  This paper introduces a method based on a non-linear iterative map to
evaluate node relevance in bipartite networks. By tuning a single parameter
gamma, the method captures different concepts of node importance, including
established measures like degree centrality, eigenvector centrality and the
fitness-complexity ranking used in economics. The algorithm's flexibility
allows for efficient ranking optimization tailored to specific tasks. As an
illustrative example, we apply this method to ecological mutualistic networks,
where ranking quality can be assessed by the extinction area - the rate at
which the system collapses when species are removed in a certain order. The map
with the optimal gamma value, which is dataset-specific, surpasses existing
ranking methods on this task. Additionally, our method excels in evaluating
nestedness, another crucial structural property of ecological systems,
requiring specific node rankings. The final part of the paper explores the
theoretical aspects of the map, revealing a phase transition at a critical
$\gamma$ value dependent on the data structure that can be characterized
analytically for random networks. Near the critical point, the map exhibits
unique features and a distinctive triangular packing pattern of the adjacency
matrix.


  We propose a method of approximating multivariate Gaussian probabilities
using dynamic programming. We show that solving the optimization problem
associated with a class of discrete-time finite horizon Markov decision
processes with non-Lipschitz cost functions is equivalent to integrating a
Gaussian functions over polytopes. An approximation scheme for this class of
MDPs is proposed and explicit error bounds under the supremum norm for the
optimal cost to go functions are derived.


  We carried out light curve solutions of two eclipsing detached binaries on
eccentric orbits observed by Kepler. The orbits and fundamental parameters of
KIC 11619964 and KIC 7118545 were determined with a high accuracy by modeling
of their photometric data. We found that the temperatures of their components
differ by around 2000 K while the radii of their secondaries are more than
twice smaller than those of the primaries. We detected a strange "brightening"
of KIC 11619964 in the narrow phase range (+-0.0005) around the center of the
primary eclipse reaching to 0.018 mag in amplitude. This "mid-eclipse
brightening" needs follow-up observations with good time resolution.


  Recently, Owen(1993) and Owen and Ledlow (1994) have shown that the dividing
line between Fanaroff-Riley class~I and class~II Radio Sources is very sharp
when the sources are represented as points in the radio-optical luminosity
plane. It is shown that if one accepts the propositions that the sources in the
vicinity of this dividing line are characterized by (1) transonic Mach numbers
and (2) mildly relativistic velocities (consistent with deceleration of an
initially moderately relativistic or ultrarelativistic jet), then the slope of
the dividing line is readily obtained using simple physical arguments and
established empirical relationships between the X-Ray luminosities, core radii,
velocity dispersions and absolute magnitudes of elliptical galaxies. The
intercept of the dividing line depends upon parameters which are known perhaps
to within factors of order unity and agrees with the data to within an order of
magnitude. ROSAT observations of elliptical galaxies will be important in
constraining the central pressures and X-Ray core radii of radio ellipticals.
Knowledge of these two parameters will assist in a more detailed assessment of
the physics which is proposed here as being relevant. High resolution
observations of jets within a kpc of the radio core will also be useful for
determining the spreading rates of jets in this region.


  Onsager's irreversible thermodynamics is used to perform a systematic
deduction of the kinetic equations governing the opening and collapse of
transient pores in spherical vesicles. We show that the edge tension has to be
determined from the initial stage of the pore relaxation and that in the final
state the vesicle membrane is not completely relaxed, since the surface tension
and the pressure difference are about $25\%$ of its initial value. We also show
that the pore life-time is controlled by the solution viscosity and its opening
is driven by the solution leak-out and the surface tension drop. The final
collapse is due to a non-linear interplay between the edge and the surface
tensions together with the pressure difference. Also, we discuss the connection
with previous models.


  We prove that every nilpotent commutative algebra can be embedded into a
pre-commutative (Zinbiel) algebra with respect to the anti-commutator
operation. For finite-dimensional algebras, the nilpotency condition is
necessary for a commutative algebra to have a pre-commutative envelope.


  Extensions of the fractional Brownian fields are constructed over a complete
Riemannian manifold. This construction is carried out for the full range of the
Hurst parameter $\alpha\in(0,1)$. In particular, we establish existence,
distributional scaling (self-similiarity), stationarity of the increments, and
almost sure H\"{o}lder continuity of sample paths. Stationary counterparts to
these fields are also constructed.


  Coherent epitaxial growth allows to produce crystalline films with strained
structures which are unstable in the bulk. Thereby, the relationship between
the lattice parameters of the overlayer in the interface plane, $(a,b)$, and
its minimum-energy out-of-plane lattice parameter, $c_{\text{min}}(a,b)$, need
not be continuous. This general statement is proven by examples of total energy
calculations. As a consequence, $c_{\text{min}}$, which is determined by the
choice of the substrate, and $c_{\text{min}}$-dependent intrinsic properties of
the overlayer cannot always be tuned in a continuous way as one may aim to do
by means of strained epitaxy. Employing the model of the epitaxial Bain path we
predict that such discontinuities occur in films of the elements V, Nb, Ru, La,
Os, and Ir. The abrupt change of $c_{\text{min}}$ can be exploited to switch
properties specific to the overlayer material. This is demonstrated for the
example of the superconducting critical temperature of a V film which we
predict to jump by 20% at a discontinuity of $c_{\text{min}}$


  We investigate scalar field theories in the multifield scenario, focusing
mainly on the possibility to smoothly build internal structure and asymmetry
for kinks and domain walls. The procedure requires the inclusion of an extra
field which is associated to a function that modifies the dynamics of the other
fields. We investigate minimum energy configurations, which support first order
equations compatible with the equations of motion. The extra field allows a
transition which is guided by a parameter that connects the standard solution
to another one, geometrically constrained, mimicking the effects of geometrical
constrictions in magnetic materials.


  A stochastic version of the Noether Theorem is derived for systems under the
action of external random forces. The concept of moment generating functional
is employed to describe the symmetry of the stochastic forces. The theorem is
applied to two kinds of random covariant forces. One of them generated in an
electrodynamic way and the other defined in the rest frame of the particle as a
function of the proper time. For both of them, it is shown the conservation of
the mean value of a random drift momentum. The validity of the theorem makes
clear that random systems can produce causal stochastic correlations between
two faraway separated systems, that had interacted in the past. In addition
possible connections of the discussion with the Ives Couder's experimental
results are remarked.


  A complete set of spectroscopic data is indispensable when using Rydberg
states of trapped ions for quantum information processing. We carried out
Rydberg series spectroscopy for $nS_{1/2}$ states with $38 \leq n \leq 65$ and
for $nD_{5/2}$ states with $37\leq n \leq 50$ on a single trapped $^{40}$Ca$^+$
ion. From a nonlinear regression to resonance frequencies, we determined the
ionization energy of 2 870 575.582(15) GHz, measured 60 times more accurately
as compared to the accepted value and contradicting it by 7.5 standard
deviations. We confirm quantum defect values of $\delta_{S_{1/2}}=1.802995(5)$
and $\delta_{D_{5/2}}=0.626888(9)$ for $nS_{1/2}$ and $nD_{5/2}$ states
respectively, which allow for unambiguous addressing of Rydberg levels of
Ca$^+$ ions.


  We have witnessed an unprecedented public health crisis caused by the new
coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has severely affected medical
institutions, our common lives, and social-economic activities. This crisis
also reveals the brittleness of existing medical services, such as
over-centralization of medical resources, the hysteresis of medical services
digitalization, and weak security and privacy protection of medical data. The
integration of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) and blockchain is expected
to be a panacea to COVID-19 attributed to the ubiquitous presence and the
perception of IoMT as well as the enhanced security and immutability of the
blockchain. However, the synergy of IoMT and blockchain is also faced with
challenges in privacy, latency, and context-absence. The emerging edge
intelligence technologies bring opportunities to tackle these issues. In this
article, we present a blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT in
addressing the COVID-19 crisis. We first review IoMT, edge intelligence, and
blockchain in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. We then present an architecture
of blockchain-empowered edge intelligence for IoMT after discussing the
opportunities of integrating blockchain and edge intelligence. We next offer
solutions to COVID-19 brought by blockchain-empowered edge intelligence from 1)
monitoring and tracing COVID-19 pandemic origin, 2) traceable supply chain of
injectable medicines and COVID-19 vaccines, and 3) telemedicine and remote
healthcare services. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and open issues
in blockchain-empowered edge intelligence.


  A series of peculiar, visual alignments between the pyramids of the pharaohs
of the 4, 5 and 6 Egyptian dynasties exists. These alignments governed from the
very beginning the planning of the funerary monuments of successive kings and,
in some cases, led to establish building sites in quite inconvenient locations
from the technical viewpoint. Explaining the topography of these monuments
means therefore also investigating on their symbolic motivations: religion,
power, dynastic lineage and social context, as well as getting insights on the
skills of the ancient architects in astronomy and geometry. In the present
paper we focus on the relationships between the Old Kingdom pyramids at
Saqqara.


  We propose a new mechanism of friction in resonantly driven vibrational
systems. The form of the friction force follows from the time- and
spatial-symmetry arguments. We consider a microscopic mechanism of this
resonant force in nanomechanical systems. The friction can be negative, leading
to an instability of forced vibrations of a nanoresonator and the onset of
self-sustained oscillations in the rotating frame.


  Laser Light Scattering (LLS) method, combined with a long-distance microscope
was utilized to detect micrometer-sized particles on a smooth substrate. LLS
was capable to detect individual particle release, shrink, or fragmentation
during exposure to a plasma or a gas jet. In-situ monitoring of hundreds of
particles was carried out to investigate the effect of hydrogen plasma exposure
on particle adhesion, morphology, and composition. LLS was calibrated with
monodisperse melamine resin spheres with known sizes of 2.14 um, 2.94 um, and
5.26 um in diameter. The lowest achievable noise level of approximately 3% was
demonstrated for counting 5.26 um spherical melamine particles. The accuracy
for melamine particle size measurements ranged from 50% for 2.14 um particles
to 10% for 5.26 um particles. This scatter was taken as the imprecision of the
method. Size distribution for polydisperse particles with known refractive
index was obtained by interpolating to an effective scattering cross-section of
a sphere using Mie theory. While the Abbe diffraction limit was about 2 um in
our system, the detection limit for Si particles in LLS according to Mie
approximation was assessed to about 3 um, given the limitations of the laser
flux, microscope resolution, camera noise, and particle composition.
Additionally, the gradual changes in forward scattering cross-sections for Si
particles during the exposure to the hydrogen plasma were consistent with Si
etching reported in the literature.


  Patterning of diamond-like carbon (DLC) and DLC:metal nanocomposites is of
interest for an increasing number of applications. We demonstrate a nanoimprint
lithography process based on silicon containing thermoplastic resist combined
with plasma etching for straightforward patterning of such films. A variety of
different structures with few hundred nanometer feature size and moderate
aspect ratios were successfully realized. The quality of produced patterns was
directly investigated by the means of optical and scanning electron microscopy
(SEM). Such structures were further assessed by employing them in the
development of gratings for guided mode resonance (GMR) effect. Optical
characterization of such leaky waveguide was compared with numerical
simulations based on rigorous coupled wave analysis method with good agreement.
The use of such structures as refractive index variation sensors is
demonstrated with sensitivity up to 319 nm/RIU, achieving an improvement close
to 450% in sensitivity compared to previously reported similar sensors. This
pronounced GMR signal fully validates the employed DLC material, the technology
to pattern it and the possibility to develop DLC based gratings as corrosion
and wear resistant refractometry sensors that are able to operate under harsh
conditions providing great value and versatility.


  The blazar 3C 454.3 underwent an unprecedented optical outburst in spring
2005. This was first followed by a mm and then by a cm radio outburst, which
peaked in February 2006. We report on follow-up observations by the WEBT to
study the multiwavelength emission in the post-outburst phase. XMM-Newton
observations on July and December 2006 added information on the X-ray and UV
fluxes. The source was in a faint state. The radio flux at the higher
frequencies showed a fast decreasing trend, which represents the tail of the
big radio outburst. It was followed by a quiescent state, common at all radio
frequencies. In contrast, moderate activity characterized the NIR and optical
light curves, with a progressive increase of the variability amplitude with
increasing wavelength. We ascribe this redder-when-brighter behaviour to the
presence of a "little blue bump" due to line emission from the broad line
region, which is clearly visible in the source SED during faint states.
Moreover, the data from the XMM-Newton OM reveal a rise of the SED in the UV,
suggesting the existence of a "big blue bump" due to thermal emission from the
accretion disc. The X-ray spectra are well fitted with a power-law model with
photoelectric absorption, possibly larger than the Galactic one. However, the
comparison with previous X-ray observations would imply that the amount of
absorbing matter is variable. Alternatively, the intrinsic X-ray spectrum
presents a curvature, which may depend on the X-ray brightness. In this case,
two scenarios are possible.


  Orchestrating service-oriented workflows is typically based on a design model
that routes both data and control through a single point - the centralised
workflow engine. This causes scalability problems that include the unnecessary
consumption of the network bandwidth, high latency in transmitting data between
the services, and performance bottlenecks. These problems are highly prominent
when orchestrating workflows that are composed from services dispersed across
distant geographical locations. This paper presents a novel workflow
partitioning approach, which attempts to improve the scalability of
orchestrating large-scale workflows. It permits the workflow computation to be
moved towards the services providing the data in order to garner optimal
performance results. This is achieved by decomposing the workflow into smaller
sub workflows for parallel execution, and determining the most appropriate
network locations to which these sub workflows are transmitted and subsequently
executed. This paper demonstrates the efficiency of our approach using a set of
experimental workflows that are orchestrated over Amazon EC2 and across several
geographic network regions.


  We study an Ising model in one dimension with short range ferromagnetic and
long range (power law) antiferromagnetic interactions. We show that the zero
temperature phase diagram in a (longitudinal) field H involves a sequence of up
and down domains whose size varies continuously with H, between -H_c and H_c
which represent the edge of the ferromagnetic up and down phases. The
implications of long range interaction in many body systems are discussed.


  Oriented object detection, an emerging task in recent years, aims to identify
and locate objects across varied orientations. This requires the detector to
accurately capture the orientation information, which varies significantly
within and across images. Despite the existing substantial efforts,
simultaneously ensuring model effectiveness and parameter efficiency remains
challenging in this scenario. In this paper, we propose a lightweight yet
effective Group-wise Rotating and Attention (GRA) module to replace the
convolution operations in backbone networks for oriented object detection. GRA
can adaptively capture fine-grained features of objects with diverse
orientations, comprising two key components: Group-wise Rotating and Group-wise
Attention. Group-wise Rotating first divides the convolution kernel into
groups, where each group extracts different object features by rotating at a
specific angle according to the object orientation. Subsequently, Group-wise
Attention is employed to adaptively enhance the object-related regions in the
feature. The collaborative effort of these components enables GRA to
effectively capture the various orientation information while maintaining
parameter efficiency. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the
superiority of our method. For example, GRA achieves a new state-of-the-art
(SOTA) on the DOTA-v2.0 benchmark, while saving the parameters by nearly 50%
compared to the previous SOTA method. Code will be released.


  Integrability of the (2+1)-dimensional Gauss-Codazzi-Mainardi equation is
considered. It is shown that this equation is the particular cases of the
Yang-Mills-Higgs-Bogomolny and self-dual Yang-Mills equations.


  Some standardized environments have been designed for partially observable
multi-agent cooperation, but we find most current environments are synchronous,
whereas real-world agents often have their own action spaces leading to
asynchrony. Furthermore, fixed agents number limits the scalability of action
space, whereas in reality agents number can change resulting in a flexible
action space. In addition, current environments are balanced, which is not
always the case in the real world where there may be an ability gap between
different parties leading to asymmetry. Finally, current environments tend to
have less stochasticity with simple state transitions, whereas real-world
environments can be highly stochastic and result in extremely risky. To address
this gap, we propose WarGame Challenge (WGC) inspired by the Wargame. WGC is a
lightweight, flexible, and easy-to-use environment with a clear framework that
can be easily configured by users. Along with the benchmark, we provide MARL
baseline algorithms such as QMIX and a toolkit to help algorithms complete
performance tests on WGC. Finally, we present baseline experiment results,
which demonstrate the challenges of WGC. We think WGC enrichs the partially
observable multi-agent cooperation domain and introduces more challenges that
better reflect the real-world characteristics. Code is release in
http://turingai.ia.ac.cn/data\_center/show/10.


  GraphBLAS is an interface for implementing graph algorithms. Algorithms
implemented using the GraphBLAS interface are cast in terms of linear
algebra-like operations. However, many graph algorithms are canonically
described in terms of operations on vertices and/or edges. Despite the known
duality between these two representations, the differences in the way
algorithms are described using the two approaches can pose considerable
difficulties in the adoption of the GraphBLAS as standard interface for
development. This paper investigates a systematic approach for translating a
graph algorithm described in the canonical vertex and edge representation into
an implementation that leverages the GraphBLAS interface. We present a two-step
approach to this problem. First, we express common vertex- and edge-centric
design patterns using a linear algebraic language. Second, we map this
intermediate representation to the GraphBLAS interface. We illustrate our
approach by translating the delta-stepping single source shortest path
algorithm from its canonical description to a GraphBLAS implementation, and
highlight lessons learned when implementing using GraphBLAS.


  Since the discovery of strangeness almost five decades ago, interest in this
degree of freedom has grown up and now its investigation spans the scales from
quarks to nuclei. Measurements with identified strange hadrons can provide
important information on several hot topics in hadronic physics: the strange
distribution and fragmentation functions, the nucleon tomography and quark
orbital momentum, accessible through the study of the {\it generalized} parton
distribution and the {\it transverse momentum dependent} parton distribution
functions, the quark hadronization in the nuclear medium, the hadron
spectroscopy and the search for exotic mesons.
  The CLAS12 large acceptance spectrometer in Hall B at the Jefferson
Laboratory upgraded with a RICH detector together with the 12 GeV CEBAF high
intensity, high polarized electron beam can open new possibilities to study
strangeness in hard processes allowing breakthroughs in all those areas.
  This paper summarizes the physics case for a RICH detector for CLAS12. Many
topics have been intensively discussed at the International Workshop "Probing
Strangeness in Hard Processes" (PSHP2010) \cite{PSHP-workshop} held in
Frascati, Italy in October 2010. The authors of this papers like to thank all
speakers and participants of the workshop for their contribution and very
fruitful discussion.


  A simple but successful strategy for building a discrete diffusion operator
in finite volume schemes of industrial use is to correct the standard two-point
flux approximation with a term accounting for the local mesh non-orthogonality.
Practical experience with a variety of different mesh typologies, including
non-orthogonal tetrahedral, hexahedral and polyhedral meshes, has shown that
this discrete diffusion operator is accurate and robust whenever the mesh is
not too distorted and sufficiently regular. In this work, we show that this
approach can be interpreted as equivalent to introducing an anisotropic
operator that accounts for the preferential directions induced by the local
mesh non-orthogonality. This allows to derive a convergence analysis of the
corrected method under a quite weak global assumption on mesh distortion. This
convergence proof, which is obtained for the first time for this finite volume
method widely employed in industrial software packages such as OpenFOAM,
provides a reference framework on how to interpret some of its variants
commonly implemented in commercial finite volume codes. Numerical experiments
are presented that confirm the accuracy and robustness of the results.
Furthermore, we also show empirically that a least square approach to the
gradient computation can provide second order convergence even when the mild
non-orthogonality condition on the mesh is violated.


  We study the next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic order resummation for the
large $p_T$ Higgs boson production at the LHC in the framework of
soft-collinear effective theory. We find that the resummation effects reduce
the scale uncertainty significantly and decrease the QCD NLO results by about
$11\%$ in the large $p_T$ region. The finite top quark mass effects and the
effects of the NNLO singular terms are also discussed.


  We consider single-hop radio networks with multiple channels as a model of
wireless networks. There are $n$ stations connected to $b$ radio channels that
do not provide collision detection. A station uses all the channels
concurrently and independently. Some $k$ stations may become active
spontaneously at arbitrary times. The goal is to wake up the network, which
occurs when all the stations hear a successful transmission on some channel.
Duration of a waking-up execution is measured starting from the first
spontaneous activation. We present a deterministic algorithm for the general
problem that wakes up the network in $O(k\log^{1/b} k\log n)$ time, where $k$
is unknown. We give a deterministic scalable algorithm for the special case
when $b>d \log \log n$, for some constant $d>1$, which wakes up the network in
$O(\frac{k}{b}\log n\log(b\log n))$ time, with $k$ unknown. This algorithm
misses time optimality by at most a factor of $O(\log n(\log b +\log\log n))$,
because any deterministic algorithm requires $\Omega(\frac{k}{b}\log
\frac{n}{k})$ time. We give a randomized algorithm that wakes up the network
within $O(k^{1/b}\ln \frac{1}{\epsilon})$ rounds with a probability that is at
least $1-\epsilon$, for any $0<\epsilon<1$, where $k$ is known. We also
consider a model of jamming, in which each channel in any round may be jammed
to prevent a successful transmission, which happens with some known parameter
probability $p$, independently across all channels and rounds. For this model,
we give two deterministic algorithms for unknown~$k$: one wakes up the network
in time $O(\log^{-1}(\frac{1}{p})\, k\log n\log^{1/b} k)$, and the other in
time $O(\log^{-1}(\frac{1}{p}) \, \frac{k}{b} \log n\log(b\log n))$ but
assuming the inequality $b>\log(128b\log n)$, both with a probability that is
at least $1-1/\mbox{poly}(n)$.


  A new dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) method is introduced for simultaneous
online system identification and denoising in conjunction with the adoption of
an extended Kalman filter algorithm\color{black}. The present paper explains
the extended-Kalman-filter-based DMD (EKFDMD) algorithm and illustrates that
EKFDMD requires significant numerical resources for many-degree-of-freedom
(many-DoF) problems and that the combination with truncated proper orthogonal
decomposition (trPOD) helps us to apply the EKFDMD algorithm to many-DoF
problems. The numerical experiments of the present study illustrate that EKFDMD
can estimate eigenvalues from a noisy dataset with a few DoFs better than or as
well as the existing algorithms, whereas EKFDMD can also denoise the original
dataset online. In particular, EKFDMD performs better than existing algorithms
for the case in which system noise is present. The EKFDMD with trPOD can be
successfully applied to many-DoF problems, including a fluid-problem example,
and the results reveal the superior performance of system identification and
denoising. Note that these superior results are obtained despite being an
online procedure.


  We study model-theoretic and stability-theoretic properies of the nonabelian
free group in the light of Sela's recent result on stability and results
announced by Bestvina and Feighn. We point out analogies between the free group
and so-called bad groups of finite Morley rank and we prove non CM-triviality
of the free group.


  I show that propositional intuitionistic logic is complete with respect to an
adaptation of Dummett's pragmatist justification procedure. In particular,
given a pragmatist justification of an argument, I show how to obtain a natural
deduction derivation of the conclusion of the argument from, at most, the same
assumptions.


  We introduce a new definition of exponential family of Markov chains, and
show that many characteristic properties of the usual exponential family of
probability distributions are properly extended to Markov chains. The method of
information geometry is effectively applied to our framework, which enables us
to characterize the divergence rate of Markov chain from a differential
geometric viewpoint.


  Absolute concentration robustness (ACR) and concordance are novel concepts in
the theory of robustness and stability within Chemical Reaction Network Theory.
In this paper, we have extended Shinar and Feinberg's reaction network analysis
approach to the insulin signaling system based on recent advances in
decomposing reaction networks. We have shown that the network with 20 species,
35 complexes, and 35 reactions is concordant, implying at most one positive
equilibrium in each of its stoichiometric compatibility class. We have obtained
the system's finest independent decomposition consisting of 10 subnetworks, a
coarsening of which reveals three subnetworks which are not only functionally
but also structurally important. Utilizing the network's deficiency-oriented
coarsening, we have developed a method to determine positive equilibria for the
entire network. Our analysis has also shown that the system has ACR in 8
species all coming from a deficiency zero subnetwork. Interestingly, we have
shown that, for a set of rate constants, the insulin-regulated glucose
transporter GLUT4 (important in glucose energy metabolism), has stable ACR.


  The complex potentials representing flows around a vertical plate
semi-submerged in a uniform stream are derived in analytical forms by the
reduction method. They are composed from the regular solution and a weak
singular eigen solution. The linear combinations of them represent some flows
such as regular flow, zero-vertical flux flow, flow satisfying Kutta condition
and wave-free flow. The wave resistances of the flows are also obtained in
analytical forms. The analytical solution obtained by Bessho-Mizuno(1962) has a
possibility that it does not satisfy the boundary condition on the plate.


  Constraints placed upon the phenotypes of organisms result from their
interactions with the environment. Over evolutionary timescales, these
constraints feed back onto smaller molecular subnetworks comprising the
organism. The evolution of biological networks is studied by considering a
network of a few nodes embedded in a larger context. Taking into account this
fact that any network under study is actually embedded in a larger context, we
define network architecture, not on the basis of physical interactions alone,
but rather as a specification of the manner in which constraints are placed
upon the states of its nodes. We show that such network architectures
possessing cycles in their topology, in contrast to those that do not, may be
subjected to unsatisfiable constraints. This may be a significant factor
leading to selection biased against those network architectures where such
inconsistent constraints are more likely to arise. We proceed to quantify the
likelihood of inconsistency arising as a function of network architecture
finding that, in the absence of sampling bias over the space of possible
constraints and for a given network size, networks with a larger number of
cycles are more likely to have unsatisfiable constraints placed upon them. Our
results identify a constraint that, at least in isolation, would contribute to
a bias in the evolutionary process toward more hierarchical-modular versus
completely connected network architectures. Together, these results highlight
the context-dependence of the functionality of biological networks.


  Differential cross sections of deep inelastic scattering of charged leptons
from hadrons are investigated by using the gauge/string duality. We consider
vector mesons derived from different holographic dual models obtaining a
general expression. We focus on the strongly coupled regime of dual gauge
theories for different values of the Bjorken parameter. We find new predictions
which are particularly interesting for differential scattering cross sections
of polarized leptons scattered off polarized vector mesons. We also carry out a
detailed comparison of the moments of the structure functions with lattice QCD
results.


  Beam loss is a critical issue in high-intensity accelerators, and much effort
is expended during both the design and operation phases to minimize the loss
and to keep it to manageable levels. As new accelerators become ever more
powerful, beam loss becomes even more critical. Linacs for H- ion beams, such
as the one at the Oak Ridge Spallation Neutron Source, have many more loss
mechanisms compared to H+ (proton) linacs, such as the one being designed for
the European Spallation Neutron Source. Interesting H- beam loss mechanisms
include residual gas stripping, H+ capture and acceleration, field stripping,
black-body radiation and the recently discovered intra-beam stripping
mechanism. Beam halo formation, and ion source or RF turn on/off transients,
are examples of beam loss mechanisms that are common for both H+ and H-
accelerators. Machine protection systems play an important role in limiting the
beam loss.


  In this paper, we introduce a simple, yet powerful pipeline for medical image
segmentation that combines Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) with Fully
Convolutional Residual Networks (FC-ResNets). We propose and examine a design
that takes particular advantage of recent advances in the understanding of both
Convolutional Neural Networks as well as ResNets. Our approach focuses upon the
importance of a trainable pre-processing when using FC-ResNets and we show that
a low-capacity FCN model can serve as a pre-processor to normalize medical
input data. In our image segmentation pipeline, we use FCNs to obtain
normalized images, which are then iteratively refined by means of a FC-ResNet
to generate a segmentation prediction. As in other fully convolutional
approaches, our pipeline can be used off-the-shelf on different image
modalities. We show that using this pipeline, we exhibit state-of-the-art
performance on the challenging Electron Microscopy benchmark, when compared to
other 2D methods. We improve segmentation results on CT images of liver
lesions, when contrasting with standard FCN methods. Moreover, when applying
our 2D pipeline on a challenging 3D MRI prostate segmentation challenge we
reach results that are competitive even when compared to 3D methods. The
obtained results illustrate the strong potential and versatility of the
pipeline by achieving highly accurate results on multi-modality images from
different anatomical regions and organs.


  We report the discovery of 11 OH megamasers and one OH absorber, along with
upper limits on the OH luminosity of 53 other luminous infrared galaxies at z >
0.1. The new megamasers show a wide range of spectral properties, but are
consistent with the extant set of 55 previously reported objects, 8 of which
have z > 0.1. The new OH detections are the preliminary results of a OH
megamaser survey in progress at the Arecibo Observatory, which is expected to
produce several dozen detections and calibrate the luminosity function of OH
megamasers to the low-redshift galaxy merger rate (0.1 < z < 0.2).


  We consider the effect of weak disorder on eigenstates in a special class of
tight-binding models. Models in this class have short-range hopping on periodic
lattices; their defining feature is that the clean systems have some energy
bands that are dispersionless throughout the Brillouin zone. We show that
states derived from these flat bands are generically critical in the presence
of weak disorder, being neither Anderson localised nor spatially extended.
Further, we establish a mapping between this localisation problem and the one
of resonances in random impedance networks, which previous work has suggested
are also critical. Our conclusions are illustrated using numerical results for
a two-dimensional lattice, known as the square lattice with crossings or the
planar pyrochlore lattice.


  This talk briefly explains how the breaking of a Lorentz-invariant
description of nature at tiny space-time intervals might affect the
non-Gaussian character of the primordial fluctuations left by inflation. For
example, a model that contains irrelevant operators that only preserve the
spatial symmetries along constant-time surfaces can generate a larger
non-Gaussian component in the pattern of primordial fluctuations than is
ordinarily predicted by inflation. This property can be useful for constraining
models that allow some Lorentz violation at short distances, beyond the
constraints possible from the power spectrum alone.


  A robust square wave generator employing a sole capacitor and two resistors
has been presented in this study. Low power and popular translinear circuit
scheme of Second generation current controlled current conveyor-CCCII has been
taken as an active element to implement the proposed square wave generator.
CCCII inhibits promising features like availability of three mutually
independently and electronically adjustable parameters corresponding
transconductance (gm), intrinsic resistance (r) of the current input terminal
and current gain between two terminals) that are very prevalent for control
applications accepted currently. The operating frequency of the proposed model
has been analyzed with respect to the passive components present there, with no
exposure of output signals to the thermal voltage (VT). Electrical/Device
properties (like Noise, Threshold, area etc.) of the proposed circuit have also
been discussed in this work. The simulation work was carried out on Synopsis
Hspice tool (v-2008.03) from Avant. Satisfying results with anticipation of
theoretical and simulated results, including precision (consistency assessment)
with Pareto analysis (Ist order Best Test flavored by Decision making analysis)
were observed during the study. The 45nm BSIM CMOS modelling parameters were
adopted to prove the theory. The elementary purpose of using such parameters is
to maximize the circuit drive and lowering the leakage current. Another purpose
of using these modelling parameters is to enhance the realization of the
proposed circuit in the custom Integrated circuit(IC) form, from a Standard
local foundry. Maximum power consumption of the circuit is 600 micro Watt, with
2V rail to rail operating voltages


  We present a proof of concept for solving a 1+1D complex-valued, delay
partial differential equation (PDE) that emerges in the study of waveguide
quantum electrodynamics (QED) by adapting the finite-difference time-domain
(FDTD) method. The delay term is spatially non-local, rendering conventional
approaches such as the method of lines inapplicable. We show that by properly
designing the grid and by supplying the (partial) exact solution as the
boundary condition, the delay PDE can be numerically solved. In addition, we
demonstrate that while the delay imposes strong data dependency, multi-thread
parallelization can nevertheless be applied to such a problem. Our code
provides a numerically exact solution to the time-dependent multi-photon
scattering problem in waveguide QED.


  On the basis of a model system of pillars built of unit cubes, a
two-component entropic measure for the multiscale analysis of
spatio-compositional inhomogeneity is proposed. It quantifies the statistical
dissimilarity per cell of the actual configurational macrostate and the
theoretical reference one that maximizes entropy. Two kinds of disorder
compete: i) the spatial one connected with possible positions of pillars inside
a cell (the first component of the measure), ii) the compositional one linked
to compositions of each local sum of their integer heights into a number of
pillars occupying the cell (the second component). As both the number of
pillars and sum of their heights are conserved, the upper limit for a pillar
height hmax occurs. If due to a further constraint there is the more demanding
limit h <= h* < hmax, the exact number of restricted compositions can be then
obtained only through the generating function. However, at least for systems
with exclusively composition degrees of freedom, we show that the neglecting of
the h* is not destructive yet for a nice correlation of the h*-constrained
entropic measure and its less demanding counterpart, which is much easier to
compute. Given examples illustrate a broad applicability of the measure and its
ability to quantify some of the subtleties of a fractional Brownian motion,
time evolution of a quasipattern [28,29] and reconstruction of a laser-speckle
pattern [2], which are hardly to discern or even missed.


  In this paper, it is shown that a topological space $X$ is compact iff every
maximal ideal of the power set ring $\mathcal{P}(X)$ converges to exactly one
point of $X$. Then as an application, simple and ring-theoretic proofs are
provided for the Tychonoff theorem and Alexander subbase theorem. As another
result in this spirit, a ring-theoretic proof is given to the fact that a
topological space is a profinite space iff it is compact and totally
disconnected.


  One century after Einstein's work, Brownian Motion still remains both a
fundamental open issue and a continous source of inspiration for many areas of
natural sciences. We first present a discussion about stochastic and
deterministic approaches proposed in the literature to model the Brownian
Motion and more general diffusive behaviours. Then, we focus on the problems
concerning the determination of the microscopic nature of diffusion by means of
data analysis. Finally, we discuss the general conditions required for the
onset of large scale diffusive motion.


  Targeted advertising can harm vulnerable groups when it targets individuals'
personal and psychological vulnerabilities. We focus on how targeted
weight-loss advertisements harm people with histories of disordered eating. We
identify three features of targeted advertising that cause harm: the
persistence of personal data that can expose vulnerabilities, over-simplifying
algorithmic relevancy models, and design patterns encouraging engagement that
can facilitate unhealthy behavior. Through a series of semi-structured
interviews with individuals with histories of unhealthy body stigma, dieting,
and disordered eating, we found that targeted weight-loss ads reinforced low
self-esteem and deepened pre-existing anxieties around food and exercise. At
the same time, we observed that targeted individuals demonstrated agency and
resistance against distressing ads. Drawing on scholarship in postcolonial
environmental studies, we use the concept of slow violence to articulate how
online targeted advertising inflicts harms that may not be immediately
identifiable. CAUTION: This paper includes media that could be triggering,
particularly to people with an eating disorder. Please use caution when
reading, printing, or disseminating this paper.


  Motivated by the properties of matter quantum fields in curved space-times,
we work out a gravity theory that combines the Born-Infeld gravity Lagrangian
with an $f(R)$ piece. To avoid ghost-like instabilities, the theory is
formulated within the Palatini approach. This construction provides more
freedom to address a number of important questions such as the dynamics of the
early universe and the cosmic accelerated expansion, among others. In
particular, we consider the effect that adding an $f(R)=a R^2$ term has on the
early-time cosmology. We find that bouncing solutions are robust against these
modifications of the Lagrangian whereas the solutions with {\it loitering}
behavior of the original Born-Infeld theory are very sensitive to the $R^2$
term. In fact, these solutions are modified in such a way that a plateau in the
$H^2$ function may arise yielding a period of (approximately) de Sitter
inflationary expansion. This inflationary behavior may be found even in a
radiation dominated universe.


  The phonon spectrum of Coulomb lattice in neutron star crusts above the
neutron drip density is affected by the interaction with the ambient neutron
Fermi-liquid. For the values of the neutron-phonon coupling constant in the
range $0.1 \le \lambda \le 1$ an appreciable renormalization of the phonon
spectrum occurs which can lead to a lattice instability manifested in an
exponential growth of the density fluctuations. The BCS phonon exchange
mechanism of superconductivity leads to neutron pairing with a gap in the
neutron excitation spectrum comparable to that due to the direct nuclear
interaction.


  The associated production of Higgs boson and single top quark is of
particular interest since it is senstive to the relative sign of the Higgs
boson coupling to gauge bosons and the Yukawa coupling $y$ to fermions. The
presented analysis is setting upper production limits on a model with
$y_\text{t}=-1$, which has an enhanced cross section compared to the standard
model expectation. For this it focusses on the Higgs boson decaying to a pair
of b quarks and uses the full dataset of $pp$ collisions recorded with the CMS
detector in 2012. It reports an upper limit on 7.57 times the expected cross
section, with an expected sensitivity of 5.14. This translates into the
exclusion of associated tHq production with $y_\text{t}=-1$-like
characteristics with a cross section smaller than 1.77\,pb.


  For $d\geq 1$ and $0<\beta<\alpha<2$, consider a family of pseudo
differential operators $\{\Delta^{\alpha} + a^\beta \Delta^{\beta/2}; a \in [0,
1]\}$ that evolves continuously from $\Delta^{\alpha/2}$ to $
\Delta^{\alpha/2}+ \Delta^{\beta/2}$. It gives arise to a family of L\'evy
processes \{$X^a, a\in [0, 1]\}$, where each $X^a$ is the sum of independent a
symmetric $\alpha$-stable process and a symmetric $\beta$-stable process with
weight $a$. For any $C^{1,1}$ open set $D$, we establish explicit sharp
two-sided estimates (uniform in $a\in [0,1]$) for the transition density
function of the subprocess $X^{a, D}$ of $X^a$ killed upon leaving the open set
$D$. The infinitesimal generator of $X^{a, D}$ is the non-local operator
$\Delta^{\alpha} + a^\beta \Delta^{\beta/2}$ with zero exterior condition on
$D^c$. As consequences of these sharp heat kernel estimates, we obtain uniform
sharp Green function estimates for $X^{a, D}$ and uniform boundary Harnack
principle for $X^a$ in $D$ with explicit decay rate.


  Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved great success recently,
demonstrating a strong capability to understand multimodal information and to
interact with human users. Despite the progress made, the challenge of
detecting high-risk interactions in multimodal settings, and in particular in
speech modality, remains largely unexplored. Conventional research on risk for
speech modality primarily emphasises the content (e.g., what is captured as
transcription). However, in speech-based interactions, paralinguistic cues in
audio can significantly alter the intended meaning behind utterances. In this
work, we propose a speech-specific risk taxonomy, covering 8 risk categories
under hostility (malicious sarcasm and threats), malicious imitation (age,
gender, ethnicity), and stereotypical biases (age, gender, ethnicity). Based on
the taxonomy, we create a small-scale dataset for evaluating current LMMs
capability in detecting these categories of risk. We observe even the latest
models remain ineffective to detect various paralinguistic-specific risks in
speech (e.g., Gemini 1.5 Pro is performing only slightly above random
baseline). Warning: this paper contains biased and offensive examples.


  Quantum state preparation by adiabatic evolution is currently rendered
ineffective by the long implementation times of the underlying quantum
circuits, comparable to the decoherence time of present and near-term quantum
devices. These implementation times can be significantly reduced by realizing
the evolution with a minimal number of customized gates. Employing a realistic
model of a two-qubit processor, we carried out classical device-level
simulations of the adiabatic evolution of a two-spin system implemented with
customized two-qubit gates. These device-level simulations were compared with
(experimental) ones solving the same problem on IBMQ systems. When used to
emulate the IBMQ quantum circuit, our device-level simulations reached state
fidelities ranging from 65% to 85%, similar to the actual performance of a
diverse set of IBMQ devices.When we reduced the implementation time by using a
minimal number of customized gates, however, the loss of fidelity was reduced
by at least a factor of four, allowing us to accurately extract the energy of
the target state. This improvement is enough to render adiabatic evolution
useful for quantum state preparation for small systems or as a preconditioner
for other state preparation methods.


  The asymptotic travelling wave solution of the KdV-Burgers equation driven by
the long scale periodic driver is constructed. The solution represents a
shock-train in which the quasi-periodic sequence of dispersive shocks or
soliton chains is interspersed by smoothly varying regions. It is shown that
the periodic solution which has the spatial driver period undergoes period
doublings as the governing parameter changes. Two types of chaotic behavior are
considered. The first type is a weak chaos, where only a small chaotic
deviation from the periodic solution occurs. The second type corresponds to the
developed chaos where the solution ``ignores'' the driver period and represents
a random sequence of uncorrelated shocks. In the case of weak chaos the shock
coordinate being repeatedly mapped over the driver period moves on a chaotic
attractor, while in the case of developed chaos it moves on a repellor. Both
solutions depend on a parameter indicating the reference shock position in the
shock-train. The structure of a one dimensional set to which this parameter
belongs is investigated. This set contains measure one intervals around the
fixed points in the case of periodic or weakly chaotic solutions and it becomes
a fractal in the case of strong chaos. The capacity dimension of this set is
calculated.


  The known (explicit) examples of Riemann surfaces not definable over their
field of moduli are not real whose field of moduli is a subfield of the reals.
In this paper we provide explicit examples of real Riemann surfaces which
cannot be defined over the field of moduli.


  We study simple models of the world-sheet CFTs describing non-geometric
backgrounds based on the topological interfaces, the `gluing condition' of
which imposes T-duality- or analogous twists. To be more specific, we start
with the torus partition function on a target space S^1 [base] x (S^1 x S^1)
[fiber] with rather general values of radii. The fiber CFT is defined by
inserting the twist operators consisting of the topological interfaces which
lie along the cycles of the world-sheet torus according to the winding numbers
of the base circle. We construct the partition functions involving such duality
twists. The modular invariance is achieved straightforwardly, whereas
`unitarization' is generically necessary to maintain the unitarity. We
demonstrate it in the case of the equal fiber radii. The resultant models are
closely related to the CFTs with the discrete torsion. The unitarization is
also physically interpreted as multiple insertions of the twist/interface
operators along various directions.


  Numerous spherical ``shells" have been observed in young star-forming
environments that host low- and intermediate-mass stars. These observations
suggest that these shells may be produced by isotropic stellar wind feedback
from young main-sequence stars. However, the driving mechanism for these shells
remains uncertain because the momentum injected by winds is too low to explain
their sizes and dynamics due to their low mass-loss rates. However, these
studies neglect how the wind kinetic energy is transferred to the ISM and
instead assume it is instantly lost via radiation, suggesting that these shells
are momentum-driven. Intermediate-mass stars have fast ($v_w \gtrsim 1000$
km/s) stellar winds and therefore the energy injected by winds should produce
energy-driven adiabatic wind bubbles that are larger than momentum-driven wind
bubbles. Here, we explore if energy-driven wind feedback can produce the
observed shells by performing a series of 3D magneto-hydrodynamic simulations
of wind feedback from intermediate-mass and high-mass stars that are placed in
a magnetized, turbulent molecular cloud. We find that, for the high-mass stars
modeled, energy-driven wind feedback produces $\sim$pc scale wind bubbles in
molecular clouds that agree with the observed shell sizes but winds from
intermediate-mass stars can not produce similar shells because of their lower
mass-loss rates and velocities. Therefore, such shells must be driven by other
feedback processes inherent to low- and intermediate-mass star formation.


  We use point processes theory to describe the asymptotic distribution of all
upper order statistics for observations collected at renewal times. As a
corollary, we obtain limiting theorems for corresponding extremal processes.


  Understanding how political attention is divided and over what subjects is
crucial for research on areas such as agenda setting, framing, and political
rhetoric. Existing methods for measuring attention, such as manual labeling
according to established codebooks, are expensive and can be restrictive. We
describe two computational models that automatically distinguish topics in
politicians' social media content. Our models---one supervised classifier and
one unsupervised topic model---provide different benefits. The supervised
classifier reduces the labor required to classify content according to
pre-determined topic list. However, tweets do more than communicate policy
positions. Our unsupervised model uncovers both political topics and other
Twitter uses (e.g., constituent service). These models are effective,
inexpensive computational tools for political communication and social media
research. We demonstrate their utility and discuss the different analyses they
afford by applying both models to the tweets posted by members of the 115th
U.S. Congress.


  Extensive numerical experiments on the long-term dynamics of planetesimal
disks with planets in systems of single stars have been carried out. The
planetary chaotic zone clearing timescales $T_\mathrm{cl}$ as a function of
mass parameter $\mu$ (planet-star mass ratio) have been determined numerically
with a high accuracy separately for the outer and inner parts of the chaotic
zone. Diffusional components $\propto \mu^{-6/7}$ and $\propto \mu^{-2}$ have
been revealed in the dependence $T_\mathrm{cl}(\mu)$. The results obtained are
discussed and interpreted in light of existing analytical theories based on the
mean motion resonance overlap criterion and in comparison with previous
numerical approaches to the problem.


  In this paper, we explore the TGTG formula from the perspective of mode
summation approach. Both scalar fields and electromagnetic fields are
considered. In this approach, one has to first solve the equation of motion to
find a wave basis for each object. The two T's in the TGTG formula are
T-matrices representing the Lippmann-Schwinger T-operators, one for each of the
objects. The two G's in the TGTG formula are the translation matrices, relating
the wave basis of an object to the wave basis of the other object. After
discussing the general theory, we apply the prescription to derive the explicit
formulas for the Casimir energies for the sphere-sphere, sphere-plane,
cylinder-cylinder and cylinder-plane interactions. First the T-matrices for a
plane, a sphere and a cylinder are derived for the following cases: the object
is imposed with general Robin boundary conditions; the object is
semitransparent; and the object is magnetodielectric. Then the operator
approach is used to derive the translation matrices. From these, the explicit
TGTG formula for each of the scenarios can be written down. Besides summarizing
all the TGTG formulas that have been derived so far, we also provide the TGTG
formulas for some scenarios that have not been considered before.


  We present here the explicit parametric solutions of second order
differential equations invariant under time translation and rescaling and third
order differential equations invariant under time translation and the two
homogeneity symmetries. The computation of first integrals gives in the most
general case, the parametric form of the general solution. For some polynomial
functions we obtain a time parametrisation quadrature which can be solved in
terms of ``known'' functions.


  Different choices exist for the renormalisation group resummation in the
determination of $\alpha_s$ from hadronic $\tau$ decays: namely fixed-order
(FOPT) and contour-improved perturbation theory (CIPT). The two approaches lead
to systematic differences in the resulting $\alpha_s$. On the basis of a model
for higher-order terms in the perturbative series, which incorporates
well-known structure from renormalons, it is found that while CIPT is unable to
account for the fully resummed series, FOPT smoothly approaches the Borel sum.
Employing the model to determine $\alpha_s$ yields $\alpha_s(M_\tau)=0.316 \pm
0.006$, which after evolution leads to $\alpha_s(M_Z) = 0.1180 \pm 0.0008$.


  In the first part we review some topological and algebraic aspects in the
theory of Artin and Coxeter groups, both in the finite and infinite case (but
still, finitely generated). In the following parts, among other things, we
compute the Schwartz genus of the covering associated to the orbit space for
all affine Artin groups. We also give a partial computation of the cohomology
of the braid group with non-abelian coefficients coming from geometric
representations. We introduce an interesting class of "sheaves over posets",
which we call "weighted sheaves over posets", and use them for explicit
computations.


  A linear system of differential equations describing a joint motion of a
thermoelastic porous body with a sufficiently large Lame's constants
(absolutelty rigid body) and a thermofluid, occupying porous space, is
considered. The rigorous justification, under various conditions imposed on
physical parameters, is fulfilled for homogenization procedures as the
dimensionless size of the pores tends to zero, while the porous body is
geometrically periodic. As the results we derive Darcy's system of filtration
for thermofluid, depending on ratios between physical parameters. The proofs
are based on Nguetseng's two-scale convergence method of homogenization in
periodic structures.


  The diversity of a community that cannot be fully counted must be inferred.
The two preeminent inference methods are the MaxEnt method, which uses
information in the form of constraints and Bayes' rule which uses information
in the form of data. It has been shown that these two methods are special cases
of the method of Maximum (relative) Entropy (ME). We demonstrate how this
method can be used as a measure of diversity that not only reproduces the
features of Shannon's index but exceeds them by allowing more types of
information to be included in the inference. A specific example is solved in
detail. Additionally, the entropy that is found is the same form as the
thermodynamic entropy.


  Aligning text-to-image diffusion model (T2I) with preference has been gaining
increasing research attention. While prior works exist on directly optimizing
T2I by preference data, these methods are developed under the bandit assumption
of a latent reward on the entire diffusion reverse chain, while ignoring the
sequential nature of the generation process. This may harm the efficacy and
efficiency of preference alignment. In this paper, we take on a finer dense
reward perspective and derive a tractable alignment objective that emphasizes
the initial steps of the T2I reverse chain. In particular, we introduce
temporal discounting into DPO-style explicit-reward-free objectives, to break
the temporal symmetry therein and suit the T2I generation hierarchy. In
experiments on single and multiple prompt generation, our method is competitive
with strong relevant baselines, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Further
investigations are conducted to illustrate the insight of our approach.


  The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) provides multiple epoch imaging for a
large fraction of the sky. Here we describe the photometric calibration of the
PTF data products that relates the PTF magnitudes to other mag systems. The
calibration process utilizes SDSS r~16 mag point source objects as photometric
standards. During photometric conditions, this allows us to solve for the
extinction coefficients and color terms, and to estimate the camera
illumination correction. This also enables the calibration of fields that are
outside the SDSS footprint. We test the precision and repeatability of the PTF
photometric calibration. Given that PTF is observing in a single filter each
night, we define a PTF calibrated magnitude system for R-band and g-band. We
show that, in this system, 59% (47%) of the photometrically calibrated PTF
R-band (g-band) data achieve a photometric precision of 0.02-0.04 mag. Given
the objects' color, the PTF magnitude system can be converted to other systems.
A night-by-night comparison of the calibrated magnitudes of individual stars
observed on multiple nights shows that they are consistent to a level of ~0.02
mag. Most of the data that were taken under non-photometric conditions can be
calibrated relative to other epochs of the same sky footprint obtained during
photometric conditions. We provide a guide describing the use of the PTF
photometric calibration data products, as well as the transformations between
the PTF magnitude system and the SDSS and Johnson-Cousins systems. (abridged).


  We study a model for the translocation of proteins across membranes through a
nanopore using a ratcheting mechanism. When the protein enters the nanopore it
diffuses in and out of the pore according to a Brownian motion. Moreover, it is
bound by ratcheting molecules which hinder the diffusion of the protein out of
the nanopore, i.e. the Brownian motion is reflected such that no ratcheting
molecule exits the pore. New ratcheting molecules bind at rate gamma. Extending
our previous approach (Depperschmidt and Pfaffelhuber, 2010) we allow the
ratcheting molecules to dissociate (at rate delta) from the protein (Model I).
We also provide an approximate model (Model II) which assumes a Poisson
equilibrium of ratcheting molecules on one side of the current reflection
boundary. Using analytical methods and simulations we show that the speed of
both models are approximately the same. Our analytical results on Model II give
the speed of translocation by means of a solution of an ordinary differential
equation.


  Following the success of spoken dialogue systems (SDS) in smartphone
assistants and smart speakers, a number of communicative robots are developed
and commercialized. Compared with the conventional SDSs designed as a
human-machine interface, interaction with robots is expected to be in a closer
manner to talking to a human because of the anthropomorphism and physical
presence. The goal or task of dialogue may not be information retrieval, but
the conversation itself. In order to realize human-level "long and deep"
conversation, we have developed an intelligent conversational android ERICA. We
set up several social interaction tasks for ERICA, including attentive
listening, job interview, and speed dating. To allow for spontaneous,
incremental multiple utterances, a robust turn-taking model is implemented
based on TRP (transition-relevance place) prediction, and a variety of
backchannels are generated based on time frame-wise prediction instead of
IPU-based prediction. We have realized an open-domain attentive listening
system with partial repeats and elaborating questions on focus words as well as
assessment responses. It has been evaluated with 40 senior people, engaged in
conversation of 5-7 minutes without a conversation breakdown. It was also
compared against the WOZ setting. We have also realized a job interview system
with a set of base questions followed by dynamic generation of elaborating
questions. It has also been evaluated with student subjects, showing promising
results.


  Rationale and Objectives: Pericardial fat (PF), the thoracic visceral fat
surrounding the heart, promotes the development of coronary artery disease by
inducing inflammation of the coronary arteries. For evaluating PF, this study
aimed to generate pericardial fat count images (PFCIs) from chest radiographs
(CXRs) using a dedicated deep-learning model.
  Materials and Methods: The data of 269 consecutive patients who underwent
coronary computed tomography (CT) were reviewed. Patients with metal implants,
pleural effusion, history of thoracic surgery, or that of malignancy were
excluded. Thus, the data of 191 patients were used. PFCIs were generated from
the projection of three-dimensional CT images, where fat accumulation was
represented by a high pixel value. Three different deep-learning models,
including CycleGAN, were combined in the proposed method to generate PFCIs from
CXRs. A single CycleGAN-based model was used to generate PFCIs from CXRs for
comparison with the proposed method. To evaluate the image quality of the
generated PFCIs, structural similarity index measure (SSIM), mean squared error
(MSE), and mean absolute error (MAE) of (i) the PFCI generated using the
proposed method and (ii) the PFCI generated using the single model were
compared.
  Results: The mean SSIM, MSE, and MAE were as follows: 0.856, 0.0128, and
0.0357, respectively, for the proposed model; and 0.762, 0.0198, and 0.0504,
respectively, for the single CycleGAN-based model.
  Conclusion: PFCIs generated from CXRs with the proposed model showed better
performance than those with the single model. PFCI evaluation without CT may be
possible with the proposed method.


  This paper examines a new class of exact and self-consistent MHD solutions
which describe steady and axisymmetric hydromagnetic outflows from the
atmosphere of a magnetized and rotating central object with possibly an
orbiting accretion disk. The plasma is driven against gravity by a thermal
pressure gradient, as well as by magnetic rotator and radiative forces. At the
Alfvenic and fast critical points the appropriate criticality conditions are
applied. The outflow starts almost radially but after the Alfven transition and
before the fast critical surface is encountered the magnetic pinching force
bends the poloidal streamlines into a cylindrical jet-type shape. The terminal
speed, Alfven number, cross-sectional area of the jet, as well as its final
pressure and density obtain uniform values at large distances from the source.
The goal of the study is to give an analytical discussion of the
two-dimensional interplay of the thermal pressure gradient, gravitational,
Lorentz and inertial forces in accelerating and collimating an MHD flow. A
parametric study of the model is also given, as well as a brief sketch of its
applicability to a self-consistent modelling of collimated outflows from
various astrophysical objects. {The analysed model succeeds to give for the
first time an exact and self-consistent MHD solution for jet-type outflows
extending from the stellar surface to infinity where it can be superfast, in
agreement with the MHD causality principle.


  Due to the rapid development of mobile Internet techniques, cloud computation
and popularity of online social networking and location-based services, massive
amount of multimedia data with geographical information is generated and
uploaded to the Internet. In this paper, we propose a novel type of cross-modal
multimedia retrieval called geo-multimedia cross-modal retrieval which aims to
search out a set of geo-multimedia objects based on geographical distance
proximity and semantic similarity between different modalities. Previous
studies for cross-modal retrieval and spatial keyword search cannot address
this problem effectively because they do not consider multimedia data with
geo-tags and do not focus on this type of query. In order to address this
problem efficiently, we present the definition of $k$NN geo-multimedia
cross-modal query at the first time and introduce relevant conceptions such as
cross-modal semantic representation space. To bridge the semantic gap between
different modalities, we propose a method named cross-modal semantic matching
which contains two important component, i.e., CorrProj and LogsTran, which aims
to construct a common semantic representation space for cross-modal semantic
similarity measurement. Besides, we designed a framework based on deep learning
techniques to implement common semantic representation space construction. In
addition, a novel hybrid indexing structure named GMR-Tree combining
geo-multimedia data and R-Tree is presented and a efficient $k$NN search
algorithm called $k$GMCMS is designed. Comprehensive experimental evaluation on
real and synthetic dataset clearly demonstrates that our solution outperforms
the-state-of-the-art methods.


  Perturbative calculations of the effective potential evaluated at a broken
minimum, $ V_{\text{min}} $, are plagued by difficulties. It is hard to get a
finite and gauge invariant result for $ V_{\text{min}} $. In fact, the methods
proposed to deal with gauge dependence and IR divergences are orthogonal in
their approaches. Gauge dependence is dealt with through the $ \hbar
$-expansion, which establishes and maintains a strict loop-order separation of
terms. On the other hand, IR divergences seem to require a resummation that
mixes the different loop orders. In this paper we test these methods on Fermi
gauge Abelian Higgs at two loops. We find that the resummation procedure is not
capable of removing all divergences. Surprisingly, the $ \hbar $-expansion
seems to be able to deal with both the divergences and the gauge dependence. In
order to isolate the physical part of $ V_{\text{min}} $, we are guided by the
separation of scales that motivated the resummation procedure; the key result
is that only hard momentum modes contribute to $ V_{\text{min}} $.


  Based upon a widely-accepted internal-barrier-layer-capacitance (IBLC) model,
the dielectric loss in the giant-dielectric-constant CaCu$_{3}$Ti$_{4}$O$_{12}$
(CCTO) material is expected to decrease as the conductivity of the CCTO
grains/subgrains increases. In this letter, we report that this idea was
successfully realized through the La-for-Ca substitution in the CCTO ceramics.
The impedance spectroscopy analysis gives the evidence.


  Protoplanetary disk simulations show that a single planet can excite more
than one spiral arm, possibly explaining recent observations of multiple spiral
arms in some systems. In this paper, we explain the mechanism by which a planet
excites multiple spiral arms in a protoplanetary disk. Contrary to previous
speculations, the formation of both primary and additional arms can be
understood as a linear process when the planet mass is sufficiently small. A
planet resonantly interacts with epicyclic oscillations in the disk, launching
spiral wave modes around the Lindblad resonances. When a set of wave modes is
in phase, they can constructively interfere with each other and create a spiral
arm. More than one spiral arm can form because such constructive interference
can occur for different sets of wave modes, with the exact number and launching
position of spiral arms dependent on the planet mass as well as the disk
temperature profile. Non-linear effects become increasingly important as the
planet mass increases, resulting in spiral arms with stronger shocks and thus
larger pitch angles. This is found in common for both primary and additional
arms. When a planet has a sufficiently large mass ($\gtrsim$ 3 thermal masses
for $(h/r)_p=0.1$), only two spiral arms form interior to its orbit. The wave
modes that would form a tertiary arm for smaller mass planets merge with the
primary arm. Improvements in our understanding of the formation of spiral arms
can provide crucial insights into the origin of observed spiral arms in
protoplanetary disks.


  We consider the maximum process of a random walk with additive independent
noise in form of $\max_{i=1,\dots,n}(S_i+Y_i)$. The random walk may have
dependent increments, but its sample path is assumed to converge weakly to a
fractional Brownian motion. When the largest noise has the same order as the
maximal displacement of the random walk, we establish an invariance principle
for the maximum process in the Skorohod topology. The limiting process is the
maximum process of the fractional Brownian notion with shot noise generated by
Poisson point processes.


  Tuning interactions in the spin singlet and quintet channels of two colliding
atoms could change the symmetry of the one-dimensional spin-3/2 fermionic
systems of ultracold atoms while preserving the integrability. Here we find a
novel $SO(4)$ symmetry integrable point in thespin-3/2 Fermi gas and derive the
exact solution of the model using the Bethe ansatz. In contrast to the model
with $SU(4)$ and $SO(5)$ symmetries, the present model with $SO(4)$ symmetry
preserves spin singlet and quintet Cooper pairs in two sets of $SU(2)\otimes
SU(2)$ spin subspaces. We obtain full phase diagrams, including the
Fulde-Ferrel-Larkin-Ovchinnikov like pair correlations, spin excitations and
quantum criticality through the generalized Yang-Yang thermodynamic equations.
In particular, various correlation functions are calculated by using
finite-size corrections in the frame work of conformal field theory. Moreover,
within the local density approximation, we further find that spin singlet and
quintet pairs form subtle multiple shell structures in density profiles of the
trapped gas.


  It is shown that the relativistic jets associated with the growth and past
activity of the supermassive black hole in the Andromeda galaxy could be the
main source of cosmic rays with energies above $10^{15}$ eV. Most of the cosmic
ray energy is related to a bow shock of the jet that produces multi-PeV cosmic
rays with light composition. The highest energy cosmic rays with heavy
composition are produced in the jet itself. The spectra of energetic particles
produced in Andromeda galaxy and propagated to the Earth are calculated and
compared with observations.


  In the EFT of biased tracers the noise field $\varepsilon_g$ is not exactly
uncorrelated with the nonlinear matter field $\delta$. Its correlation with
$\delta$ is effectively captured by adding stochasticities to each bias
coefficient. We show that if these stochastic fields are Gaussian (the impact
of their non-Gaussianity being subleading on quasi-linear scales anyway) it is
possible to resum exactly their effect on the conditional likelihood ${\cal
P}[\delta_g|\delta]$ to observe a galaxy field $\delta_g$ given an underlying
$\delta$. This resummation allows to take them into account in EFT-based
approaches to Bayesian forward modeling. We stress that the resulting
corrections to a purely Gaussian conditional likelihood with white-noise
covariance are the most relevant on scales where the EFT is under control: they
are more important than any non-Gaussianity of the noise $\varepsilon_g$.


  The notion of bounded FC-nilpotent group is introduced and it is shown that
any such group is nilpotent-by-finite, generalizing a result of Neumann on
bounded FC-groups.


  We study a class of entangling gates for trapped atomic ions and demonstrate
the use of numeric optimization techniques to create a wide range of fast,
error-robust gate constructions. Our approach introduces a framework for
numeric optimization using individually addressed, amplitude and phase
modulated controls targeting maximally and partially entangling operations on
ion pairs, complete multi-ion registers, multi-ion subsets of large registers,
and parallel operations within a single register. Our calculations and
simulations demonstrate that the inclusion of modulation of the difference
phase for the bichromatic drive used in the M\o lmer-S\o rensen gate permits
approximately time-optimal control across a range of gate configurations, and
when suitably combined with analytic constraints can also provide robustness
against key experimental sources of error. We further demonstrate the impact of
experimental constraints such as bounds on coupling rates or modulation
band-limits on achievable performance. Using a custom optimization engine based
on TensorFlow we also demonstrate time-to-solution for optimizations on ion
registers up to 20 ions of order tens of minutes using a local-instance laptop,
allowing computational access to system-scales relevant to near-term
trapped-ion devices.


  Automatic speech recognition (ASR) in the cloud allows the use of larger
models and more powerful multi-channel signal processing front-ends compared to
on-device processing. However, it also adds an inherent latency due to the
transmission of the audio signal, especially when transmitting multiple
channels of a microphone array. One way to reduce the network bandwidth
requirements is client-side compression with a lossy codec such as Opus.
However, this compression can have a detrimental effect especially on
multi-channel ASR front-ends, due to the distortion and loss of spatial
information introduced by the codec. In this publication, we propose an
improved approach for the compression of microphone array signals based on
Opus, using a modified joint channel coding approach and additionally
introducing a multi-channel spatial decorrelating transform to reduce
redundancy in the transmission. We illustrate the effect of the proposed
approach on the spatial information retained in multi-channel signals after
compression, and evaluate the performance on far-field ASR with a multi-channel
beamforming front-end. We demonstrate that our approach can lead to a 37.5 %
bitrate reduction or a 5.1 % relative word error rate reduction for a fixed
bitrate budget in a seven channel setup.


  We extend the investigation of cosmological dynamics of the general
non-canonical scalar field models by dynamical system techniques for a broad
class of potentials and coupling functions. In other words, we do not restrict
the analysis to exponential or power-law potentials and coupling functions.
This type of investigation helps in understanding the general properties of a
class of cosmological models. In order to better understand the phase space of
the models, we investigate the various special cases and discuss the stability
and viability issues. Performing a detailed stability analysis, we show that it
is possible to describe the cosmic history of the universe at the background
level namely the early radiation dominated era, intermediate matter dominated
era and the late time dark energy domination. Moreover, we find that we can
identify a broad class of coupling functions for which it is possible to get an
appealing unified description of dark matter and dark energy. The results
obtained here, therefore, enlarge the previous analyses wherein only a specific
potential and coupling functions describes the unification of dark sectors.
Further, we also observe that a specific scenario can also possibly explain the
phenomenon of slow-roll inflationary exit.


  We investigate how the empirical properties of hot X-ray-emitting gas in a
sample of seven starburst and three normal edge-on spiral galaxies (a sample
which covers the full range of star-formation intensity found in disk galaxies)
correlate with the size, mass, star formation rate and star formation intensity
in the host galaxies. Intriguingly, the diffuse X-ray properties of the normal
spirals (both in their disks and halos) fall where extrapolation of the trends
from the starburst galaxies with superwinds would predict. We demonstrate that
the luminosity of diffuse X-ray emission in both disk and halo is directly
proportional to the rate of mechanical energy feedback from massive stars.
Nevertheless, with only three non-starburst normal spiral galaxies it is hard
to exclude an accretion-based origin for extra-planar diffuse X-ray emission
around normal star-forming galaxies. Larger galaxies have more extended
X-ray-emitting halos, but galaxy mass appears to play no role in determining
the properties of the disk or extra-planar X-ray emitting plasma. The
combination of these luminosity and size correlations leads to a correlation
between the surface brightness of the diffuse X-ray emission and the mean star
formation rate per unit area in the disk (L_FIR/D_25^2). We argue that the
crucial spatial region around a galaxy that controls whether gas in
starburst-driven superwinds will escape into the IGM is not the outer halo ~100
kpc from the host galaxy, but the inner few halo scale heights, within ~20 kpc
of the galaxy plane. Given the properties of the gaseous halos we observe,
superwind outflows from disk galaxies of mass M ~ 10^10 -- 10^11 Msun should
still eject some fraction of their material into the IGM. (abstract abridged)


  A unified scheme for treating generalized superselection sectors is proposed
on the basis of the notion of selection criteria to characterize states of
relevance to each specific domain in quantum physics, ranging from the
relativistic quantum fields in the vacuum situations with unbroken and
spontaneously broken internal symmetries, through equilibrium and
non-equilibrium states to some basic aspects in measurement processes. This is
achieved by the help of c-q and q-c channels: the former determines the states
to be selected and to be parametrized by the order parameters, and the latter
provides the physical interpretations of selected states in terms of order
parameters. This formulation extends the traditional range of applicability of
the Doplicher-Roberts construction method for recovering the field algebra and
the gauge group (of the first kind) from the data of group invariant
observables to the situations with spontaneous symmetry breakdown: in use of
the machinery proposed, the physical and mathematical meaning of basic
structural ingredients associated with the spontaneously broken symmetry are
re-examined, such as the degenerate vacua parametrized by the variable
belonging to the relevant homogeneous space, the Goldstone modes and
condensates, etc. The geometrical meaning of the space of order parameters is
naturally understood in relation with the adjunction as the classifying space
of a sector structure. As further examples of applications, some basic notions
arising in the mathematical framework of quantum theory are reformulated and
examined in connection with control theory.


  The behavioural comparison of systems is an important concern of software
engineering research. For example, the areas of specification discovery and
specification mining are concerned with measuring the consistency between a
collection of execution traces and a program specification. This problem is
also tackled in process mining with the help of measures that describe the
quality of a process specification automatically discovered from execution
logs. Though various measures have been proposed, it was recently demonstrated
that they neither fulfil essential properties, such as monotonicity, nor can
they handle infinite behaviour. In this paper, we address this research problem
by introducing a new framework for the definition of behavioural quotients. We
proof that corresponding quotients guarantee desired properties that existing
measures have failed to support. We demonstrate the application of the
quotients for capturing precision and recall measures between a collection of
recorded executions and a system specification. We use a prototypical
implementation of these measures to contrast their monotonic assessment with
measures that have been defined in prior research.


  By considering a limiting case of a Kronecker-type identity, we obtain an
identity found by both Andrews and Crandall. We then use the Andrews-Crandall
identity to give a new proof of a formula of Gauss for the representations of a
number as a sum of three squares. From the Kronecker-type identity, we also
deduce Gauss's theorem that every positive integer is representable as a sum of
three triangular numbers.


  Let $G$ be a finite group, and let $N(G)$ be the set of sizes of its
conjugacy classes. We show that if a finite group $G$ has trivial center and
$N(G)$ equals to $N(Alt_n)$ or $N(Sym_n)$ for $n\geq 23$, then $G$ has a
composition factor isomorphic to an alternating group $Alt_k$ such that $k\leq
n$ and the half-interval $(k, n]$ contains no primes. As a corollary, we prove
the Thompson's conjecture for simple alternating groups.


  The model of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, so-called hodgepodge machine,
is discussed in detail and compared with the experimentally determined system
trajectory. We show that many of the features observed in the experiment may be
found at different internal excitation growth rates, the g/maxState ratios. The
g/maxState ratio determines the structure of the limit set and defines also
details of the system state-space trajectory. While the limit set identical to
the experiment and the model may be found, there is not a single g/maxState
level which defines the trajectory identical to the experiment. We also propose
that there is an inherent experimental time unit defined by the time extent of
the bottleneck chemical reaction process which defines the g/maxState ratio and
the spatial element of the process.


  We investigate the possibility of a super-luminous Type Ic core-collapse
supernovae producing a large amount of 56Ni. Very massive stars with a
main-sequence mass larger than 100 Msun and a metallicity 0.001 < Z < 0.004 are
expected to explode as super-luminous Type Ic supernovae. Stars with ~ 110 -
150 Msun and Z < 0.001 would explode as Type Ic pulsational pair-instability
supernovae if the whole H and He layers has been lost by the mass loss during
pulsational pair-instability. We evaluate the total ejecta mass and the yields
of 56Ni, O, and Si in core-collapse supernovae evolved from very massive stars.
We adopt 43.1 and 61.1 Msun WO stars with Z=0.004 as supernova progenitors
expected to explode as Type Ic core-collapse supernovae. These progenitors have
masses of 110 and 250 Msun at the zero-age main sequence. Spherical explosions
with an explosion energy larger than 2e52 erg produce more than 3.5 Msun 56Ni,
enough to reproduce the light curve of SN 2007bi. Asphericity of the explosion
affects the total ejecta mass as well as the yields of 56Ni, O, and Si.
Aspherical explosions of the 110 and 250 Msun models reproduce the 56Ni yield
of SN 2007bi. These explosions will also show large velocity dispersion. An
aspherical core-collapse supernova evolved from a very massive star is a
possibility of the explosion of SN 2007bi.


  This work studies the production of direct photons in relativistic nuclear
collisions, along with the production of hadrons. Radiation from the very first
instants to the final moments of the evolution is included. The hybrid model
used here describes all stages of relativistic heavy-ion collisions.
Chronologically, those are an initial state reflecting the collision of nuclei
described within the Color Glass Condensate effective theory; a pre-equilibrium
phase based on non-equilibrium linear response; relativistic viscous
hydrodynamics, and a hadronic afterburner. The effect of the pre-equilibrium
phase on both photonic and hadronic observables is highlighted for the first
time. The potential of photon observables -- spectrum, differential elliptic
and triangular flow -- to reveal the chemical equilibration time is studied.
Finally, we consider "small collision systems", including proton+nucleus
collisions and collisions of light nuclei, as probed by hadronic and
electromagnetic observables. We demonstrate how photon production can signal
the formation of quark-gluon plasma in such small systems.


  We estimate the scattering amplitude of the process $ p \bar{p} \,\to\,
\bar{D^0} D^0$ within a double-handbag framework where transition distribution
amplitudes, calculated through an overlap representation, factorize from a hard
subprocess. This process will be measured in the $\bar{\text{P}}\text{ANDA}$
experiment at GSI-FAIR.


  We discuss the quality of kinematic data in dwarf spheroidal galaxies, the
current interpretations of those data, and prospects for actually deriving the
mass profile in these galaxies. We then discuss stellar populations constraints
on some of the models that attempt to explain the kinematics and formation of
the dSph's.


  We derive the exact solution for the optical conductivity $\sigma(\omega)$ of
one hole in the Holstein-t-J model in the framework of dynamical mean-field
theory (DMFT). We investigate the magnetic and phonon features associated with
polaron formation as a function of the exchange coupling $J$, of the
electron-phonon interaction $\lambda$ and of the temperature. Our solution
directly relates the features of the optical conductivity to the excitations in
the single-particle spectral function, revealing two distinct mechanisms of
closing and filling of the optical pseudogap that take place upon varying the
microscopic parameters. We show that the optical absorption at the polaron
crossover is characterized by a coexistence of a magnon peak at low frequency
and a broad polaronic band at higher frequency. An analytical expression for
$\sigma(\omega)$ valid in the polaronic regime is presented.


  We consider an extremum problem posed by Turan. The aim of this problem is to
find a maximum mean value of 1-periodic continuous even function such that sum
of Fourier coefficient modules for this function is equal to 1 and support of
this function lies in $[-h,h]$, $0<h\le 1/2$. We show that this extremum
problem for rational $h=p/q$ is equivalent two finite-dimensional linear
programming problems. Here there are exact results for rational $h=2/q$,
$h=p/(2p+1)$, $h=3/q$, and asymptotic equalities.


  We revisit and improve joint concavity/convexity and monotonicity properties
of quasi-entropies due to Petz in a new fashion. Then we characterize equality
cases in the monotonicity inequalities (the data-processing inequalities) of
quasi-entropies in several ways as follows: Let
$\Phi:\mathcal{B}(\mathcal{H})\to\mathcal{B}(\mathcal{K})$ be a
trace-preserving map such that $\Phi^*$ is a Schwarz map. When $f$ is an
operator monotone or operator convex function on $[0,\infty)$, we present
several equivalent conditions for the equality
$S_f^K(\Phi(\rho)\|\Phi(\sigma))=S_f^{\Phi^*(K)}(\rho\|\sigma)$ to hold for
given positive operators $\rho,\sigma$ on $\mathcal{H}$ and
$K\in\mathcal{B}(\mathcal{K})$. The conditions include equality cases in the
monotonicity versions of Lieb's concavity and Ando's convexity theorems.
Specializing the map $\Phi$ we have equivalent conditions for equality cases in
Lieb's concavity and Ando's convexity. Similar equality conditions are
discussed also for monotone metrics and $\chi^2$-divergences. We further
consider some types of linear preserver problems for those quantum information
quantities.


  For a regular tournament $T$ of order $n,$ denote by $c_{8}(T)$ the number of
cycles of length $8$ in $T.$ Let $DR_{n}$ be a doubly-regular tournament of
order $n\equiv 3\mod4$ (so, the out-sets and in-sets of its vertices are also
regular and hence, contain the maximum possible number of cyclic triples) and
$RLT_{n}$ be the unique regular locally transitive tournament of (odd) order
$n$ (so, the out-sets and in-sets of its vertices are transitive and hence,
contain no cyclic triples, at all). Some arguments based on the spectral
properties of tournaments allow us to suggest that $c_{8}(T) \le
c_{8}(RLT_{n}),$ where $n$ is sufficiently large. This restriction on $n$ is
essential because our computer processing of B. McKay's file of tournaments
implies that for $n=9,11,13,$ the maximum of $c_{8}(T)$ is attained at
tournaments with regular structure of the out and in-sets of their vertices. In
the present paper, we show that $c_{8}(DR_{n})$ does not depend on a particular
choice of $DR_{n}$ and determine expressions for $c_{8}(DR_{n})$ and
$c_{8}(RLT_{n}).$ They are both polynomials of degree $8$ in $n.$ Comparing
$c_{8}(DR_{n})$ with $c_{8}(RLT_{n})$ yields the inequality
$c_{8}(DR_{n})>c_{8}(RLT_{n})$ for $11\le n\le 35,$ while $c_{8}(RLT_{n}) >
c_{8}(DR_{n})$ for $n\ge 39.$ This allows us to treat the value $n=39$ as the
point of phase transition in the local properties of maximizers and minimizers
of $c_{8}(T)$ in the class of regular tournaments of order $n.$


  In this study, a new subspace-constrained diagonal loading (SSC-DL) method is
presented for robust beamforming against the issue of a mismatched direction of
arrival (DoA), based on an extension to the well known diagonal loading (DL)
technique. One important difference of the proposed SSC-DL from conventional DL
is that it imposes an additional constraint to restrict the optimal weight
vector within a subspace whose basis vectors are determined by a number of
angles neighboring to the estimated DoA. Unlike many existing methods which
resort to a beamwidth expansion, the weight vector produced by SSC-DL has a
relatively small beamwidth around the DoA of the target signal. Yet, the SSC-DL
beamformer has a great interference suppression level, thereby achieving an
improved overall SINR performance. Simulation results suggest the proposed
method has a near-to-optimal SINR performance.


  Data privacy in healthcare is of paramount importance (and thus regulated
using laws like HIPAA) due to the highly sensitive nature of patient data. To
that end, healthcare organizations mention how they collect/process/store/share
this data (i.e., data practices) via their privacy policies. Thus there is a
need to audit these policies and check compliance with respective laws. This
paper addresses this need and presents a large-scale data-driven study to audit
privacy policies from healthcare organizations in three countries -- USA, UK,
and India.
  We developed a three-stage novel \textit{workflow} for our audit. First, we
collected the privacy policies of thousands of healthcare organizations in
these countries and cleaned this privacy policy data using a clustering-based
mixed-method technique. We identified data practices regarding users' private
medical data (medical history) and site privacy (cookie, logs) in these
policies. Second, we adopted a summarization-based technique to uncover exact
broad data practices across countries and notice important differences.
Finally, we evaluated the cross-country data practices using the lens of legal
compliance (with legal expert feedback) and grounded in the theory of
Contextual Integrity (CI). Alarmingly, we identified six themes of
non-alignment (observed in 21.8\% of data practices studied in India) pointed
out by our legal experts. Furthermore, there are four \textit{potential
violations} according to case verdicts from Indian Courts as pointed out by our
legal experts. We conclude this paper by discussing the utility of our auditing
workflow and the implication of our findings for different stakeholders.


  Nowadays, deep learning based methods have demonstrated impressive
performance on ideal super-resolution (SR) datasets, but most of these methods
incur dramatically performance drops when directly applied in real-world SR
reconstruction tasks with unpredictable blur kernels. To tackle this issue,
blind SR methods are proposed to improve the visual results on random blur
kernels, which causes unsatisfactory reconstruction effects on ideal
low-resolution images similarly. In this paper, we propose a double-win
framework for ideal and blind SR task, named S2R, including a light-weight
transformer-based SR model (S2R transformer) and a novel coarse-to-fine
training strategy, which can achieve excellent visual results on both ideal and
random fuzzy conditions. On algorithm level, S2R transformer smartly combines
some efficient and light-weight blocks to enhance the representation ability of
extracted features with relatively low number of parameters. For training
strategy, a coarse-level learning process is firstly performed to improve the
generalization of the network with the help of a large-scale external dataset,
and then, a fast fine-tune process is developed to transfer the pre-trained
model to real-world SR tasks by mining the internal features of the image.
Experimental results show that the proposed S2R outperforms other single-image
SR models in ideal SR condition with only 578K parameters. Meanwhile, it can
achieve better visual results than regular blind SR models in blind fuzzy
conditions with only 10 gradient updates, which improve convergence speed by
300 times, significantly accelerating the transfer-learning process in
real-world situations.


  We prepared high epitaxial thin films of the compound Sr_2FeMoO_6 with narrow
rocking curves by pulsed laser deposition. The diagonal and nondiagonal
elements of the resistivity tensor were investigated at temperatures from 4 K
up to room temperature in magnetic fields up to 8 T. An electronlike ordinary
Hall effect and a holelike anomalous Hall contribution are observed. Both
coefficients have reversed sign compared to the colossal magnetoresistive
manganites. We found at 300 K an ordinary Hall coefficent of -1.87x10^{-10}
m^3/As, corresponding to a nominal charge carrier density of four electrons per
formula unit. At low temperature only a small negative magnetoresistance is
observed which vanishes at higher temperatures. The temperature coefficient of
the resistivity is negative over the whole temperature range. A Kondo like
behavior is observed below 30 K while above 100 K variable range hopping like
transport occurs.