic media.


  We calculate the probability distribution for the volume of the Universe
after slow-roll inflation both in the eternal and in the non-eternal regime.
Far from the eternal regime the probability distribution for the number of
e-foldings, defined as one third of the logarithm of the volume, is sharply
peaked around the number of e-foldings of the classical inflaton trajectory. At
the transition to the eternal regime this probability is still peaked (with the
width of order one e-folding) around the average, which gets twice larger at
the transition point. As one enters the eternal regime the probability for the
volume to be finite rapidly becomes exponentially small. In addition to
developing techniques to study eternal inflation, our results allow us to
establish the quantum generalization of a recently proposed bound on the number
of e-foldings in the non-eternal regime: the probability for slow-roll
inflation to produce a finite volume larger than e^(S_dS/2), where S_dS is the
de Sitter entropy at the end of the inflationary stage, is smaller than the
uncertainty due to non-perturbative quantum gravity effects. The existence of
such a bound provides a consistency check for the idea of de Sitter
complementarity.


  This paper presents explicit algebraic transformations of some Gauss
hypergeometric functions. Specifically, the transformations considered apply to
hypergeometric solutions of hypergeometric differential equations with the
local exponent differences $1/K,1/L,1/M$ such that $K,L,M$ are positive
integers and $1/K+1/L+1/M<1$. All algebraic transformations of these Gauss
hypergeometric functions are considered. We show that apart from classical
transformations of degree 2, 3, 4, 6 there are several other transformations of
degree 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 18, 24. Besides, we present an algorithm to compute
relevant Belyi functions explicitly.


  We examine the field equations of a self-gravitating texture in low-energy
superstring gravity, allowing for an arbitrary coupling of the texture field to
the dilaton. Both massive and massless dilatons are considered. For the
massless dilaton non-singular spacetimes exist, but only for certain values of
the coupling, dependent on the gravitational strength of the texture; moreover,
this non-singular behaviour exists only in a certain frame. For the massive
dilaton, the texture induces a long-range dilaton cloud, but we expect the
gravitational behaviour of the defect to be similar to that found in Einstein
theory. We compare these results with those found for other global topological
defects.


  Hypergraph product codes introduced by Tillich and Z\'emor are a class of
quantum LDPC codes with constant rate and distance scaling with the square-root
of the block size. Quantum expander codes, a subclass of these codes, can be
decoded using the linear time small-set-flip algorithm of Leverrier, Tillich
and Z\'emor. In this paper, we numerically estimate the performance for the
hypergraph product codes under independent bit and phase flip noise. We focus
on two families of hypergraph product codes. The first family has rate $1/61
\sim 1.6\%$, has qubits of weight $10$ or $12$ and stabilizers of weight $11$.
We report a threshold near $4.6\%$ for the small-set-flip decoder. We also show
that for similar rate, the performance of the hypergraph product is better than
the performance of the toric code as soon as we deal with more than $500$
logical qubits and that for $3600$ logical qubits, the logical error rate for
the hypergraph product code is several orders of magnitude smaller. The second
family has rate $0.2$, qubits of weight $10$ and $20$ and stabilizers of weight
$15$. We report a threshold near $2\%$ for the small-set-flip decoder.


  We investigate properties of potentially Du Bois singularities, that is,
those that occur on the underlying space of a Du Bois pair. We show that a
normal variety $X$ with potentially Du Bois singularities and Cartier canonical
divisor $K_X$ is necessarily log canonical, and hence Du Bois. As an immediate
corollary, we obtain the Lipman-Zariski conjecture for varieties with
potentially Du Bois singularities.
  We also show that for a normal surface singularity, the notions of Du Bois
and potentially Du Bois singularities coincide. In contrast, we give an example
showing that in dimension at least three, a normal potentially Du Bois
singularity $x \in X$ need not be Du Bois even if one assumes the canonical
divisor $K_X$ to be $\mathbb{Q}$-Cartier.


  The Grundy (or First-Fit) chromatic number of a graph $G=(V,E)$, denoted by
$\Gamma(G)$ (or $\chi_{_{\sf FF}}(G)$), is the maximum number of colors used by
a First-Fit (greedy) coloring of $G$. To determine $\Gamma(G)$ is NP-complete
for various classes of graphs. Also there exists a constant $c>0$ such that the
Grundy number is hard to approximate within the ratio $c$. We first obtain an
$\mathcal{O}(VE)$ algorithm to determine the Grundy number of block graphs i.e.
graphs in which every biconnected component is complete subgraph. We prove that
the Grundy number of a general graph $G$ with cut-vertices is upper bounded by
the Grundy number of a block graph corresponding to $G$. This provides a
reasonable upper bound for the Grundy number of graphs with cut-vertices. Next,
define $\Delta_2(G)={\max}_{u\in G}~ {\max}_{v\in N(u):d(v)\leq d(u)} d(v)$. We
obtain an $\mathcal{O}(VE)$ algorithm to determine $\Gamma(G)$ for graphs $G$
whose girth $g$ is at least $2\Delta_2(G)+1$. This algorithm provides a
polynomial time approximation algorithm within ratio $\min \{1,
(g+1)/(2\Delta_2(G)+2)\}$ for $\Gamma(G)$ of general graphs $G$ with girth $g$.


  Let $(X,\omega)$ be a compact $n$-dimensional K\"ahler manifold on which the
integral of $\omega^n$ is $1$. Let $K$ be an immersed real $\mathcal{C}^3$
submanifold of $X$ such that the tangent space at any point of $K$ is not
contained in any complex hyperplane of the (real) tangent space at that point
of $X.$ Let $\mu$ be a probability measure compactly supported on $K$ with
$L^p$ density for some $p>1.$ We prove that the complex Monge-Amp\`ere equation
$(dd^c \varphi + \omega)^n=\mu$ has a H\"older continuous solution.


  Determining the distance of quasar absorption outflows from the central
source (R) and their kinetic luminosity are crucial for understanding their
contribution to active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback. Here we summarize the
results for a sample of nine luminous quasars that were observed with the
Hubble Space Telescope. We find that the outflows in more than half of the
objects are powerful enough to be the main agents for AGN feedback, and that
most outflows are found at R>100 pc. The sample is representative of the quasar
absorption outflow population as a whole and is unbiased towards specific
ranges of R and kinetic luminosity. Therefore, the analysis results can be
extended to the majority of such objects, including broad absorption line
quasars. We find that these results are consistent with those of another sample
(seven quasars) that is also unbiased towards specific ranges of R and kinetic
luminosity. Assuming that all quasars have absorption outflows, we conclude
that most luminous quasars produce outflows that can contribute significantly
to AGN feedback. We also discuss the criterion for whether an outflow is
energetic enough to cause AGN feedback effects.


  A half-geodesic is a closed geodesic realizing the distance between any pair
of its points. All geodesics in a round sphere are half-geodesics. Conversely,
this note establishes that Riemannian spheres with all geodesics closed and
sufficiently many half-geodesics are round.


  Elastic scattering in a quantum wire has several novel features not seen in
1D, 2D or 3D. In this work we consider a single channel quantum wire as its
application is inevitable in making devices based on quantum interference
effects. We consider a point defect or a single delta function impurity in such
a wire and show how some of these novel features affect Friedel-sum-rule (FSR)
in a way, that is quite unlike in 1D, 2D and 3D.


  We present observations of two new single-lined eclipsing binaries, both
consisting of an Am star and an M-dwarf, discovered by the Wide Angle Search
for Planets transit photometry survey. Using WASP photometry and spectroscopic
measurements we find that HD186753B has an orbital period of P=1.9194 days, a
mass of M=0.24 +/- 0.02 M_sun and radius of R=0.31 +/- 0.06 R_sun; and that
TCY7096-222-1B has an orbital period of P=8.9582 days, a mass between 0.29 and
0.54 M_sun depending on eccentricity and radius of R=0.263+0.02-0.07 R_sun. We
find that the Am stars have relatively low rotational velocities that closely
match the orbital velocities of the M-dwarfs, suggesting that they have been
"spun-down" by the M-dwarfs.


  QU Car is listed in cataclysmic variable star catalogues as a nova-like
variable. This little-studied, yet bright interacting binary is re-appraised
here in the light of new high-quality ultraviolet (UV) interstellar line data
obtained with STIS on board the Hubble Space Telescope. The detection of a
component of interstellar absorption at a mean LSR velocity of $-$14 km
s$^{-1}$ indicates that the distance to QU Car may be $\sim$2 kpc or more -- a
considerable increase on the previous lower-limiting distance of 500 pc. If so,
the bolometric luminosity of QU Car could exceed $10^{37}$ ergs s$^{-1}$. This
would place this binary in the luminosity domain occupied by known
compact-binary supersoft X-ray sources. Even at a 500 pc, QU Car appears to be
the most luminous nova-like variable known.
  New intermediate dispersion optical spectroscopy of QU Car spanning
3800--7000 \AA is presented. These data yield the discovery that C{\sc iv}
$\lambda\lambda$5801,12 is present as an unusually prominent emission line in
an otherwise low-contrast line spectrum. Using measurements of this and other
lines in a recombination line analysis, it is shown that the C/He abundance as
proxied by the n(C$^{4+}$)/n(He$^{2+}$) ratio may be as high as 0.06 (an order
of magnitude higher than the solar ratio). Furthermore, the C/O abundance ratio
is estimated to be greater than 1. These findings suggest that the companion in
QU Car is a carbon star. If so, it would be the first example of a carbon star
in such a binary. An early-type R star best matches the required abundance
pattern and could escape detection at optical wavelengths provided the distance
to QU Car is $\sim$2 kpc or more.


  It has been researched the kinetics of the thermal equilibrium's
establishment in an early Universe under the assumption of the recovery of
interaction scaling of elementary particles in range of superhigh energies. The
case of the thermal equilibrium's weak initial violation and basic cosmological
consequences of the thermal equilibrium's violation have been researched.


  Motivated by classical works of Schechtman and Schmuckenschl\"ager on
intersections of $\ell_p$-balls and recent ones in information-based complexity
relating random sections of ellipsoids and the quality of random information in
approximation problems, we study the threshold behavior of the asymptotic
volume of intersections of generalized $p$-ellipsoids. The non-critical
behavior is determined under a spectral flatness (Wiener entropy) condition on
the semi-axes. In order to understand the critical case at the threshold, we
prove a central limit theorem for $q$-norms of points sampled uniformly at
random from a $p$-ellipsoid, which is obtained under Noether's condition on the
semi-axes.


  Conventional electrical circuits are generally rigid in their components and
working styles which are not flexible and stretchable. From an alternative,
liquid metal based soft electronics is offering important opportunities for
innovating modern bioelectronics and electrical engineering. However, its
running in wet environments such as aqueous solution, biological tissues or
allied subjects still encounters many technical challenges. Here, we proposed a
new conceptual electrical circuit, termed as droplet circuits, to fulfill the
special needs as raised in the above mentioned areas. Such unconventional
circuits are immersed in solution and composed of liquid metal droplets,
conductive ions or wires such as carbon nanotubes. With specifically designed
topological or directional structures/patterns, the liquid metal droplets
composing the circuit can be discretely existing and disconnected from each
other, while achieving the function of electron transport through conductive
routes or quantum tunneling effect. The conductive wires serve as the electron
transfer stations when the distance between two separate liquid metal droplets
is far beyond than that quantum tunneling effects can support. The unique
advantage of the current droplet circuit lies in that it allows parallel
electron transport, high flexibility, self-healing, regulativity and
multi-point connectivity, without needing to worry about circuit break. This
would extend the category of classical electrical circuits into the newly
emerging areas like realizing room temperature quantum computing, making
brain-like intelligence or nerve-machine interface electronics etc. The
mechanisms and potential scientific issues of the droplet circuits are
interpreted. Future prospects along this direction are outlined.


  The localization game is a pursuit-evasion game analogous to Cops and
Robbers, where the robber is invisible and the cops send distance probes in an
attempt to identify the location of the robber. We present a novel graph
parameter called the capture time, which measures how long the localization
game lasts assuming optimal play. We conjecture that the capture time is linear
in the order of the graph, and show that the conjecture holds for graph
families such as trees and interval graphs. We study bounds on the capture time
for trees and its monotone property on induced subgraphs of trees and more
general graphs. We give upper bounds for the capture time on the incidence
graphs of projective planes. We finish with new bounds on the localization
number and capture time using treewidth.


  We have investigated neutralino dark matter in the framework of minimal
supersymmetric Standard Model focusing on the coannihilatioin region. In this
region, where the particle whose mass is tightly degenerated with the
neutralino dark matter exists, we can solve the Lithium problem in the case of
lepton flavor being violated. It turns out that Sommerfeld enhancement is
important in the coannihilation region so that the dark matter signal becomes
large enough to be observed by the current sensitivity of indirect experiments.


  The number of degrees-of-freedom (NDoF) in a communication system is limited
by the number of antenna ports, element shapes, positions, and the propagation
environment. As the number of antenna elements increases within a given region,
the NDoF eventually saturates due to correlation of the radiated fields. The
maximal NDoF can be determined numerically for communication between two
regions using singular value decomposition of a channel model representing wave
propagation between densely sampled sources at the transmitter and fields at
the receiver. This paper provides a straightforward analytical estimate of the
NDoF for arbitrarily shaped transmitter and receiver regions. The analysis show
that the NDoF for electrically large regions is approximated by the mutual
shadow area of the regions, measured in wavelengths. Several setups illustrate
the results, which are then compared with numerical evaluations of the singular
values of the propagation channel. These new analytical expressions also
simplify to previously established results based on Weyl's law and the paraxial
approximation.


  We introduce block Markov chains (BMCs) indexed by an infinite rooted tree.
It turns out that BMCs define a new class of tree-indexed Markovian processes.
We clarify the structure of BMCs in connection with Markov chains (MCs) and
Markov random fields (MRFs). Mainly, show that probability measures which are
BMCs for every root are indeed Markov chains (MCs) and yet they form a strict
subclass of Markov random fields (MRFs) on the considered tree. Conversely, a
class of MCs which are BMCs is characterized. Furthermore, we establish that in
the one-dimensional case the class of BMCs coincides with MCs. However, a
slight perturbation of the one-dimensional lattice leads to us to an example of
BMCs which are not MCs appear.


  The von Neumann entropy of a quantum state is a central concept in physics
and information theory, having a number of compelling physical interpretations.
There is a certain perspective that the most fundamental notion in quantum
mechanics is that of a quantum channel, as quantum states, unitary evolutions,
measurements, and discarding of quantum systems can each be regarded as certain
kinds of quantum channels. Thus, an important goal is to define a consistent
and meaningful notion of the entropy of a quantum channel. Motivated by the
fact that the entropy of a state $\rho$ can be formulated as the difference of
the number of physical qubits and the "relative entropy distance" between
$\rho$ and the maximally mixed state, here we define the entropy of a channel
$\mathcal{N}$ as the difference of the number of physical qubits of the channel
output with the "relative entropy distance" between $\mathcal{N}$ and the
completely depolarizing channel. We prove that this definition satisfies all of
the axioms, recently put forward in [Gour, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 65, 5880
(2019)], required for a channel entropy function. The task of quantum channel
merging, in which the goal is for the receiver to merge his share of the
channel with the environment's share, gives a compelling operational
interpretation of the entropy of a channel. The entropy of a channel can be
negative for certain channels, but this negativity has an operational
interpretation in terms of the channel merging protocol. We define Renyi and
min-entropies of a channel and prove that they satisfy the axioms required for
a channel entropy function. Among other results, we also prove that a smoothed
version of the min-entropy of a channel satisfies the asymptotic equipartition
property.


  Ionization of the final ${}^{3}$He$^{+}$ ion during the nuclear
$\beta^{-}$-decay of the tritium atom is discussed. The velocity spectrum of
the emitted secondary electrons is derived in the explicit form. Our method
allows to determine the relative and absolute probabilities of formation of the
final states in few-electron atoms which include `free' secondary electrons
moving with different velocities.
  \noindent PACS number(s): 23.40.-s, 12.20.Ds and 14.60.Cd


  I apply the method of characteristics to both bi-directional and
uni-directional pulse propagation in dispersionless media containing
nonlinearity of arbitrary order. The differing analytic predictions for the
shocking distance quantify the effects of the uni-directional approximation
used in many pulse propagation models. Results from numerical simulations
support the theoretical predictions, and reveal the nature of the coupling
between forward and backward waves.


  Let $e$ and $v$ be minimal tripotents in a JBW$^*$-triple $M$. We introduce
the notion of triple transition pseudo-probability from $e$ to $v$ as the
complex number $TTP(e,v)= \varphi_v(e),$ where $\varphi_v$ is the unique
extreme point of the closed unit ball of $M_*$ at which $v$ attains its norm.
In the case of two minimal projections in a von Neumann algebra, this
correspond to the usual transition probability. We prove that every bijective
transformation $\Phi$ preserving triple transition pseudo-probabilities between
the lattices of tripotents of two atomic JBW$^*$-triples $M$ and $N$ admits an
extension to a bijective {\rm(}complex{\rm)} linear mapping between the socles
of these JBW$^*$-triples. If we additionally assume that $\Phi$ preserves
orthogonality, then $\Phi$ can be extended to a surjective (complex-)linear
{\rm(}isometric{\rm)} triple isomorphism from $M$ onto $N$. In case that $M$
and $N$ are two spin factors or two type 1 Cartan factors we show, via
techniques and results on preservers, that every bijection preserving triple
transition pseudo-probabilities between the lattices of tripotents of $M$ and
$N$ automatically preserves orthogonality, and hence admits an extension to a
triple isomorphism from $M$ onto $N$.


  A number of late [WC] stars have unique infrared properties, not found among
the non-[WC] planetary nebulae, and together define a class of IR-[WC] stars.
They have unusual IRAS colours, resembling stars in the earliest post-AGB
evolution and possibly related to PAH formation. Most or all show a double
chemistry, with both a neutral (molecular) oxygen-rich and an inner carbon-rich
region. Their dense nebulae indicate recent evolution from the AGB, suggesting
a fatal-thermal-pulse (FTP) scenario. Although both the colours and the stellar
characteristics predict fast evolution, it is shown that this phase must last
for 10^4 yr. The morphologies of the nebulae are discussed. For one object in
Sgr, the progenitor mass (1.3 solar masses) is known. The stellar temperatures
of the IR-[WC] stars appear much higher in low metallicity systems (LMC, Sgr).
This may be indicative of an extended 'pseudo' photosphere. It is proposed that
re-accretion of ejected gas may slow down the post-AGB evolution and so extend
the life time of the IR-[WC] stars.


  Given two positive integers $n$ and $k$ and a parameter $t\in (0,1)$, we
choose at random a vector subspace $V_{n}\subset
\mathbb{C}^{k}\otimes\mathbb{C}^{n}$ of dimension $N\sim tnk$. We show that the
set of $k$-tuples of singular values of all unit vectors in $V_n$ fills
asymptotically (as $n$ tends to infinity) a deterministic convex set $K_{k,t}$
that we describe using a new norm in $\R^k$.
  Our proof relies on free probability, random matrix theory, complex analysis
and matrix analysis techniques. The main result result comes together with a
law of large numbers for the singular value decomposition of the eigenvectors
corresponding to large eigenvalues of a random truncation of a matrix with high
eigenvalue degeneracy.


  We seek progress in the study of subtoposes of the effective topos. First we
treat Van Oosten's result that local operators on the effective topos are
internally NNO-indexed joins of what we shall call 'basic' local operators. Our
main innovation is the notion of a tree-like structure called 'sight', which
provides a tangible representation of local operators on the effective topos.
This leads in particular to the establishment of an infinity of new basic
subtoposes of the effective topos. Various comparisons (inequalities and
non-inequalities) in between these new examples and known examples such as
Turing degrees are made. Sights also provide a realizability-like semantics for
the first-order arithmetic of subtoposes of the effective topos. The text
begins with an overview of relevant tripos theory and some topos-theoretic
constructions of local operators.


  Stereotypes, bias, and discrimination have been extensively documented in
Machine Learning (ML) methods such as Computer Vision (CV) [18, 80], Natural
Language Processing (NLP) [6], or both, in the case of large image and caption
models such as OpenAI CLIP [14]. In this paper, we evaluate how ML bias
manifests in robots that physically and autonomously act within the world. We
audit one of several recently published CLIP-powered robotic manipulation
methods, presenting it with objects that have pictures of human faces on the
surface which vary across race and gender, alongside task descriptions that
contain terms associated with common stereotypes. Our experiments definitively
show robots acting out toxic stereotypes with respect to gender, race, and
scientifically-discredited physiognomy, at scale. Furthermore, the audited
methods are less likely to recognize Women and People of Color. Our
interdisciplinary sociotechnical analysis synthesizes across fields and
applications such as Science Technology and Society (STS), Critical Studies,
History, Safety, Robotics, and AI. We find that robots powered by large
datasets and Dissolution Models (sometimes called "foundation models", e.g.
CLIP) that contain humans risk physically amplifying malignant stereotypes in
general; and that merely correcting disparities will be insufficient for the
complexity and scale of the problem. Instead, we recommend that robot learning
methods that physically manifest stereotypes or other harmful outcomes be
paused, reworked, or even wound down when appropriate, until outcomes can be
proven safe, effective, and just. Finally, we discuss comprehensive policy
changes and the potential of new interdisciplinary research on topics like
Identity Safety Assessment Frameworks and Design Justice to better understand
and address these harms.


  We apply the dynamical systems tools to study the asymptotic properties of a
cosmological model based on a non-linear modification of General Relativity in
which the standard Einstein-Hilbert action is replaced by one of
Dirac-Born-Infeld type. It is shown that the dynamics of this model is
extremely rich: there are found equilibrium points in the phase space that can
be associated with matter-dominated, matter-curvature scaling, de Sitter, and
even phantom-like solutions. Depending on the value of the overall parameters
the dynamics in phase space can show multi-attractor structure into the future
(multiple future attractors may co-exist). This is a consequence of
bifurcations in control parameter space, showing strong dependence of the
model's dynamical properties on the free parameters. Contrary to what is
expected from non-linear modifications of general relativity of this kind,
removal of the initial spacetime singularity is not a generic feature of the
corresponding cosmological model. Instead, the starting point of the cosmic
dynamics -- the past attractor in the phase space -- is a state of infinitely
large value of the Hubble rate squared, usually associated with the big bang
singularity.


  Recent research in the design of end to end communication system using deep
learning has produced models which can outperform traditional communication
schemes. Most of these architectures leveraged autoencoders to design the
encoder at the transmitter and decoder at the receiver and train them jointly
by modeling transmit symbols as latent codes from the encoder. However, in
communication systems, the receiver has to work with noise corrupted versions
of transmit symbols. Traditional autoencoders are not designed to work with
latent codes corrupted with noise. In this work, we provide a framework to
design end to end communication systems which accounts for the existence of
noise corrupted transmit symbols. The proposed method uses deep neural
architecture. An objective function for optimizing these models is derived
based on the concepts of variational inference. Further, domain knowledge such
as channel type can be systematically integrated into the objective. Through
numerical simulation, the proposed method is shown to consistently produce
models with better packing density and achieving it faster in multiple popular
channel models as compared to the previous works leveraging deep learning
models.


  Federated learning enables multiple clients to collaboratively contribute to
the learning of a global model orchestrated by a central server. This learning
scheme promotes clients' data privacy and requires reduced communication
overheads. In an application like network traffic classification, this helps
hide the network vulnerabilities and weakness points. However, federated
learning is susceptible to backdoor attacks, in which adversaries inject
manipulated model updates into the global model. These updates inject a salient
functionality in the global model that can be launched with specific input
patterns. Nonetheless, the vulnerability of network traffic classification
models based on federated learning to these attacks remains unexplored. In this
paper, we propose GABAttack, a novel genetic algorithm-based backdoor attack
against federated learning for network traffic classification. GABAttack
utilizes a genetic algorithm to optimize the values and locations of backdoor
trigger patterns, ensuring a better fit with the input and the model. This
input-tailored dynamic attack is promising for improved attack evasiveness
while being effective. Extensive experiments conducted over real-world network
datasets validate the success of the proposed GABAttack in various situations
while maintaining almost invisible activity. This research serves as an
alarming call for network security experts and practitioners to develop robust
defense measures against such attacks.


  The polar properties of antiphase boundaries (APBs) in PbZrO$_3$ are analyzed
in detail using a recently developed layer group approach in order parameter
space and compared with the results from Landau-Ginzburg free energy
description. It is shown that the former approach reveals the microscopic APBs'
properties, and predicts polar APB structures at particular positions inside
the unit cell, which agree very well with recent experimental obsevations [Wei,
et.~al. \cite{Wei2014,Wei2015}]. The systematic usage of the method is
developed. In contrast with it the commonly used free energy description
obscures the microscopic features but still can reflect the macroscopic
properties of the APBs by taking into account the bilinear coupling of
polarization and order parameter gradients. The relation between the layer
group approach and the Landau-Ginzburg free energy description is discussed and
two mechanisms of polarization switching inside the APBs are distinguished. It
is illustrated that the polar APBs observed in PbZrO$_3$ are consistently and
naturally explained by the layer group approach. This analysis is expected to
have a significant impact also in other materials.


  Most results on the value sets $V_f$ of polynomials $f \in \mathbb{F}_q[x]$
relate the cardinality $|V_f|$ to the degree of $f$. In particular, the
structure of the spectrum of the class of polynomials of a fixed degree $d$ is
rather well known.
  We consider a class $\mathcal{F}_{q,n}$ of polynomials, which we obtain by
modifying linear permutations at $n$ points. The study of the spectrum of
$\mathcal{F}_{q,n}$ enables us to obtain a simple description of polynomials $F
\in \mathcal{F}_{q,n}$ with prescribed $V_F$, especially those avoiding a given
set, like cosets of subgroups of the multiplicative group $\mathbb{F}_q^*$. The
value set count for such $F$ can also be determined. This yields polynomials
with evenly distributed values, which have small maximum count.


  This paper extends Kontsevich's ideas on quantizing Poisson manifolds. A new
differential is added to the Hodge decomposition of the Hochschild complex, so
that it becomes a bicomplex, even more similar to the classical Hodge theory
for complex manifolds.


  We study the relationship between jet power and accretion for Fermi and
non-Fermi blazars, respectively. We also compare the relevant parameter between
them. Our main results are as follows. (i) Fermi and non-Fermi blazars have
significant difference in redshift, black hole mass, and broad line luminosity.
(ii) Fermi blazars have higher average core-dominance parameter than non-Fermi
blazars, which suggests that Fermi blazars have strong beaming effect. (iii) We
find significant correlation between broad line emission and jet power for
Fermi and non-Fermi blazars, respectively, which suggests a direct tight
connection between jet and accretion. (iv) The accretion and black hole mass
may have a different contribution to jet power for Fermi and non-Fermi blazars,
respectively.


  We present new observational results obtained for the Galactic non-thermal
radio source G328.4+0.2 to determine both if this source is a pulsar wind
nebula or supernova remnant, and in either case, the physical properties of
this source. Using X-ray data obtained by XMM, we confirm that the X-ray
emission from this source is heavily absorbed and has a spectrum best fit by a
power law model of photon index=2 with no evidence for a thermal component, the
X-ray emission from G328.4+0.2 comes from a region significantly smaller than
the radio emission, and that the X-ray and radio emission are significantly
offset from each other. We also present the results of a new high resolution (7
arcseconds) 1.4 GHz image of G328.4+0.2 obtained using the Australia Telescope
Compact Array, and a deep search for radio pulsations using the Parkes Radio
Telescope. We find that the radio emission has a flat spectrum, though some
areas along the eastern edge of G328.4+0.2 have a steeper radio spectral index
of ~-0.3. Additionally, we obtain a luminosity limit of the central pulsar of
L_{1400} < 30 mJy kpc^2, assuming a distance of 17 kpc. In light of these
observational results, we test if G328.4+0.2 is a pulsar wind nebula (PWN) or a
large PWN inside a supernova remnant (SNR) using a simple hydrodynamic model
for the evolution of a PWN inside a SNR. As a result of this analysis, we
conclude that G328.4+0.2 is a young (< 10000 years old) pulsar wind nebula
formed by a low magnetic field (<10^12 G) neutron star born spinning rapidly
(<10 ms) expanding into an undetected SNR formed by an energetic (>10^51 ergs),
low ejecta mass (M < 5 Solar Masses) supernova explosion which occurred in a
low density (n~0.03 cm^{-3}) environment.


  We present a set of effective outflow/open boundary conditions and an
associated algorithm for simulating the dynamics of multiphase flows consisting
of $N$ ($N\geqslant 2$) immiscible incompressible fluids in domains involving
outflows or open boundaries. These boundary conditions are devised based on the
properties of energy stability and reduction consistency. The energy stability
property ensures that the contributions of these boundary conditions to the
energy balance will not cause the total energy of the N-phase system to
increase over time. Therefore, these open/outflow boundary conditions are very
effective in overcoming the backflow instability in multiphase systems. The
reduction consistency property ensures that if some fluid components are absent
from the N-phase system then these N-phase boundary conditions will reduce to
those corresponding boundary conditions for the equivalent smaller system. Our
numerical algorithm for the proposed boundary conditions together with the
N-phase governing equations involves only the solution of a set of de-coupled
individual Helmholtz-type equations within each time step, and the resultant
linear algebraic systems after discretization involve only constant and
time-independent coefficient matrices which can be pre-computed. Therefore, the
algorithm is computationally very efficient and attractive. We present
extensive numerical experiments for flow problems involving multiple fluid
components and inflow/outflow boundaries to test the proposed method. In
particular, we compare in detail the simulation results of a three-phase
capillary wave problem with Prosperetti's exact physical solution and
demonstrate that the method developed herein produces physically accurate
results.


  In this paper, we study the performance of Full Waveform Inversion (FWI) from
time-harmonic Cauchy data via conditional well-posedness driven iterative
regularization. The Cauchy data can be obtained with dual sensors measuring the
pressure and the normal velocity. We define a novel misfit functional which,
adapted to the Cauchy data, allows the independent location of experimental and
computational sources. The conditional well-posedness is obtained for a
hierarchy of subspaces in which the inverse problem with partial data is
Lipschitz stable. Here, these subspaces yield piecewise linear representations
of the wave speed on given domain partitions. Domain partitions can be
adaptively obtained through segmentation of the gradient. The domain partitions
can be taken as a coarsening of an unstructured tetrahedral mesh associated
with a finite element discretization of the Helmholtz equation. We illustrate
the effectiveness of the iterative regularization through computational
experiments with data in dimension three. In comparison with earlier work, the
Cauchy data do not suffer from eigenfrequencies in the configurations.


  We investigate the formation of protoplanetary disks around nine solar mass
stars formed in the context of a (40 pc)$^3$ Giant Molecular Cloud model, using
RAMSES adaptive-mesh refinement simulations extending over a scale range of
about 4 million, from an outer scale of 40 pc down to cell sizes of 2 AU. Our
most important result is that the accretion process is heterogeneous in
multiple ways; in time, in space, and among protostars of otherwise similar
mass. Accretion is heterogeneous in time, in the sense that accretion rates
vary during the evolution, with generally decreasing profiles, whose slopes
vary over a wide range, and where accretion can increase again if a protostar
enters a region with increased density and low speed. Accretion is
heterogeneous in space, because of the mass distribution, with mass approaching
the accreting star-disk system in filaments and sheets. Finally, accretion is
heterogeneous among stars, since the detailed conditions and dynamics in the
neighborhood of each star can vary widely. We also investigate the sensitivity
of disk formation to physical conditions, and test their robustness by varying
numerical parameters. We find that disk formation is robust even when choosing
the least favorable sink particle parameters, and that turbulence cascading
from larger scales is a decisive factor in disk formation. We also investigate
the transport of angular momentum, finding that the net inward mechanical
transport is compensated for mainly by an outward directed magnetic transport,
with a contribution from gravitational torques usually subordinate to the
magnetic transport.


  An intelligent agent will often be uncertain about various properties of its
environment, and when acting in that environment it will frequently need to
quantify its uncertainty. For example, if the agent wishes to employ the
expected-utility paradigm of decision theory to guide its actions, it will need
to assign degrees of belief (subjective probabilities) to various assertions.
Of course, these degrees of belief should not be arbitrary, but rather should
be based on the information available to the agent. This paper describes one
approach for inducing degrees of belief from very rich knowledge bases, that
can include information about particular individuals, statistical correlations,
physical laws, and default rules. We call our approach the random-worlds
method. The method is based on the principle of indifference: it treats all of
the worlds the agent considers possible as being equally likely. It is able to
integrate qualitative default reasoning with quantitative probabilistic
reasoning by providing a language in which both types of information can be
easily expressed. Our results show that a number of desiderata that arise in
direct inference (reasoning from statistical information to conclusions about
individuals) and default reasoning follow directly {from} the semantics of
random worlds. For example, random worlds captures important patterns of
reasoning such as specificity, inheritance, indifference to irrelevant
information, and default assumptions of independence. Furthermore, the
expressive power of the language used and the intuitive semantics of random
worlds allow the method to deal with problems that are beyond the scope of many
other non-deductive reasoning systems.


  Time-varying stochastic optimization problems frequently arise in machine
learning practice (e.g. gradual domain shift, object tracking, strategic
classification). Although most problems are solved in discrete time, the
underlying process is often continuous in nature. We exploit this underlying
continuity by developing predictor-corrector algorithms for time-varying
stochastic optimizations. We provide error bounds for the iterates, both in
presence of pure and noisy access to the queries from the relevant derivatives
of the loss function. Furthermore, we show (theoretically and empirically in
several examples) that our method outperforms non-predictor corrector methods
that do not exploit the underlying continuous process.


  Molecular communication requires low-complexity symbol detection algorithms
to deal with the many sources of uncertainty that are inherent in these
channels. This paper proposes two variants of a high-performance asynchronous
peak detection algorithm for a receiver that makes independent observations.
The first variant has low complexity and measures the largest observation
within a sampling interval. The second variant adds decision feedback to
mitigate inter-symbol interference. Although the algorithm does not require
synchronization between the transmitter and receiver, results demonstrate that
the bit error performance of symbol-by-symbol detection using the first variant
is better than using a single sample whose sampling time is chosen a priori.
The second variant is shown to have performance comparable to that of an energy
detector. Both variants of the algorithm demonstrate better resilience to
timing offsets than that of existing detectors.


  Recently defined expectile regions capture the idea of centrality with
respect to a multivariate distribution, but fail to describe the tail behavior
while it is not at all clear what should be understood by a tail of a
multivariate distribution. Therefore, cone expectile sets are introduced which
take into account a vector preorder for the multi-dimensional data points. This
provides a way of describing and clustering a multivariate distribution/data
cloud with respect to an order relation. Fundamental properties of cone
expectiles including dual representations of both expectile regions and cone
expectile sets are established. It is shown that set-valued sublinear risk
measures can be constructed from cone expectile sets in the same way as in the
univariate case. Inverse functions of cone expectiles are defined which should
be considered as rank functions rather than depth functions. Finally, expectile
orders for random vectors are introduced and characterized via expectile rank
functions.


  Quantum k-SAT is the problem of deciding whether there is a n-qubit state
which is perpendicular to a set of vectors, each of which lies in the Hilbert
space of k qubits. Equivalently, the problem is to decide whether a particular
type of local Hamiltonian has a ground state with zero energy. We consider
random quantum k-SAT formulas with n variables and m = \alpha n clauses, and
ask at what value of \alpha these formulas cease to be satisfiable. We show
that the threshold for random quantum 3-SAT is at most 3.594. For comparison,
convincing arguments from statistical physics suggest that the classical 3-SAT
threshold is \alpha \approx 4.267. For larger k, we show that the quantum
threshold is a constant factor smaller than the classical one. Our bounds work
by determining the generic rank of the satisfying subspace for certain gadgets,
and then using the technique of differential equations to analyze various
algorithms that partition the hypergraph into a collection of these gadgets.
Our use of differential equation to establish upper bounds on a satisfiability
threshold appears to be novel, and our techniques may apply to various
classical problems as well.


  This paper theoretically and experimentally investigates frequency-tuned and
impedance-tuned wireless non-radiative power transfer (WNPT) systems.
Closed-form expressions for the efficiencies of both systems, as a function of
frequency and system (circuit) parameters, are presented. In the
frequency-tuned system, the operating frequency is adjusted to compensate for
changes in mutual inductance that occur for variations of transmitter and
receiver loop positions. Frequency-tuning is employed for a range of distances
over which the loops are strongly coupled. In contrast, the impedance-tuned
system employs varactor-based matching networks to compensate for changes in
mutual inductance and achieve a simultaneous conjugate impedance match over a
range of distances. The frequency-tuned system is simpler to implement, while
the impedance-tuned system is more complex but can achieve higher efficiencies.
Both of the experimental WNPT systems studied employ resonant shielded loops as
transmitting and receiving devices.


  Influence of two type of spin structures on the form of the Fermi surface
(FS) and a photoemission intensity map is studied for t-t'-U Hubbard model.
Mean field calculations are done for the stripe phase and for the spiral spin
structure. It is shown, that unlike a case of electron doping, the hole-doped
models are unstable with respect to formation of such structures. The pseudogap
anisotropies are different for h- and e- doping. In accordance with ARPES data
for La2SrxCuO4 the stripe phase is characterized by quasi-one-dimensional
segments of FS at k=(\pi,0) and by suppression of spectral weight in diagonal
direction. It is shown that spiral structures display the polarisation
anisotropy: different segments of FS correspond to electros with different spin
polarisations.


  We introduce quantum versions of Manin pairs and Manin triples and define
quantum moment maps in this context. This provides a framework that
incorporates quantum moment maps for actions of Lie algebras and quantum groups
for any quantum parameter. We also show how our quantum moment maps degenerate
to known classical versions of moment maps and describe their fusion.


  We present a study on the mechanical configuration and the electronic
properties of semiconducting carbon nanotubes supported by partially
depassivated silicon substrates, as inferred from topographic and spectroscopic
data acquired with a room-temperature ultrahigh vacuum scanning tunneling
microscope and density-functional theory calculations. A mechanical distortion
and doping for semiconducting carbon nanotubes on Si(100)-(2x1):H with
hydrogen-depassivated stripes up to 100 Angstrom wide are ascertained from both
experiment and theory. The results presented here point towards novel and local
functionalities of nanotube-semiconductor interfaces.


  The distributional properties of a multi-dimensional continuous-state
branching process are determined by its cumulant semigroup, which is defined by
the backward differential equation. We provide a proof of the assertion of
Rhyzhov and Skorokhod (Theory Probab. Appl., 1970) on the uniqueness of the
solutions to the equation, which is based on a characterization of the process
as the pathwise unique solution to a system of stochastic equations.


  We introduce a Julia implementation of the recently proposed Nevanlinna
analytic continuation method. The method is based on Nevanlinna interpolants
and, by construction, preserves the causality of a response function. For
theoretical calculations without statistical noise, this continuation method is
a powerful tool to extract real-frequency information from numerical input data
on the Matsubara axis. This method has been applied to first-principles
calculations of correlated materials. This paper presents its efficient and
full-featured open-source implementation of the method including the Hamburger
moment problem and smoothing.


  We present a learning-based approach to solving a Rubik's cube with a
multi-fingered dexterous hand. Despite the promising performance of dexterous
in-hand manipulation, solving complex tasks which involve multiple steps and
diverse internal object structure has remained an important, yet challenging
task. In this paper, we tackle this challenge with a hierarchical deep
reinforcement learning method, which separates planning and manipulation. A
model-based cube solver finds an optimal move sequence for restoring the cube
and a model-free cube operator controls all five fingers to execute each move
step by step. To train our models, we build a high-fidelity simulator which
manipulates a Rubik's Cube, an object containing high-dimensional state space,
with a 24-DoF robot hand. Extensive experiments on 1400 randomly scrambled
Rubik's cubes demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving an average
success rate of 90.3%.


  In this article we give a new proof of Ng\^o's Geometric Stabilisation
Theorem, which implies the Fundamental Lemma. This is a statement which relates
the cohomology of Hitchin fibres for a quasi-split reductive group scheme $G$
to the cohomology of Hitchin fibres for the endoscopy groups $H_{\kappa}$. Our
proof avoids the Decomposition and Support Theorem, instead the argument is
based on results for $p$-adic integration on coarse moduli spaces of
Deligne-Mumford stacks. Along the way we establish a description of the inertia
stack of the (anisotropic) moduli stack of $G$-Higgs bundles in terms of
endoscopic data, and extend duality for generic Hitchin fibres of Langlands
dual group schemes to the quasi-split case.


  In this note we investigate the production of charged heavy particles via
\gaga\ fusion at high energy pp colliders. We revise previous claims that the
\gaga\ cross section is comparable to or larger than that for the corresponding
Drell-Yan process at high energies. Indeed we find that the \gaga\ contribution
to the total production cross section at pp is far below the Drell-Yan cross
section. As far as the individual elastic, semi-elastic and inelastic
contributions to the \gaga\ process are concerned we find that they are all of
the same order of magnitude.


  We address the question of the bi-Lipschitz local triviality of a complex
polynomial function over a complex value.
  Our main result state that a non constant complex polynomial admits a locally
bi-Lipschitz trivial value if and only if it is a polynomial in a single
complex variable.


  Recent studies have found that the spectral evolution of pulses within
gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) is consistent with simple radiative cooling. Perhaps
more interesting was a report that some bursts may have a single cooling rate
for the multiple pulses that occur within it. We determine the probability that
the observed "cooling rate invariance" is purely coincidental by sampling
values from the observed distribution of cooling rates. We find a 0.1-26%
probability that we would randomly observe a similar degree of invariance based
on a variety of pulse selection methods and pulse comparison statistics. This
probability is sufficiently high to warrant skepticism of any intrinsic
invariance in the cooling rate.


  WA qualitative probabilistic network models the probabilistic relationships
between its variables by means of signs. Non-monotonic influences have
associated an ambiguous sign. These ambiguous signs typically lead to
uninformative results upon inference. A non-monotonic influence can, however,
be associated with a, more informative, sign that indicates its effect in the
current state of the network. To capture this effect, we introduce the concept
of situational sign. Furthermore, if the network converts to a state in which
all variables that provoke the non-monotonicity have been observed, a
non-monotonic influence reduces to a monotonic influence. We study the
persistence and propagation of situational signs upon inference and give a
method to establish the sign of a reduced influence.


  We present a method of rank-optimal weighting which can be used to explore
the best possible position of a subject in a ranking based on a composite
indicator by means of a mathematical optimization problem. As an example, we
explore the dataset of the OECD Better Life Index and compute for each country
a weight vector which brings it as far up in the ranking as possible with the
greatest advance of the immediate rivals. The method is able to answer the
question "What is the best possible rank a country can achieve with a given set
of weighted indicators?" Typically, weights in composite indicators are
justified normatively and not empirically. Our approach helps to give bounds on
what is achievable by such normative judgments from a purely output-oriented
and strongly competitive perspective. The method can serve as a basis for exact
bounds in sensitivity analysis focused on ranking positions.
  In the OECD Better Life Index data we find that 19 out the 36 countries in
the OECD Better Life Index 2014 can be brought to the top of the ranking by
specific weights. We give a table of weights for each country which brings it
to its highest possible position. Many countries achieve their best rank by
focusing on their strong dimensions and setting the weights of many others to
zero. Although setting dimensions to zero is possible in the OECD's online
tool, this contradicts the idea of better life being multidimensional in
essence. We discuss modifications of the optimization problem which could take
this into account, e.g. by allowing only a minimal weight of one.
  Methods to find rank-optimal weights can be useful for various
multidimensional datasets like the ones used to rank universities or employers.


  The measurement of CP violation in the charm sector triggered a lot of
theoretical activities and re-considerations. Nevertheless currently neither
theory nor experiment have reached definite conclusions about the origin of a
large CP violating effect in hadronic $D$ decays. We review briefly (part of)
the current theory literature and present as the most important outcome of the
many investigations initial steps in a long journey to understand the standard
model contribution to hadronic $D$ meson decays from first principles as well
as various control channels, that can be studied by experiment.


  Proteins play crucial roles in every cellular process by interacting with
each other, with nucleic acids, metabolites, and other molecules. The resulting
assemblies can be very large and intricate and pose challenges to experimental
methods. In the current era of integrative modeling, it is often only by a
combination of various experimental techniques and computations that 3D models
of those molecular machines can be obtained. Among the various computational
approaches available, molecular docking is often the method of choice when it
comes to predicting 3D structures of complexes. Docking can generate
particularly accurate models when taking into account the available information
on the complex of interest. We review here the use of experimental and
bioinformatics data in protein-protein docking, describing recent software
developments and highlighting applications for the modeling of antibody-antigen
complexes and membrane protein complexes, and the use of evolutionary and shape
information.


  We prove the birationality of the 4-canonical map of varieties of general
type and maximal Albanese dimension


  We present a study of the nuclear morphology of a sample of narrow- and
broad-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1's and BLS1's) based on broad-band images in
the Hubble Space Telescope archives. In our previous study, we found that
large-scale stellar bars at > 1 kpc from the nucleus are more common in NLS1's
than BLS1's. In this paper we find that NLS1's preferentially have grand-design
dust spirals within approx. 1 kpc of their centers. We also find that NLS1's
have a higher fraction of nuclear star-forming rings than BLS1's. We find that
many of the morphological differences are due to the presence or absence of a
large-scale stellar bar within the spiral host galaxy. In general, barred
Seyfert 1s tend to have grand-design dust spirals at their centers, confirming
the results of other researchers. The high fraction of grand-design nuclear
dust spirals and stellar nuclear rings observed in NLS1's host galaxies
suggests a means for efficient fueling of their nuclei to support their high
Eddington ratios.


  Quantum cryptography can, in principle, provide unconditional security
guaranteed by the law of physics only. Here, we survey the theory and practice
of the subject and highlight some recent developments.


  This paper makes three main contributions to the theory of communication
complexity and stream computation. First, we present new bounds on the
information complexity of AUGMENTED-INDEX. In contrast to analogous results for
INDEX by Jain, Radhakrishnan and Sen [J. ACM, 2009], we have to overcome the
significant technical challenge that protocols for AUGMENTED-INDEX may violate
the "rectangle property" due to the inherent input sharing. Second, we use
these bounds to resolve an open problem of Magniez, Mathieu and Nayak [STOC,
2010] that asked about the multi-pass complexity of recognizing Dyck languages.
This results in a natural separation between the standard multi-pass model and
the multi-pass model that permits reverse passes. Third, we present the first
passive memory checkers that verify the interaction transcripts of priority
queues, stacks, and double-ended queues. We obtain tight upper and lower bounds
for these problems, thereby addressing an important sub-class of the memory
checking framework of Blum et al. [Algorithmica, 1994].


  We compute the Hochschild cohomology groups of the cluster-tilted algebras of
finite representation type.


  The atmospheric compositions of planets offer a unique view into their
respective formation processes. State-of-the-art observatories and techniques
are finally able to provide high-precision data on atmospheric composition that
can be used to constrain planet formation. In this context, we focus on the
formation of WASP-77Ab based on previous observations of its atmosphere, which
have provided precise C/O and metallicity measurements. We use the SimAb planet
formation simulation to model the formation of WASP-77Ab. We assume two
compositions for the disk WASP-77Ab was formed within: one of a solar
composition and one that represents the composition of WASP-77A. In addition,
we considered two different scenarios regarding the migration of the planet and
we study the possible planet formation paths that reproduce the composition of
WASP-77Ab. This work shows that the planet is expected to have formed in a disk
where not many planetesimals could be accreted. Moreover, we demonstrate that
the most likely migration scenario is disk-free migration, whereby the planet
initiates its Type II migration within the CO ice line and ends it beyond the
water ice line.


  IGR J17591$-$2342 is a new accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar (AMXP) that was
recently discovered in outburst in 2018. Early observations revealed that the
source's radio emission is brighter than that of any other known neutron star
low-mass X-ray binary (NS-LMXB) at comparable X-ray luminosity, and assuming
its likely $\gtrsim 6$ kpc distance. It is comparably radio bright to black
hole LMXBs at similar X-ray luminosities. In this work, we present the results
of our extensive radio and X-ray monitoring campaign of the 2018 outburst of
IGR J17591$-$2342. In total we collected 10 quasi-simultaneous radio (VLA,
ATCA) and X-ray (Swift-XRT) observations, which make IGR J17591$-$2342 one of
the best-sampled NS-LMXBs. We use these to fit a power-law correlation index
$\beta = 0.37^{+0.42}_{-0.40}$ between observed radio and X-ray luminosities (
$L_\mathrm{R}\propto L_\mathrm{X}^{\beta}$). However, our monitoring revealed a
large scatter in IGR J17591$-$2342's radio luminosity (at a similar X-ray
luminosity, $L_\mathrm{X} \sim 10^{36}$ erg s$^{-1}$, and spectral state), with
$L_\mathrm{R} \sim 4 \times 10^{29}$ erg s$^{-1}$ during the first three
reported observations, and up to a factor of 4 lower $L_\mathrm{R}$ during
later radio observations. Nonetheless, the average radio luminosity of IGR
J17591$-$2342 is still one of the highest among NS-LMXBs, and we discuss
possible reasons for the wide range of radio luminosities observed in such
systems during outburst. We found no evidence for radio pulsations from IGR
J17591$-$2342 in our Green Bank Telescope observations performed shortly after
the source returned to quiescence. Nonetheless, we cannot rule out that IGR
J17591$-$2342 becomes a radio millisecond pulsar during quiescence.


  In the wake of measurements on $B_c^+ \to J/\psi K^+$, $B_c^+ \to J/\psi
\pi^+\pi^-\pi^+$, and $B_c^+ \to J/\psi K^+ K^-\pi^+$ at Large Hadron Collider
experiments, we propose to study the decays $B_c^+ \to J/\psi M^+$
comprehensively, with $M$ being the light charged pseudoscalar ($P$), vector
($V$), scalar ($S$), axial-vector ($A$), and tensor ($T$) mesons, within the
improved perturbative QCD (iPQCD) formalism at leading order in the Standard
Model. The theoretical predictions for experimental observables such as
branching fractions, relative ratios, and longitudinal polarization fractions
in the iPQCD formalism await near future examinations relying on the upgraded
Large Hadron Collider, even the forthcoming Circular Electron-Positron
Collider. We emphasize that the investigations on the
factorizable-emission-suppressed or -forbidden decays like $B_c^+ \to J/\psi
S^+$, $B_c^+ \to J/\psi A^+_{1^1\!P_1}$, and $B_c^+ \to J/\psi T^+$, should go
definitely beyond naive factorization to explore the rich dynamics, which
could, in turn, further help understand the QCD nature of $B_c$ meson, as well
as that of related hadrons. The future confirmations on those predictions about
the relative ratios between the branching fractions of $B_c^+ \to J/\psi
b_1(1235)^+ (a_0(980)^+, a_0(1450)^+, a_2(1320)^+)$ and $B_c^+ \to J/\psi
\pi^+$ could further examine the reliability of this iPQCD formalism. Because
of containing only tree-level $\bar b \to \bar c$ transitions, the {\it CP}
asymmetries in the $B_c^+ \to J/\psi M^+$ decays exhibit naturally zero.


  WebAssembly is an increasingly popular lightweight binary instruction format,
which can be efficiently embedded and sandboxed. Languages like C, C++, Rust,
Go, and many others can be compiled into WebAssembly. This paper describes
Twine, a WebAssembly trusted runtime designed to execute unmodified,
language-independent applications. We leverage Intel SGX to build the runtime
environment without dealing with language-specific, complex APIs. While SGX
hardware provides secure execution within the processor, Twine provides a
secure, sandboxed software runtime nested within an SGX enclave, featuring a
WebAssembly system interface (WASI) for compatibility with unmodified
WebAssembly applications. We evaluate Twine with a large set of general-purpose
benchmarks and real-world applications. In particular, we used Twine to
implement a secure, trusted version of SQLite, a well-known full-fledged
embeddable database. We believe that such a trusted database would be a
reasonable component to build many larger application services. Our evaluation
shows that SQLite can be fully executed inside an SGX enclave via WebAssembly
and existing system interface, with similar average performance overheads. We
estimate that the performance penalties measured are largely compensated by the
additional security guarantees and its full compatibility with standard
WebAssembly. An in-depth analysis of our results indicates that performance can
be greatly improved by modifying some of the underlying libraries. We describe
and implement one such modification in the paper, showing up to $4.1\times$
speedup. Twine is open-source, available at GitHub along with instructions to
reproduce our experiments.