  We analyze the regression accuracy of convolutional neural networks assembled
from encoders, decoders and skip connections and trained with multifidelity
data. Besides requiring significantly less trainable parameters than equivalent
fully connected networks, encoder, decoder, encoder-decoder or decoder-encoder
architectures can learn the mapping between inputs to outputs of arbitrary
dimensionality. We demonstrate their accuracy when trained on a few
high-fidelity and many low-fidelity data generated from models ranging from
one-dimensional functions to Poisson equation solvers in two-dimensions. We
finally discuss a number of implementation choices that improve the reliability
of the uncertainty estimates generated by Monte Carlo DropBlocks, and compare
uncertainty estimates among low-, high- and multifidelity approaches.


  Let $P_8(x)=3x^2-2x$. For positive integers $a_1,a_2,\dots,a_k$, a polynomial
of the form $a_1P_8(x_1)+a_2P_8(x_2)+\cdots+a_kP_8(x_k)$ is called an octagonal
form. For a positive integer $n$, an octagonal form is called tight $\mathcal
T(n)$-universal if it represents (over $\mathbb{z}$) every positive integer
greater than or equal to $n$ and does not represent any positive integer less
than $n$. In this article, we find all tight $\mathcal T(n)$-universal
octagonal forms for every $n\ge 2$. Furthermore, we provide an effective
criterion on tight $\mathcal T(n)$-universality of an arbirary octagonal form,
which is a generalization of "15-Theorem" of Conway and Schneeberger.


  In three-dimensional models obtained by photogrammetry of existing
structures, all of the shapes that the eye can select cannot always find their
equivalents in the geometric components of the model. However, the matching of
meaningful parts and assemblages with the records acquired with rapid and
detailed documentation methods will provide an advantage for the creation of
information models of existing structures. While aiming to produce answers to
this problem and in order to overcome the difficulties of pattern recognition
in three-dimensional models, we used two-dimensional samples obtained by
projection. Processing techniques such as ambient occlusion, curvature and
normal maps are commonly used in modern computer graphics applications that
enable the representation of three-dimensional surface properties in
two-dimensional data sets. The method we propose is based on the recognition of
patterns through these mappings instead of the usual light-based visualization.
The first stage of the application is photogrammetric capture of a few examples
of Zeugma mosaics and three-dimensional digital modeling of a set of Seljuk era
brick walls based on knowledge obtained through architectural history
literature. The second stage covers the creation of digital models byprocessing
the surface representation obtained from this data using Alice Vision,
OpenCV-Python, and Autodesk Maya to include information on aspects of the
making of the walls. What is envisioned for the next stages is that the mapping
data contributes and supports the knowledge for rule-based design and making
processesof cultural heritage.


  Multi-task Imitation Learning (MIL) aims to train a policy capable of
performing a distribution of tasks based on multi-task expert demonstrations,
which is essential for general-purpose robots. Existing MIL algorithms suffer
from low data efficiency and poor performance on complex long-horizontal tasks.
We develop Multi-task Hierarchical Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning
(MH-AIRL) to learn hierarchically-structured multi-task policies, which is more
beneficial for compositional tasks with long horizons and has higher expert
data efficiency through identifying and transferring reusable basic skills
across tasks. To realize this, MH-AIRL effectively synthesizes context-based
multi-task learning, AIRL (an IL approach), and hierarchical policy learning.
Further, MH-AIRL can be adopted to demonstrations without the task or skill
annotations (i.e., state-action pairs only) which are more accessible in
practice. Theoretical justifications are provided for each module of MH-AIRL,
and evaluations on challenging multi-task settings demonstrate superior
performance and transferability of the multi-task policies learned with MH-AIRL
as compared to SOTA MIL baselines.


  The increasing adoption of advanced metering infrastructure has led to
growing concerns regarding privacy risks stemming from the high resolution
measurements. This has given rise to privacy protection techniques that
physically alter the consumer's energy load profile, masking private
information by using localised devices, e.g. batteries or flexible loads.
Meanwhile, there has also been increasing interest in aggregating the
distributed energy resources (DERs) of residential consumers to provide
services to the grid. In this paper, we propose an online distributed algorithm
to aggregate the DERs of privacy-conscious consumers to provide services to the
grid, whilst preserving their privacy. Results show that the optimisation
solution from the distributed method converges to one close to the optimum
computed using an ideal centralised solution method, balancing between grid
service provision, consumer preferences and privacy protection. More
importantly, the distributed method preserves consumer privacy, and does not
require high-bandwidth two-way communications infrastructure.


  We present a simple method for incorporating the surface tension effect into
an iterative conformal mapping model of two-dimensional diffusion-limited
aggregation. A curvature-dependent growth probability is introduced and the
curvature is given by utilizing the branch points of a conformal map. The
resulting cluster exhibits a crossover from compact to fractal growth. In the
fractal growth regime, it is confirmed, by the conformal map technique, that
the fractal dimension of its area and perimeter length coincide.


  The photonic bound state in the continuum (BIC) is discovered in a hybrid
photonic circuit with low refractive index waveguide on a high refractive index
thin membrane, where the optical dissipation is forbidden because of the
destructive interference of different leakage channels. Based on the photonic
BIC, the low mode area in a hybrid waveguide and high quality factor in a
microresonator can be applied to enhance the light-matter interaction. Taking
the fabrication-friendly polymer structure on diamond membrane as an example,
those excellent optical performances can exist in a wide range of structure
parameters with large fabrication tolerance and induce the strong coupling
between photon and nitrogen-vacancy center in the diamond for scalable quantum
information processors and networks. Such a fabrication-friendly structure with
photonic BIC is also very promising in laser, nonlinear optical and quantum
optical applications.


  Silicon irradiated with an ultrashort 800 nm-laser pulse is studied
theoretically using a two temperature description that considers the transient
free carrier density during and after irradiation. A Drude model is implemented
to account for the highly transient optical parameters. We analyze the
importance of considering these density-dependent parameters as well as the
choice of the Drude collision frequency. In addition, degeneracy and transport
effects are investigated. The importance of each of these processes for
resulting calculated damage thresholds is studied.We report damage thresholds
calculations that are in very good agreement with experimental results over a
wide range of pulse durations.


  Lattice Boltzmann simulations have been very successful in simulating
liquid-gas and other multi-phase fluid systems. However, the underlying second
order analysis of the equation of motion has long been known to be insufficient
to consistently derive the fourth order terms that are necessary to represent
an extended interface. These same terms are also responsible for thermodynamic
consistency, i.e. to obtain a true equilibrium solution with both a constant
chemical potential and a constant pressure. In this article we present an
equilibrium analysis of non-ideal lattice Boltzmann methods of sufficient order
to identify those higher order terms that lead to a lack of thermodynamic
consistency. We then introduce a thermodynamically consistent forcing method.


  The paper is concerned with an inverse point source problem for the Helmholtz
equation. It consists of recovering the locations and amplitudes of a finite
number of radiative point sources inside a given inhomogeneous medium from the
knowledge of a single boundary measurement. The main result of the paper is a
new H\"{o}lder type stability estimate for the inversion under the assumption
that the point sources are well separated. The proof of the stability is based
on a combination of Carleman estimates and a technique for proving uniqueness
of the Cauchy problem.


  We report recent theoretical progress in the analysis of radiative
corrections in inclusive rare B-decays. In view of the B-factories, currently
under construction at SLAC and KEK, and of the upgraded CESR experiment, the
experimental status of rare B decays is expected to improve significantly in
the near future. We review the complete NLL QCD calculations of the inclusive b
-> s gamma and the b -> d gamma decay rates. We also discuss recently computed
electroweak corrections and further improvements which lead to the current
theoretical prediction of B(B -> X_s gamma) = (3.32 +/- 0.30) * 10^{-4}. We
shortly comment on the theoretical uncertainty and on implications to physics
beyond the SM. We collect the experimental data already available from CESR and
LEP and discuss experimental and theoretical problems regarding the photon
energy spectrum.


  In this work, we introduce a new type of linear classifier that is
implemented in a chemical form. We propose a novel encoding technique which
simultaneously represents multiple datasets in an array of microliter-scale
chemical mixtures. Parallel computations on these datasets are performed as
robotic liquid handling sequences, whose outputs are analyzed by
high-performance liquid chromatography. As a proof of concept, we chemically
encode several MNIST images of handwritten digits and demonstrate successful
chemical-domain classification of the digits using volumetric perceptrons. We
additionally quantify the performance of our method with a larger dataset of
binary vectors and compare the experimental measurements against predicted
results. Paired with appropriate chemical analysis tools, our approach can work
on increasingly parallel datasets. We anticipate that related approaches will
be scalable to multilayer neural networks and other more complex algorithms.
Much like recent demonstrations of archival data storage in DNA, this work
blurs the line between chemical and electrical information systems, and offers
early insight into the computational efficiency and massive parallelism which
may come with computing in chemical domains.


  This paper presents the three scripting commands and main functionalities of
a novel character animation environment called CHASE. CHASE was developed for
enabling inexperienced programmers, animators, artists, and students to animate
in meaningful ways virtual reality characters. This is achieved by scripting
simple commands within CHASE. The commands identified, which are associated
with simple parameters, are responsible for generating a number of predefined
motions and actions of a character. Hence, the virtual character is able to
animate within a virtual environment and to interact with tasks located within
it. An additional functionality of CHASE is supplied. It provides the ability
to generate multiple tasks of a character, such as providing the user the
ability to generate scenario-related animated sequences. However, since
multiple characters may require simultaneous animation, the ability to script
actions of different characters at the same time is also provided.


  We present a first 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulation of oxygen, neon
and carbon shell burning in a rapidly rotating 16 M_sun core-collapse supernova
progenitor. We also run a purely hydrodynamic simulation for comparison. After
180s (15 and 7 convective turnovers respectively), the magnetic fields in the
oxygen and neon shells achieve saturation at 10^{11}G and 5 x 10^{10}G. The
strong Maxwell stresses become comparable to the radial Reynolds stresses and
eventually suppress convection. The suppression of mixing by convection and
shear instabilities results in the depletion of fuel at the base of the burning
regions, so that the burning shell eventually move outward to cooler regions,
thus reducing the energy generation rate. The strong magnetic fields
efficiently transport angular momentum outwards, quickly spinning down the
rapidly rotating convective oxygen and neon shells and forcing them into rigid
rotation. The hydrodynamic model shows complicated redistribution of angular
momentum and develops regions of retrograde rotation at the base of the
convective shells. We discuss implications of our results for stellar evolution
and for the subsequent core-collapse supernova. The rapid redistribution of
angular momentum in the MHD model casts some doubt on the possibility of
retaining significant core angular momentum for explosions driven by
millisecond magnetars. However, findings from multi-D models remain tentative
until stellar evolution calculations can provide more consistent rotation
profiles and estimates of magnetic field strengths to initialise multi-D
simulations without substantial numerical transients. We also stress the need
for longer simulations, resolution studies, and an investigation of non-ideal
effects.


  We prove results exploring the relationship between the fundamental group and
the second Betti number of minimal symplectic fillings of lens spaces. These
results unify and generalize several disparate facts appearing in the
literature. The Fibonacci numbers make a cameo appearance.


  In this work we present NJOY+NCrystal, a tool to generate thermal neutron
scattering libraries with support for coherent and incoherent elastic
components for crystalline solid materials. This tool, which is a customized
version of NJOY, was created by modifying the nuclear data processing program
NJOY to call the thermal scattering software library NCrystal, and includes a
proposed change in the ENDF-6 format to store both the coherent and incoherent
elastic components. Necessary changes to enable this format in NJOY, as well as
to sample it in the OpenMC Monte Carlo code, are detailed here. Examples of
materials that are coherent-dominant, incoherent-dominant, and mixed elastic
scatterers are presented, as well as the creation of novel libraries for
MgH$_2$ and MgD$_2$, that are under consideration as advanced neutron
reflectors in the HighNESS project at the European Spallation Source.
NJOY+NCrystal simplifies greatly the process to generate thermal scattering
libraries (TSL) and this is exemplified with 213 new and updated TSL
evaluations.


  Recent research indicates that many convex optimization problems with random
constraints exhibit a phase transition as the number of constraints increases.
For example, this phenomenon emerges in the $\ell_1$ minimization method for
identifying a sparse vector from random linear measurements. Indeed, the
$\ell_1$ approach succeeds with high probability when the number of
measurements exceeds a threshold that depends on the sparsity level; otherwise,
it fails with high probability.
  This paper provides the first rigorous analysis that explains why phase
transitions are ubiquitous in random convex optimization problems. It also
describes tools for making reliable predictions about the quantitative aspects
of the transition, including the location and the width of the transition
region. These techniques apply to regularized linear inverse problems with
random measurements, to demixing problems under a random incoherence model, and
also to cone programs with random affine constraints.
  The applied results depend on foundational research in conic geometry. This
paper introduces a summary parameter, called the statistical dimension, that
canonically extends the dimension of a linear subspace to the class of convex
cones. The main technical result demonstrates that the sequence of intrinsic
volumes of a convex cone concentrates sharply around the statistical dimension.
This fact leads to accurate bounds on the probability that a randomly rotated
cone shares a ray with a fixed cone.


  We consider the supergravity dual of the N=1* theory at finite temperature by
applying the Polchinski-Strassler construction to the black D3 brane solution
of Type IIB supergravity. At finite temperature the 5-brane probe action is
minimized when the probe falls to the horizon, although metastable minima with
r>>r_H persist for a range of temperatures. Thermal effects on the 3-form
source for the hypermultiplet mass m and its order m^2 back reaction on the
other fields of the IIB theory are computed. We find unique solutions which are
regular at the horizon and have the correct behavior on the boundary. For fixed
temperature T, the horizon shrinks for increasing m^2 suggesting that there is
a critical temperature separating the system into high and low temperature
phases. In the high temperature phase 5-branes are unnecessary since there are
no naked singularities. Using the order m^2 correction to the horizon area we
calculate the correction to the entropy to be \Delta S =-0.1714N^2m^2T, which
is less than the free field result.


  Capsule endoscopy is a novel and non-invasive method for diagnosis, which
assists gastroenterologists to monitor the digestive track. Although this new
technology has many advantages over the conventional endoscopy, there are
weaknesses that limits the usage of this technology. Some weaknesses are due to
using small-size batteries. Radio transmitter consumes the largest portion of
energy; consequently, a simple way to reduce the power consumption is to reduce
the data to be transmitted. Many works are proposed to reduce the amount of
data to be transmitted consist of specific compression methods and reduction in
video resolution and frame rate. We proposed a system inside the capsule for
detecting informative frames and sending these frames instead of several
non-informative frames. In this work, we specifically focused on hardware
friendly algorithm (with capability of parallelism and pipeline) for
implementation of polyp detection. Two features of positive contrast and
customized edges of polyps are exploited to define whether the frame consists
of polyp or not. The proposed method is devoid of complex and iterative
structure to save power and reduce the response time. Experimental results
indicate acceptable rate of detection of our work.


  Many problems in robotics, such as estimating the state from noisy sensor
data or aligning two point clouds, can be posed and solved as least-squares
problems. Unfortunately, vanilla nonminimal solvers for least-squares problems
are notoriously sensitive to outliers. As such, various robust loss functions
have been proposed to reduce the sensitivity to outliers. Examples of loss
functions include pseudo-Huber, Cauchy, and Geman-McClure. Recently, these loss
functions have been generalized into a single loss function that enables the
best loss function to be found adaptively based on the distribution of the
residuals. However, even with the generalized robust loss function, most
nonminimal solvers can only be solved locally given a prior state estimate due
to the nonconvexity of the problem. The first contribution of this paper is to
combine graduated nonconvexity (GNC) with the generalized robust loss function
to solve least-squares problems without a prior state estimate and without the
need to specify a loss function. Moreover, existing loss functions, including
the generalized loss function, are based on Gaussian-like distribution.
However, residuals are often defined as the squared norm of a multivariate
error and distributed in a Chi-like fashion. The second contribution of this
paper is to apply a norm-aware adaptive robust loss function within a GNC
framework. The proposed approach enables a GNC formulation of a generalized
loss function such that GNC can be readily applied to a wider family of loss
functions. Furthermore, simulations and experiments demonstrate that the
proposed method is more robust compared to non-GNC counterparts, and yields
faster convergence times compared to other GNC formulations.


  We explore solid electrolytes for electrostatic gating using field-effect
transistors (FETs) in which thin WSe$_2$ crystals are exfoliated and
transferred onto a lithium-ion conducting glass ceramic substrate. For negative
gate voltages ($V_G < 0$) the devices work equally well as ionic liquid gated
FETs while offering specific advantages, whereas no transistor action is seen
for $V_G>0$. For $V_G <0$ the devices can nevertheless be driven into the
ambipolar injection regime by applying a large source-drain bias, and strong
electroluminescence is observed when direct band-gap WSe$_2$ monolayers are
used. Detecting and imaging the emitted light is much simpler in these FETs as
compared to ionic liquid gated transistors, because the semiconductor surface
is exposed (i.e., not covered by another material). Our results show that solid
electrolytes are complementary to existing liquid gates, as they enable
experiments not possible when the semiconductor is buried under the liquid
itself.


  Optical fiber transmission systems form the backbone of today's communication
networks and will be of high importance for future networks as well. Among the
prominent noise effects in optical fiber is phase noise, which is induced by
the Kerr effect. This effect limits the data transmission capacity of these
networks and incurs high processing load on the receiver. At the same time,
quantum information processing techniques offer more efficient solutions but
are believed to be inefficient in terms of size, power consumption and
resistance to noise. Here we investigate the concept of an all-optical joint
detection receiver. We show how it contributes to enabling higher baud-rates
for optical transmission systems when used as a pre-processor, even under high
levels of noise induced by the Kerr effect.


  We discuss some techniques related to equivariant compactifications of
uniform spaces and amenability of topological groups. In particular, we give a
new proof of a recent result by Glasner and Weiss describing the universal
minimal flow of the infinite symmetric group ${\mathfrak S}_\infty$ with the
standard Polish topology, and extend Bekka's concept of an amenable
representation, enabling one to deduce non-amenability of the Banach--Lie
groups $\GL(L_p)$ and $\GL(\ell_p)$, $1\leq p <\infty$.


  Semiconductor superlattices are interesting for two distinct reasons: the
possibility to design their structure (band-width(s),doping, etc.) gives access
to a large parameter space where different physical phenomena can be explored.
Secondly, many important device applications have been proposed, and then
subsequently successfully fabricated. A number of theoretical approaches has
been used to describe their current-voltage characteristics, such as miniband
conduction, Wannier-Stark hopping, and sequential tunneling. The choice of a
transport model has often been dictated by pragmatic considerations without
paying much attention to the strict domains of validity of the chosen model. In
the first part of this paper we review recent efforts to map out these
boundaries, using a first-principles quantum transport theory, which
encompasses the standard models as special cases. In the second part, focusing
in the mini-band regime, we analyze a superlattice device as an element in an
electric circuit, and show that its performance as a THz-photon detector allows
significant optimization, with respect to geometric and parasitic effects, and
detection frequency. The key physical mechanism enhancing the responsivity is
the excitation of hybrid Bloch-plasma oscillations.


  Agile development methods are commonly used to iteratively develop the
information systems and they can easily handle ever-changing business
requirements. Scrum is one of the most popular agile software development
frameworks. The popularity is caused by the simplified process framework and
its focus on teamwork. The objective of Scrum is to deliver working software
and demonstrate it to the customer faster and more frequent during the software
development project. However the security requirements for the developing
information systems have often a low priority. This requirements prioritization
issue results in the situations where the solution meets all the business
requirements but it is vulnerable to potential security threats.
  The major benefit of the Scrum framework is the iterative development
approach and the opportunity to automate penetration tests. Therefore the
security vulnerabilities can be discovered and solved more often which will
positively contribute to the overall information system protection against
potential hackers. In this research paper the authors propose how the agile
software development framework Scrum can be enriched by considering the
penetration tests and related security requirements during the software
development lifecycle. Authors apply in this paper the knowledge and expertise
from their previous work focused on development of the new information system
penetration tests methodology PETA with focus on using COBIT 4.1 as the
framework for management of these tests, and on previous work focused on
tailoring the project management framework PRINCE2 with Scrum.


  We describe phase transitions in the heavy quark potential in planar gauge
theories having wrapped D5-brane string duals. A new phase transition,
previously unnoticed in these models, is driven by the source of a large
dimension operator. Another transition, which has already been described in a
previous paper, is driven by the presence of light dynamical flavors. Both
transitions connect a Coulomb-like phase to a confining linear phase.


  Ong and Ho developed optimal linear index codes for single uniprior index
coding problems (ICPs) by finding a spanning tree for each of the strongly
connected components of the corresponding information-flow graphs, following
which Thomas et al. considered the same class of ICPs over Rayleigh fading
channel. They developed the min-max probability of error criterion for choosing
an index code which minimized the probability of error at the receivers and
showed that there always exist optimal linear index codes for which any
receiver takes at most two transmissions to decode a requested message.
Motivated by the above works, this paper considers single uniprior ICPs over
Rayleigh fading channels for which minimizing average probability of error is
shown to be a criterion for further selection of index codes. The optimal index
code w.r.t this criterion is shown to be one that minimizes the total number of
transmissions used for decoding the message requests at all the receivers. An
algorithm that generates a spanning tree which has a lower value of this metric
as compared to the optimal star graph is also presented. For a given set of
parameters of single uniprior ICPs, a lower bound for the total number of
transmissions used by any optimal index code is derived, and a class of ICPs
for which this bound is tight is identified.


  Neural dialog state trackers are generally limited due to the lack of
quantity and diversity of annotated training data. In this paper, we address
this difficulty by proposing a reinforcement learning (RL) based framework for
data augmentation that can generate high-quality data to improve the neural
state tracker. Specifically, we introduce a novel contextual bandit generator
to learn fine-grained augmentation policies that can generate new effective
instances by choosing suitable replacements for the specific context. Moreover,
by alternately learning between the generator and the state tracker, we can
keep refining the generative policies to generate more high-quality training
data for neural state tracker. Experimental results on the WoZ and MultiWoZ
(restaurant) datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly
improves the performance over the state-of-the-art models, especially with
limited training data.


  In the previous paper (cond-mat/9809323), we calculated the density of staes
in the random-mass Dirac fermion system. In this paper, we obtain the mean
localization length of the single-fermion Greem's function by using the
supersymmetric methods. It is shown that the localization length is a
increasing function of the correation length of the disorders. This result is
in agreement with the density of states and the numerical studies
(cond-mat/9903389).


  We present results showing an improvement of the accuracy of perturbation
theory as applied to cosmological structure formation for a useful range of
scales. The Lagrangian theory of gravitational instability of
Friedmann--Lema\^\i tre cosmogonies investigated and solved up to the third
order in the series of papers by Buchert (1989, 1992, 1993), Buchert \& Ehlers
(1993), Buchert (1994), Ehlers \& Buchert (1994), is compared with numerical
simulations. In this paper we study the dynamics of hierarchical models as a
second step. In the first step (Buchert, Melott and Wei{\ss} 1994) we analyzed
the performance of the Lagrangian schemes for pancake models, i.e., models
which initially have a truncated power spectrum. We here explore whether the
results found for pancake models carry over to hierarchical models which are
evolved deeply into the non--linear regime............We find that for spectra
with negative power--index the second--order scheme performs considerably
better than TZA in terms of statistics which probe the dynamics, and slightly
better in terms of low--order statistics like the power--spectrum. In cases
with much small--scale power the gain from the higher--order schemes is small,
but still measurable. However, in contrast to the results found for pancake
models, where the higher--order schemes get worse than TZA at late non--linear
stages and on small scales, we here find that the second--order model is as
robust as TZA, retaining the improvement at later stages and on smaller scales.
In view of these


  We study chiral properties of eigenvalue spectrum for staggered quarks. We
present a new method to identify would-be zero modes and nonzero modes using
their symmetry and chiral properties. Here, we review the traditional method
with HYP improved staggered quarks, and extend it to a completely new method
which uses the chiral Ward identities and leakage patterns to achieve the goal.


  In this report, we introduce NICE (New frontiers for zero-shot Image
Captioning Evaluation) project and share the results and outcomes of 2023
challenge. This project is designed to challenge the computer vision community
to develop robust image captioning models that advance the state-of-the-art
both in terms of accuracy and fairness. Through the challenge, the image
captioning models were tested using a new evaluation dataset that includes a
large variety of visual concepts from many domains. There was no specific
training data provided for the challenge, and therefore the challenge entries
were required to adapt to new types of image descriptions that had not been
seen during training. This report includes information on the newly proposed
NICE dataset, evaluation methods, challenge results, and technical details of
top-ranking entries. We expect that the outcomes of the challenge will
contribute to the improvement of AI models on various vision-language tasks.


  Instructional design is a fundamental base for educational technologies as it
lays the foundation to facilitate learning and teaching based on pedagogical
underpinnings. However, most of the educational technologies today face two
core challenges in this context: (i) lack of instructional design as a basis
(ii) lack of support for a variety of instructional designs. In order to
address these challenges, we propose a patterns based approach for design of
educational technologies. This is in contrast with existing literature that
focuses either on patterns in education or in software, and not both. The core
idea of our approach is to leverage patterns for modeling instructional design
knowledge and to connect it with patterns in software architecture. We discuss
different categories of patterns in instructional design. We then present the
notion of Pattern-Oriented Instructional Design (POID) as a way to model
instructional design as a connection of patterns (GoalPattern, ProcessPattern,
ContentPattern) and integrate it with Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture
(POSA) based on fundamental principles in software engineering. We demonstrate
our approach through adult literacy case study (287 million learners, 22 Indian
Languages and a variety of instructional designs). The results of our approach
(both web and mobile versions) are available at http://rice.iiit.ac.in and were
adopted by National Literacy Mission Authority of Government of India.


  A positive P-representation for the spin-j thermal density matrix is given in
closed form. The representation is constructed by regarding the wave function
as the internal state of a closed-loop control system. A continuous
interferometric measurement process is proved to einselect coherent states, and
feedback control is proved to be equivalent to a thermal reservoir. Ito
equations are derived, and the P-representation is obtained from a
Fokker-Planck equation. Langevin equations are derived, and the force noise is
shown to be the Hilbert transform of the measurement noise. The formalism is
applied to magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) and gravity wave (GW)
interferometry. Some unsolved problems relating to drift and diffusion on
Hilbert spaces are noted.


  We describe pair-correlation inherent in the structure of many-particle
ground state of quantum gases, namely, Bose Einstein condensate and
Cooper-paired Fermi superfluid of atomic gases. We make a comparative study on
the pair-correlation properties of these two systems. We discuss how to probe
this pair-correlation by stimulated light scattering. This intrinsic
pair-correlation may serve as a resource for many-particle entanglement.


  The aim of this paper is to construct a new braided $T$-category via the
generalized Yetter-Drinfel'd modules and Drinfel'd codouble over Hopf algebra,
an approach different from that proposed by Panaite and Staic \cite{PS}.
Moreover, in the case of finite dimensional, we will show that this category
coincides with the corepresentation of a certain coquasitriangular Turaev group
algebra that we construct. Finally we apply our theory to the case of group
algebra.


  Solutions of numerous equations of mathematical physics such as elliptic,
weakly singular, singular, hypersingular integral equations belong to
functional classes $\bar Q^u_{r \gamma}(\Omega,1)$ and $Q^u_{r
\gamma}(\Omega,1)$ defined over $l-$dimensional hypercube $\Omega=[-1,1]^l,
l=1,2,....$ The derivatives of classes' representatives grow indefinitely when
the argument approaches the boundary $\delta \Omega$. In this paper we estimate
the Kolmogorov and Babenko widths of two functional classes $\bar Q^u_{r
\gamma}(\Omega,1)$ and $Q^u_{r \gamma}(\Omega,1).$ We construct local splines
belonging to those classes, such that the errors of approximation are of the
same order as that of the estimated widths. Thus we construct optimal with
respect to order methods for approximating the functional classes $\bar Q^u_{r
\gamma}(\Omega,1)$ and $Q^u_{r \gamma}(\Omega,1).$ One can use these results
for constructing methods optimal with respect to order for approximating a unit
ball of the Sobolev spaces with logarithmic and polynomial weights.


  Increasingly, autonomous vehicles (AVs) are becoming a reality, such as the
Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) in vehicles that assist drivers in
driving and parking functions with vehicles today. The localization problem for
AVs relies primarily on multiple sensors, including cameras, LiDARs, and
radars. Manufacturing, installing, calibrating, and maintaining these sensors
can be very expensive, thereby increasing the overall cost of AVs. This
research explores the means to improve localization on vehicles belonging to
the ADAS category in a platooning context, where an ADAS vehicle follows a lead
"Smart" AV equipped with a highly accurate sensor suite. We propose and produce
results by using a filtering framework to combine pose information derived from
vision and odometry to improve the localization of the ADAS vehicle that
follows the smart vehicle.


  Horizontal integration of access technologies to networks and services should
be accompanied by some kind of convergence of authentication technologies. The
missing link for the federation of user identities across the technological
boundaries separating authentication methods can be provided by trusted
computing platforms. The concept of establishing transitive trust by trusted
computing enables the desired crossdomain authentication functionality. The
focus of target application scenarios lies in the realm of mobile networks and
devices.


  The paper addresses state estimation for linear discrete-time systems with
binary (threshold) measurements. A Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) approach is
followed and different estimators, characterized by two different choices of
the cost function to be minimized and/or by the possible inclusion of
constraints, are proposed. Specifically, the cost function is either quadratic,
when only the information pertaining to the threshold-crossing instants is
exploited, or piece-wise quadratic, when all the available binary measurements
are taken into account. Stability results are provided for the proposed MHE
algorithms in the presence of unknown but bounded disturbances and measurement
noises. Performance of the proposed techniques is also assessed by means of a
simulation example.


  In this work, we focus on visual venue category prediction, which can
facilitate various applications for location-based service and personalization.
Considering that the complementarity of different media platforms, it is
reasonable to leverage venue-relevant media data from different platforms to
boost the prediction performance. Intuitively, recognizing one venue category
involves multiple semantic cues, especially objects and scenes, and thus they
should contribute together to venue category prediction. In addition, these
venues can be organized in a natural hierarchical structure, which provides
prior knowledge to guide venue category estimation. Taking these aspects into
account, we propose a Hierarchy-dependent Cross-platform Multi-view Feature
Learning (HCM-FL) framework for venue category prediction from videos by
leveraging images from other platforms. HCM-FL includes two major components,
namely Cross-Platform Transfer Deep Learning (CPTDL) and Multi-View Feature
Learning with the Hierarchical Venue Structure (MVFL-HVS). CPTDL is capable of
reinforcing the learned deep network from videos using images from other
platforms. Specifically, CPTDL first trained a deep network using videos. These
images from other platforms are filtered by the learnt network and these
selected images are then fed into this learnt network to enhance it. Two kinds
of pre-trained networks on the ImageNet and Places dataset are employed.
MVFL-HVS is then developed to enable multi-view feature fusion. It is capable
of embedding the hierarchical structure ontology to support more discriminative
joint feature learning. We conduct the experiment on videos from Vine and
images from Foursqure. These experimental results demonstrate the advantage of
our proposed framework.


  The nature of the fractional quantum Hall state with filling factor $\nu=2/3$
and its edge modes continues to remain an open problem in low-dimensional
condensed matter physics. Here, we suggest an experimental setting to probe the
$\nu=2/3$ edge by tunnel-coupling it to a $\nu=1$ integer quantum Hall edge in
another layer of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). In this double-layer
geometry, the momentum of tunneling electrons may be boosted by an auxiliary
magnetic field parallel to the two planes of 2DEGs. We evaluate the current as
a function of bias voltage and the boosting magnetic field. Its threshold
behavior yields information about the spectral function of the $\nu=2/3$ edge,
in particular about the nature of the chiral edge modes. Our theory accounts
also for the effects of Coulomb interaction and disorder.


  WD J204713.76-125908.9 is a new addition to the small class of white dwarfs
with helium-dominated photospheres that exhibit strong Balmer absorption lines
and atmospheric metal pollution. The exceptional abundances of hydrogen
observed in these stars may be the result of accretion of water-rich rocky
bodies. We obtained far-ultraviolet and optical spectroscopy of WD
J204713.76-125908.9 using the Cosmic Origin Spectrograph on-board the Hubble
Space Telescope and X-shooter on the Very Large Telescope, and identify
photospheric absorption lines of nine metals: C, O, Mg, Si, P, S, Ca, Fe and
Ni. The abundance ratios are consistent with the steady state accretion of
exo-planetesimal debris rich in the volatile elements carbon and oxygen, and
the transitional element sulphur, by factors of seventeen, two, and four
respectively compared to bulk Earth. The parent body has a composition akin to
Solar System carbonaceous chondrites, and the inferred minimum mass, $1.6
\times 10^{20}$ g, is comparable to an asteroid 23 km in radius. We model the
composition of the disrupted parent body, finding from our simulations a median
water mass fraction of eight per cent.


  Many university texts on Mechanics deal with the problem of the effect of the
air drag force, using as example the slowing down of a parachute. Hardly no one
discuss what happens when the drag force is proportional to both $u$ and $u^2$.
In this paper we deal with a real problem to illustrate the effect of both
terms in the speed of a runner: a theoretical model of the performance of the
100 m world record sprint of Usain Bolt during the 2009 World Championships at
Berlin is developed, assuming a drag force proportional to $u$ and to $u^2$.
The resulting equation of motion is solved and fitted to the experimental data
obtained from the International Amateur of Athletics Federations that recorded
Bolt's position with a LAVEG (laser velocity guard) device. It is worth to note
that our model works only for short sprints.


  The transition form factors of the semileptonic $B \rightarrow
D_2^*(2460)\ell\bar{\nu}\,\,\,\,(\ell=\tau,\mu,e)$ decay channel are calculated
within the framework of the three-point QCD sum rules. The fit functions of the
form factors are then used to estimate the total decay width and branching
ratio of this transition. The order of branching ratio shows that this channel
can be detected at LHCb.


  We study some dynamical properties of composition operators defined on the
space $\mathcal{P}(^m X)$ of $m$-homogeneous polynomials on a Banach space $X$
when $\mathcal{P}(^m X)$ is endowed with two different topologies: the one of
uniform convergence on compact sets and the one defined by the usual norm. The
situation is quite different for both topologies: while in the case of uniform
convergence on compact sets every power bounded composition operator is
uniformly mean ergodic, for the topology of the norm there is no relation
between the latter properties. Several examples are given.


  The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of some T Tauri stars display a
deficit of near-IR flux that could be a consequence of an embedded Jupiter-mass
planet partially clearing an inner hole in the circumstellar disc. Here, we use
two-dimensional numerical simulations of the planet-disc interaction, in
concert with simple models for the dust dynamics, to quantify how a planet
influences the dust at different radii within the disc. We show that pressure
gradients at the outer edge of the gap cleared by the planet act as a filter -
letting particles smaller than a critical size through to the inner disc while
holding back larger particles in the outer disc. The critical particle size
depends upon the disc properties, but is typically of the order of 10 microns.
This filtration process will lead to discontinuous grain populations across the
planet's orbital radius, with small grains in the inner disc and an outer
population of larger grains. We show that this type of dust population is
qualitatively consistent with SED modelling of systems that have optically thin
inner holes in their circumstellar discs. This process can also produce a very
large gas-to-dust ratio in the inner disc, potentially explaining those systems
with optically thin inner cavities that still have relatively high accretion
rates.


  The Be/X-ray binary A 0535+26 showed a normal (type I) outburst in August
2009. It is the fourth in a series of normal outbursts associated with the
periastron, but is unusual by presenting a double-peaked light curve. The two
peaks reached a flux of ~450 mCrab in the 15-50 keV range. We present results
of the timing and spectral analysis of INTEGRAL, RXTE, and Suzaku observations
of the outburst. The energy dependent pulse profiles and their evolution during
the outburst are studied. No significant differences with respect to other
normal outbursts are observed. The centroid energy of the fundamental cyclotron
line shows no significant variation during the outburst. A spectral hardening
with increasing luminosity is observed. We conclude that the source is
accreting in the sub-critical regime. We discuss possible explanations for the
double-peaked outburst.


  For a map $\mathcal M$ cellularly embedded on a connected and closed
orientable surface, the bases of its Lagrangian (also known as delta-) matroid
$\Delta(\mathcal M)$ correspond to the bases of a Lagrangian subspace $L$ of
the standard orthogonal space $\mathbb{Q}^E\oplus\mathbb{Q}^{E^*}$, where $E$
and $E^*$ are the edge-sets of $\mathcal M$ and its dual map. The Lagrangian
subspace $L$ is said to be a representation of both $\mathcal M$ and
$\Delta(\mathcal M)$. Furthermore, the bases of $\Delta(\mathcal M)$, when
understood as vertices of the hypercube $[-1,1]^n$, induce a polytope $\mathbf
P(\Delta(\mathcal M))$ with edges parallel to the root system of type $BC_n$.
In this paper we study the action of the Coxeter group $BC_n$ on $\mathcal M$,
$L$, $\Delta(\mathcal M)$ and $\mathbf P(\Delta(\mathcal M))$. We also comment
on the action of $BC_n$ on $\mathcal M$ when $\mathcal M$ is understood a
dessin d'enfant.


  The control of postcritical sets of quadratic polynomials with a neutral
fixed point is a main ingredient in the remarkable work of Buff and Ch\'eritat
to construct quadratic Julia sets with positive area. Based on the
Inou-Shishikura theory, they obtained the control for the case of rotation
numbers of bounded high type. Later, Cheraghi developed several elaborate
analytic techniques based on Inou-Shishikura's results and obtained the control
for the case of rotation numbers of high type. In this paper, based on the
pseudo-Siegel disk theory of Dudko and Lyubich, we obtained the control for the
general case.


  In this work, we revisit the temporal stability of slip channel flow. Lauga &
Cossu (Phys. Fluids 17, 088106 (2005)) and Min & Kim (Phys. Fluids 17, 108106
(2005)) have investigated both modal stability and non-normality of slip
channel flow and concluded that the velocity slip greatly suppresses linear
instability and only modestly affects the non-normality. Here we study the
stability of channel flow with streamwise and spanwise slip separately as two
limiting cases of anisotropic slip and explore a broader range of slip length
than previous studies did. We find that, with sufficiently large slip, both
streamwise and spanwise slip trigger three-dimensional leading instabilities.
Overall, the critical Reynolds number is only slightly increased by streamwise
slip, whereas it can be greatly decreased by spanwise slip. Streamwise slip
suppresses the non-modal transient growth, whereas spanwise slip enlarges the
non-modal growth although it does not affect the base flow. Interestingly, as
the spanwise slip length increases, the optimal perturbations exhibit flow
structures different from the well-known streamwise rolls. However, in the
presence of equal slip in both directions, the three-dimensional leading
instabilities disappear and the flow is greatly stabilized. The results suggest
that earlier instability and larger transient growth can be triggered by
introducing anisotropy in the velocity slip.


  We compare the structure of synthetic dust polarization with synthetic
molecular line emission from radiative transfer calculations using a
3-dimensional, turbulent collapsing-cloud magnetohydrodynamics simulation. The
histogram of relative orientations (HRO) technique and the projected Rayleigh
statistic (PRS) are considered. In our trans-Alfv\'enic (more strongly
magnetized) simulation, there is a transition to perpendicular alignment at
densities above $\sim$$4 \times 10^{3}$ cm$^{-3}$. This transition is recovered
in most of our synthetic observations of optically thin molecular tracers,
however for $^{12}$CO it does not occur and the PRS remains in parallel
alignment across the whole observer-space. We calculate the physical depth of
the optical depth $\tau = 1$ surface and find that for $^{12}$CO it is largely
located in front of the cloud midplane, suggesting that $^{12}$CO is too
optically thick and instead mainly probes low volume density gas. In our
super-Alfv\'enic simulation, the magnetic field becomes significantly more
tangled, and all observed tracers tend toward no preference for perpendicular
or parallel alignment. An observable difference in alignment between optically
thin and optically thick tracers may indicate the presence of a dynamically
important magnetic field, though there is some degeneracy with viewing angle.
We convolve our data with a Gaussian beam and compare it with HRO results of
the Vela C molecular cloud. We find good agreement between these results and
our sub-Alfv\'enic simulations when viewed with the magnetic field in the
plane-of-the-sky (especially when sensitivity limitations are considered),
though the observations are also consistent with an intermediately inclined
magnetic field.


  In this paper we consider independent site percolation in a triangulation of
$\mathbb{R}^2$ given by adding $\sqrt{2}$-long diagonals to the usual graph
$\mathbb{Z}^2$. We conjecture that $p_c=\frac{1}{2}$ for any such graph, and
prove it for almost every such graph.


  We find that the mean meridional motion of the spot groups varies
considerably on a time scale of about 5-20 years. The maximum amplitude of the
variation is about 10-15 m/s in both the Sun's northern and the southern
hemispheres. Variation in the mean motion is considerably different during
different solar cycles. At the maximum epoch (year 2000) of the current
cycle~23, the mean motion is relatively strong in the past 100 years and
northbound in both the northern and the southern hemispheres. The power
spectral analyses suggest the existence of approximate 3.2- and 4.3-year
periodicities in the mean motion of the spot groups in the southern hemisphere,
whereas a 13-16 year periodicity is found to exist in the mean motion of the
northern hemisphere. There is strong evidence for a latitude-time dependency in
the periodicities of the mean motion. The north-south difference in the mean
motion also varies by about 10 m/s. During the recent cycles, the north-south
difference is negligibly small. Approximate 12- and 22-year periodicities are
found to exist in the north-south difference.


  Finite temperature problems in the strong correlated systems are important
but challenging tasks. Minimally entangled typical thermal states (METTS) are a
powerful method in the framework of tensor network methods to simulate finite
temperature systems, including Fermions and frustrated spins which introduce a
sign problem in the typical Monte Carlo methods. In this work, we introduce an
extension of the METTS algorithm by using a new basis, the auxiliary matrix
product state. This new basis achieves the pre-summation process in the
partition function, and thus improve the convergence in the Monte Carlo
samplings. The method also has the advantage of simulating the grand canonical
ensemble in a computationally efficient way by employing good quantum numbers.
We benchmark our method on the spin-$1/2$ XXZ model on the triangular lattice,
and show that the new method outperforms the original METTS as well as the
purification methods at sufficiently low temperature, the usual range of
applications of METTS. The new method also naturally connects the METTS method
to the purification method.


  We study the time evolution of the numbers of charm mesons after the kinetic
freezeout of the expanding hadron gas produced by the hadronization of the
quark-gluon plasma from a central heavy-ion collision. The $\pi D$ reaction
rates have contributions from a $D^\ast$ resonance in the $s$ channel. The $\pi
D^\ast$ reaction rates are enhanced by $t$-channel singularities from an
intermediate $D$. The contributions to reaction rates from $D^\ast$ resonances
and $D$-meson $t$-channel singularities are sensitive to thermal mass shifts
and thermal widths. In the expanding hadron gas, the $t$-channel singularities
are regularized by the thermal $D$ widths. After kinetic freezeout, the thermal
$D$ widths are dominated by coherent pion forward scattering. The contributions
to $\pi D^\ast$ reaction rates from $t$-channel singularities are inversely
proportional to the pion number density, which decreases to 0 as the hadron gas
expands. The $t$-channel singularities produce small but significant changes in
charm-meson ratios from those predicted using the known $D^\ast$-decay
branching fractions.


  We report the results of Monte Carlo simulations on several spin glass models
at low temperatures. By using the parallel tempering (Exchange Monte Carlo)
technique we are able to equilibrate down to low temperatures, for moderate
sizes, and hence the data should not be affected by critical fluctuations. Our
results for short range models are consistent with a picture proposed earlier
that there are large scale excitations which cost only a finite energy in the
thermodynamic limit, and these excitations have a surface whose fractal
dimension is less than the space dimension. For the infinite range Viana-Bray
model, our results obtained for a similar number of spins are consistent with
standard replica symmetry breaking.


  Let $(M, g)$ be a complete Riemannian $3$-manifold that is asymptotic to
Schwarzschild with positive mass and whose scalar curvature vanishes. We
\textsl{unconditionally} characterize the large, embedded stable constant mean
curvature spheres in $(M, g)$.


  We prove a removable singularities theorem for point singularities of the
coupled yang mills fermion equations, on a bundle over a two dimensional base
space.


  The shell model within the $2s1d0g_{7/2}0h_{11/2}$ shell is applied to
calculate nuclear structure properties of the even Z=52 - 62, N=82 isotones.
The results are compared with experimental data and with the results of a
quasiparticle random-phase approximation (QRPA) calculation. The interaction
used in these calculations is a realistic two-body G-matrix interaction derived
from modern meson-exchange potential models for the nucleon-nucleon
interaction. For the shell model all the two-body matrix elements are
renormalized by the $\hat{Q}$-box method whereas for the QRPA the effective
interaction is defined by the G-matrix.


  We study the efficiency at maximum power of two coupled heat engines, using
thermoelectric generators (TEGs) as engines. Assuming that the heat and
electric charge fluxes in the TEGs are strongly coupled, we simulate
numerically the dependence of the behavior of the global system on the
electrical load resistance of each generator in order to obtain the working
condition that permits maximization of the output power. It turns out that this
condition is not unique. We derive a simple analytic expression giving the
relation between the electrical load resistance of each generator permitting
output power maximization. We then focuse on the efficiency at maximum power
(EMP) of the whole system to demonstrate that the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency may
not always be recovered: the EMP varies with the specific working conditions of
each generator but remains in the range predicted by irreversible
thermodynamics theory. We finally discuss our results in light of non-ideal
Carnot engine behavior.


  In this note we revisit the analysis performed in arXiv:2305.07217 of
odd-parity perturbations around static and spherically symmetric black holes in
Einsteinian Cubic Gravity (ECG). We show that the additional propagating modes
always have masses much above the cutoff of the theory. Therefore, contrary to
what is claimed in that paper, the ECG black holes remain stable within the
effective field theory regime. We consider the same analysis for a general
cubic theory, showing that the ECG results are not special in this regard. We
use the occasion to make some clarifications on the role, uses and limitations
of ECG and its generalizations.


  In this paper we define an internal binary operation between functions called
in the text \emph{fractal convolution}, that applies a pair of mappings into a
fractal function. This is done by means of a suitable Iterated Function System.
We study in detail the operation in $\mathcal{L}^p$ spaces and in sets of
continuous functions, in a different way to previous works of the authors. We
develop some properties of the operation and its associated sets. The lateral
convolutions with the null function provide linear operators whose
characteristics are explored. The last part of the article deals with the
construction of convolved fractals bases and frames in Banach and Hilbert
spaces of functions.


  In many learning applications, data are collected from multiple sources, each
providing a \emph{batch} of samples that by itself is insufficient to learn its
input-output relationship. A common approach assumes that the sources fall in
one of several unknown subgroups, each with an unknown input distribution and
input-output relationship. We consider one of this setup's most fundamental and
important manifestations where the output is a noisy linear combination of the
inputs, and there are $k$ subgroups, each with its own regression vector. Prior
work~\cite{kong2020meta} showed that with abundant small-batches, the
regression vectors can be learned with only few, $\tilde\Omega( k^{3/2})$,
batches of medium-size with $\tilde\Omega(\sqrt k)$ samples each. However, the
paper requires that the input distribution for all $k$ subgroups be isotropic
Gaussian, and states that removing this assumption is an ``interesting and
challenging problem". We propose a novel gradient-based algorithm that improves
on the existing results in several ways. It extends the applicability of the
algorithm by: (1) allowing the subgroups' underlying input distributions to be
different, unknown, and heavy-tailed; (2) recovering all subgroups followed by
a significant proportion of batches even for infinite $k$; (3) removing the
separation requirement between the regression vectors; (4) reducing the number
of batches and allowing smaller batch sizes.


  For index coding problems with special structure on the side-information
graphs called Interlinked Cycle (IC) structures index codes have been proposed
in the literature (C. Thapa, L. Ong, and S. Johnson, "Interlinked Cycles for
Index Coding: Generalizing Cycles and Cliques", in IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory,
vol. 63, no. 6, Jun. 2017, with a correction in "Interlinked Cycles for Index
Coding: Generalizing Cycles and Cliques", in arxiv (arxiv:1603.00092v2 [cs.IT]
25 Feb 2018)). Recently (S. Sasi and B.S. Rajan, "On Optimal Index Codes for
Interlinked Cycle Structures with Outer Cycles," in arxiv (arXiv:1804.09120v1
[cs.IT]), 24 Apr 2018) for a generalization of IC structures called IC
structures with interlocked outer cycles optimal length index codes have been
reported and it is shown that the optimal length depends on the maximum number
of disjoint outer cycles. In this paper we discuss certain structural
properties of IC structures with interlocked outer cycles and provide a simple
algorithm to find the maximum number of disjoint outer cycles.


  An impact of neutrals on anomalous edge plasma transport and zonal flow (ZF)
is considered. As an example, it is assumed that edge plasma turbulence is
driven by the resistive drift wave (RDW) instability. It is found that the
actual effect of neutrals is not related to a suppression of the instability
\textit{per se}, but due to an impact on the ZF. Particularly, it is shown
that, whereas the neutrals make very little impact on the linear growth rate of
the RDW instability, they can largely reduce the zonal flow generation in the
nonlinear stage, which results in an enhancement of the overall anomalous
plasma transport. Even though only RDW instability is considered, it seems that
such an impact of neutrals on anomalous edge plasma transport has a very
generic feature. It is conceivable that such neutral induced enhancement of
anomalous plasma transport is observed experimentally in a detached divertor
regime, which is accompanied by a strong increase of neutral density.


  We consider spatially homogeneous, anisotropic cosmological models in 5D
whose line element can be written as $dS^2 = {\cal{A}}(u, v)du dv -
{\cal{B}}_{i j}(u, v)dx^{i}dx^{j}$, $(i, j = 1, 2, 3)$, where $u$ and $v$ are
light-like coordinates. In the case where ${\cal{B}}_{i j}$ is diagonal, we
construct three families of analytic solutions to the 5D vacuum field equations
$R_{AB} = 0$ $ (A, B = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4)$. Among them, there is a family of
self-similar homothetic solutions that contains, as a particular case, the
so-called light-like Kasner universes. In this work we provide a detailed study
of the different types of 4D scenarios that can be embedded in such universes.
For the sake of generality of the discussion, and applicability of the results,
in our analysis we consider the two versions of non-compactified 5D relativity
in vogue, viz., braneworld theory and induced matter theory. We find a great
variety of cosmological models in 4D which are anisotropic versions of the FRW
ones. We obtain models on the brane with a non-vanishing cosmological term
$\Lambda_{(4)}$, which inflate {\it \`a la} de Sitter without satisfying the
classical false-vacuum equation of state. Using the symmetry of the solutions,
we construct a class of non-static vacuum solutions on the brane. We also
develop {\it static} pancake-like distributions where the matter is
concentrated in a thin surface (near $z = 0$), similar to those proposed by
Zel'dovich for the shape of the first collapsed objects in an expanding
anisotropic universe. The solutions discussed here can be applied in a variety
of physical situations.


  We survey some recent progress on understanding when one four-dimensional
symplectic manifold can be symplectically embedded into another. In 2010,
McDuff established a number-theoretic criterion for the existence of a
symplectic embedding of one four-dimensional ellipsoid into another. This is
related to previously known criteria for when a disjoint union of balls can be
symplectically embedded into a ball. The new theory of "ECH capacities" gives
general obstructions to symplectic embeddings in four dimensions which turn out
to be sharp in the above cases.


  This paper is concerned with the distance of a symmetric tridiagonal Toeplitz
matrix $T$ to the variety of similarly structured singular matrices, and with
determining the closest matrix to $T$ in this variety. Explicit formulas are
presented, that exploit the analysis of the sensitivity of the spectrum of $T$
with respect to structure-preserving perturbations of its entries.


  This work presents a novel descriptor for texture images based on fractal
geometry and its application to image analysis. The descriptors are provided by
estimating the triangular prism fractal dimension under different scales with a
weight exponential parameter, followed by dimensionality reduction using
Karhunen-Lo\`{e}ve transform. The efficiency of the proposed descriptors is
tested on two well-known texture data sets, that is, Brodatz and Vistex, both
for classification and image retrieval. The novel method is also tested
concerning invariances in situations when the textures are rotated or affected
by Gaussian noise. The obtained results outperform other classical and
state-of-the-art descriptors in the literature and demonstrate the power of the
triangular descriptors in these tasks, suggesting their use in practical
applications of image analysis based on texture features.


  Enabling bi-directional retrieval of images and texts is important for
understanding the correspondence between vision and language. Existing methods
leverage the attention mechanism to explore such correspondence in a
fine-grained manner. However, most of them consider all semantics equally and
thus align them uniformly, regardless of their diverse complexities. In fact,
semantics are diverse (i.e. involving different kinds of semantic concepts),
and humans usually follow a latent structure to combine them into
understandable languages. It may be difficult to optimally capture such
sophisticated correspondences in existing methods. In this paper, to address
such a deficiency, we propose an Iterative Matching with Recurrent Attention
Memory (IMRAM) method, in which correspondences between images and texts are
captured with multiple steps of alignments. Specifically, we introduce an
iterative matching scheme to explore such fine-grained correspondence
progressively. A memory distillation unit is used to refine alignment knowledge
from early steps to later ones. Experiment results on three benchmark datasets,
i.e. Flickr8K, Flickr30K, and MS COCO, show that our IMRAM achieves
state-of-the-art performance, well demonstrating its effectiveness. Experiments
on a practical business advertisement dataset, named \Ads{}, further validates
the applicability of our method in practical scenarios.


  Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently emerged as a powerful approach to
learning representations from large-scale unlabeled data, showing promising
results in time series analysis. The self-supervised representation learning
can be categorized into two mainstream: contrastive and generative. In this
paper, we will present a comprehensive comparative study between contrastive
and generative methods in time series. We first introduce the basic frameworks
for contrastive and generative SSL, respectively, and discuss how to obtain the
supervision signal that guides the model optimization. We then implement
classical algorithms (SimCLR vs. MAE) for each type and conduct a comparative
analysis in fair settings. Our results provide insights into the strengths and
weaknesses of each approach and offer practical recommendations for choosing
suitable SSL methods. We also discuss the implications of our findings for the
broader field of representation learning and propose future research
directions. All the code and data are released at
\url{https://github.com/DL4mHealth/SSL_Comparison}.


  We provide an analytical formulation to model the propagation of elastic
waves in a homogeneous half-space supporting an array of thin plates. The
technique provides the displacement field obtained from the interaction between
an incident wave generated by a harmonic source and the scattered fields
induced by the flexural motion of the plates. The scattered field generated by
each plate is calculated using an ad-hoc set of Green's functions. The
interaction between the incident field and the scattered fields is modeled
through a multiple scattering formulation. Owing to the introduction of the
multiple scattering formalism, the proposed technique can handle a generic set
of plates arbitrarily arranged on the half-space surface. The method is
validated via comparison with finite element simulations considering Rayleigh
waves interacting with a single and a collection of thin plates. Our framework
can be used to investigate the interaction of vertically polarized surface
waves and flexural resonators in different engineering contexts, from the
design of novel surface acoustic wave devices to the interpretation of urban
vibrations problems.


  Both single emitters and large area field emitters (LAFE) are generally
characterized using the slope and intercept of a Murphy-Good (or
Fowler-Nordheim) plot which are used to extract the field enhancement factor
and the emission area. Using a shielding model that has been developed recently
for a LAFE, the validity of the underlying assumption is investigated. It is
found that in case of a LAFE, the slope has contributions from the enhancement
factor {\it as well as} the rate at which the effective number of
super-emitters changes with the applied field. As a consequence, the emission
area is related to both the slope and the intercept in a LAFE. When the mean
spacing in a LAFE is much larger than the height of emitter, the usual
interpretation of the slope and intercept are recovered.


  We discuss the problem of noncommutative SO(N) gauge field theories from the
string one-loop point of view. To this end we propose an expression for the
string propagator on the boundary of the Moebius strip in the presence of a
constant B field. We discuss in detail the problems related to its derivation.
Then we use it to compute the one-loop corrections to two-, three- and
four-gluon amplitudes in an open string theory with orthogonal Chan-Paton
factors. We show that these corrections in the field theory limit in 4D are
compatible with the one-loop corrections of a renormalizable noncommutative
SO(N) gauge field theory.


  We present an alternative representation for the anisotropic Eliashberg
equations of superconductivity, whose numerical solution yields an efficiency
gain of several orders of magnitude with respect to the conventional
representation in momentum space. Our method is a practical realization of a
long-sought approach, whose essence is a linear transformation from regular
${\bf k}$ space to a set of orthonormal functions defined as the solutions of
the Helmholtz equation on the Fermi surface. In this way, all the anisotropy of
the problem can be described by a handful of coefficients with built-in
symmetry. We perform benchmark calculations on the gap anisotropy of MgB$_2$,
and reproduce previous results at a remarkably reduced computational cost.
Furthermore, we apply our methodology to efficiently determine the transition
temperature of the compressed YH$_6$ hydride, obtaining very good agreement
with recent experimental measurements. The simplification introduced by our
method enables the high-throughput exploration of superconducting materials
without having to resort to the isotropic approximation, and opens up
possibilities towards first principles calculations of more advanced theories
of superconductivity.


  Our food security is built on the foundation of soil. Farmers would be unable
to feed us with fiber, food, and fuel if the soils were not healthy. Accurately
predicting the type of soil helps in planning the usage of the soil and thus
increasing productivity. This research employs state-of-the-art Visual
Transformers and also compares performance with different models such as SVM,
Alexnet, Resnet, and CNN. Furthermore, this study also focuses on
differentiating different Visual Transformers architectures. For the
classification of soil type, the dataset consists of 4 different types of soil
samples such as alluvial, red, black, and clay. The Visual Transformer model
outperforms other models in terms of both test and train accuracies by
attaining 98.13% on training and 93.62% while testing. The performance of the
Visual Transformer exceeds the performance of other models by at least 2%.
Hence, the novel Visual Transformers can be used for Computer Vision tasks
including Soil Classification.


  Dynamical mean-field theory is used to study the three orbital model of the
$d^3$ compound SrRu$_2$O$_6$ both with and without explicitly including the
O-$p$ states. Depending on the size of the Hund's coupling $J$, at low to
intermediate temperatures we find solutions corresponding to Mott or correlated
covalent insulator. The latter can explain the experimentally observed absence
of Curie susceptibility in the paramagnetic phase. At high temperatures a
single phase with smoothly varying properties is observed. SrRu$_2$O$_6$
provides an ideal system to study the competition between the local moment
physics and covalent bonding since both effects are maximized, while spin-orbit
interaction is found to play a minor role.


  We construct phase space localizing operators in all dimensions. These are
frequency localized variants of the conditional expectation operator related to
a dyadic stopping time. Our construction is an improvement over the so-called
phase plane projections of Muscalu, Tao and the third author in one dimension.
The motivation for such operators comes from time-frequency analysis. They are
used in particular to prove uniform estimates for multilinear modulation
invariant operators.


  Given a fixed hypergraph $H$, let $\mbox{wsat}(n,H)$ denote the smallest
number of edges in an $n$-vertex hypergraph $G$, with the property that one can
sequentially add the edges missing from $G$, so that whenever an edge is added,
a new copy of $H$ is created. The study of $\mbox{wsat}(n,H)$ was introduced by
Bollob\'as in 1968, and turned out to be one of the most influential topics in
extremal combinatorics. While for most $H$ very little is known regarding
$\mbox{wsat}(n,H)$, Alon proved in 1985 that for every graph $H$ there is a
limiting constant $C_H$ so that $\mbox{wsat}(n,H)=(C_H+o(1))n$. Tuza
conjectured in 1992 that Alon's theorem can be (appropriately) extended to
arbitrary $r$-uniform hypergraphs. In this paper we prove this conjecture.


  Circumnuclear star formation and AGN feedback is believed to play a critical
role in the context of galaxy evolution. The low-luminosity QSO (LLQSO) sample
that contains 99 of the closest AGN with redshift z<=0.06 fills the gap between
the local AGN population and high-redshift QSOs that is essential to understand
the AGN evolution with redshift. In this paper, we present the results of
near-infrared H+K-integral field spectroscopy of the inner kiloparsecs of the
LLQSO HE 1029-1831 with SINFONI. Line maps show that ionized hydrogen gas is
located in spiral arms within the stellar bar and in a circumnuclear ring. Line
fluxes and diagnostic line ratios indicate recent or ongoing star formation in
the circumnuclear region and the presence of young and intermediate-age stellar
populations in the bulge. In particular, we find traces of an intense starburst
in the circumnuclear region that has begun around 100 Myr ago but has declined
to a fraction of the maximum intensity now. We estimate the dynamical bulge
mass and find that the galaxy follows published M_BH-M_bulge relations.
However, bulge-disk decomposition of the K-band image with BUDDA reveals that
HE 1029-1831 does not follow the M_BH-L_bulge relations of inactive galaxies.
We conclude that the deviation from M_BH-L_bulge relations of inactive galaxies
in this source is rather caused by young stellar populations and not by an
undermassive black hole.


  Social Media can be used to extract discussion topics during a disaster. With
the COVID-19 pandemic impact on South Africa, we need to understand how the law
and regulation promulgated by the government in response to the pandemic
contrasts with discussion topics social media users have been engaging in. In
this work, we expand on traditional media analysis by using Social Media
discussions driven by or directed to South African government officials. We
find topics that are similar as well as different in some cases. The findings
can inform further study into social media during disaster settings in South
Africa and beyond. This paper sets a framework for future analysis in
understanding the opinions of the public during a pandemic and how these
opinions can be distilled [in a semi-automated approach] to inform government
communication in the future.


  Data summarization that presents a small subset of a dataset to users has
been widely applied in numerous applications and systems. Many datasets are
coded with hierarchical terminologies, e.g., the international classification
of Diseases-9, Medical Subject Heading, and Gene Ontology, to name a few. In
this paper, we study the problem of selecting a diverse set of k elements to
summarize an input dataset with hierarchical terminologies, and visualize the
summary in an ontology structure. We propose an efficient greedy algorithm to
solve the problem with (1-1/e) = 62% -approximation guarantee. Although this
greedy solution achieves quality-guaranteed answers approximately but it is
still not optimal. To tackle the problem optimally, we further develop a
dynamic programming algorithm to obtain optimal answers for graph visualization
of log-data using ontology terminologies called OVDO . The complexity and
correctness of OVDO are theoretically analyzed. In addition, we propose a
useful optimization technique of tree reduction to remove useless nodes with
zero weights and shrink the tree into a smaller one, which ensures the
efficiency acceleration of OVDO in many real-world applications. Extensive
experimental results on real-world datasets show the effectiveness and
efficiency of our proposed approximate and exact algorithms for tree data
summarization.


  Kolya Uraltsev was one of the inventors of the Heavy Quark Expansion (HQE),
that describes inclusive weak decays of hadrons containing heavy quarks and in
particular lifetimes. Besides giving a pedagogic introduction to the subject,
we review the development and the current status of the HQE, which just
recently passed several non-trivial experimental tests with an unprecedented
precision. In view of many new experimental results for lifetimes of heavy
hadrons, we also update several theory predictions: $\tau (B^+) / \tau (B_d) =
1.04^{+0.05}_{-0.01} \pm 0.02 \pm 0.01$, $\tau (B_s) / \tau (B_d) = 1.001 \pm
0.002$, $\tau (\Lambda_b)/ \tau (B_d) = 0.935 \pm 0.054$ and $\bar {\tau}
(\Xi_b^0) / \bar{\tau} (\Xi_b^+) = 0.95 \pm 0.06$. The theoretical precision is
currently strongly limited by the unknown size of the non-perturbative matrix
elements of four-quark operators, which could be determined with lattice
simulations.


  We study some aspects of modular generalized Springer theory for a complex
reductive group $G$ with coefficients in a field $\mathbb k$ under the
assumption that the characteristic $\ell$ of $\mathbb k$ is rather good for
$G$, i.e., $\ell$ is good and does not divide the order of the component group
of the centre of $G$. We prove a comparison theorem relating the
characteristic-$\ell$ generalized Springer correspondence to the
characteristic-$0$ version. We also consider Mautner's characteristic-$\ell$
`cleanness conjecture'; we prove it in some cases; and we deduce several
consequences, including a classification of supercuspidal sheaves and an
orthogonal decomposition of the equivariant derived category of the nilpotent
cone.


  I present a review of the searches for charginos and neutralinos using data
from proton-antiproton collision at the centre of mass energy of 1.96 TeV
collected by the CDF and the D0 experiments at the Tevatron during run II.


  We follow the timing properties of the neutron star low-mass X-ray binary
system 4U 1705-44 in different spectral states, as monitored by the Rossi X-ray
Timing Explorer over about a month. We fit the power density spectra using
multiple Lorentzians. We show that the characteristic frequencies of these
Lorentzians, when properly identified, fit within the correlations previously
reported. The time evolution of these frequencies and their relation with the
parameters of the energy spectra reported in Barret & Olive (2002) are used to
constrain the accretion geometry changes. The spectral data were fitted by the
sum of a blackbody and a Comptonized component and were interpreted in the
framework of a truncated accretion disk geometry, with a varying truncation
radius. If one assumes that the characteristic frequencies of the Lorentzians
are some measure of this truncation radius, as in most theoretical models, then
the timing data presented here strengthen the above interpretation. The soft to
hard and hard to soft transitions are clearly associated with the disk receding
from and approaching the neutron star respectively. During the transitions,
correlations are found between the Lorentzian frequencies and the flux and
temperature of the blackbody, which is thus likely to be coming from the disk.
On the other hand, in the hard state, the characteristic Lorentzians
frequencies which are at the lowest, remained nearly constant despite
significant evolution of the spectra parameters. The disk no longer contributes
to the X-ray emission, and the blackbody is now likely to be emitted by the
neutron star surface which is providing the seed photons for the
Comptonization.


  Spin chains have been proposed as quantum wires in many quantum information
processing architectures. Coherent transmission of quantum information over
short distances is enabled by their internal dynamics, which drives the
transport of single-spin excitations in perfectly polarized chains. Given the
practical challenge of preparing the chain in a pure state, we propose to use a
chain that is initially in the maximally mixed state. We compare the transport
properties of pure and mixed-state chains, finding similarities that enable the
experimental study of pure-state transfer by its simulation via mixed-state
chains, and demonstrate protocols for the perfect transfer of quantum
information in these chains. Remarkably, mixed-state chains allow the use of
Hamiltonians which do not preserve the total number of excitations, and which
are more readily obtainable from the naturally occurring magnetic dipolar
interaction. We propose experimental implementations using solid-state nuclear
magnetic resonance and defect centers in diamond.


  A five-body calculation of $^{12}$C+$n$+$n$+$p$+$p$ is performed to take a
step towards solving an outstanding problem in nuclear theory: The simultaneous
and accurate description of the ground and first excited 0$^+$ states of
$^{16}$O. The interactions between the constituent particles are chosen
consistently with the energies of bound subsystems, especially $^{12}$C$+n$,
$^{12}$C$+p$, and $\alpha$-particle. The five-body dynamics is solved with the
stochastic variational method on correlated Gaussian basis functions. No
restriction is imposed on the four-nucleon configurations except the Pauli
principle excluding the occupied orbits in $^{12}$C. The energies of both the
ground and first excited states of $^{16}$O are obtained in excellent agreement
with experiment. Analysis of the wave functions indicates spatially localized
$\alpha$-particle-like cluster structure for the excited state and
shell-model-like delocalized structure for the ground state.


  The central idea of metamaterials and metaoptics is that, besides their base
materials, the geometry of structures offers a broad extra dimension to explore
for exotic functionalities. Here, we discover that the topology of structures
fundamentally dictates the topological properties of optical near fields and
offers a new dimension to exploit for optical functionalities that are
irrelevant to specific material constituents or structural geometries. We find
that the nontrivial topology of metal structures ensures the birth of
polarization singularities (PSs) in the near field with rich morphologies and
intriguing spatial evolutions including merging, bifurcation, and topological
transition. By mapping the PSs to non-Hermitian exceptional points and
employing homotopy theory, we extract the core invariant that governs the
topological classification of the PSs and the conservation law that regulates
their spatial evolutions. The results have effectively bridged three vibrant
fields of singular optics, topological photonics, and non-Hermitian physics,
with potential applications in chiral sensing, chiral quantum optics, and
beyond photonics in other wave systems.


  In a recent paper (astro-ph/0207561, posted on July 25, 2002), Fromang &
Balbus state that ``a uniformly rotating barotropic fluid in an external
potential attains a true energy minimum if and only if the rotation profile is
everywhere subsonic. If regions of supersonic rotation are present, fluid
variations exist that could take the system to states of lower energy.'' We
present a simple counter-example which demonstrates that the stablity criterion
presented by Fromang & Balbus is incorrect.


  In a series of two recent papers, the frequency and size distribution
dependence of extinction spectra for astronomical silicate and graphite grains
was analyzed by us in the context of MRN type interstellar dust models. These
grains were taken to be homogeneous spheres following the power law
$(a^{-3.5})$ size distribution which is very much in use. The analytic formulas
were obtained for the graphite and silicate grains in wavelength range 1000\AA
- 22,500\AA and their utility was demonstrated. In this paper of the series, we
present analytic formulas for the scattering and absorption spectrum of another
important constituent of interstellar dust models, namely, the polycyclic
aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Relative contribution of the PAHs to extinction
{\it vis a vis} carbonaceous classical grains has been examined.


  Radon background is one of the most critical influences on the ultra-low
background and rare-event physical experiments in underground laboratories. To
conduct a comprehensive investigation of the radon concentrations in China
JinPing underground Laboratory (CJPL), long-term cumulative measurements were
carried out using time-integrated passive radon dosimeters containing CR-39
solid-state nuclear track detectors at four sites of CJPL-I. The measurements
lasted from May 30,2015 to March 16,2016, a total of 290 days, and the total
effective measurement time is 6,953 hours. In the main experiment hall equipped
with the ventilation system, the average annual radon concentrations were
(55+/-7) Bq m^-3, (58+/-10) Bq^m-3and (53+/-9) Bq m^-3 in three locations
respectively. In the storage tunnel without any radon reduction facility, the
average annual radon concentrations increased to (345+/-15) Bq m^-3, reflecting
the original average annual radon concentration levels in the underground
laboratory. Compared with the measured results in the period from 2010 to 2011,
the average radon concentration in the main experimental hall was reduced from
(86+/-25) Bq m^-3 to (58+/-10) Bq m^-3 due to the well-running ventilation
system. Compared with other international underground laboratories, radon
concentrations in CJPL-I were at an intermediate level and can meet the demand
for low background and rare-event physical experiments.


  Whilst holding great promise for low noise, ease of operation and networking,
useful photonic quantum computing has been precluded by the need for
beyond-state-of-the-art components, manufactured by the millions. Here we
introduce a manufacturable platform for quantum computing with photons. We
benchmark a set of monolithically-integrated silicon photonics-based modules to
generate, manipulate, network, and detect photonic qubits, demonstrating
dual-rail photonic qubits with $99.98\% \pm 0.01\%$ state preparation and
measurement fidelity, Hong-Ou-Mandel quantum interference between independent
photon sources with $99.50\%\pm0.25\%$ visibility, two-qubit fusion with
$99.22\%\pm0.12\%$ fidelity, and a chip-to-chip qubit interconnect with
$99.72\%\pm0.04\%$ fidelity, not accounting for loss. In addition, we preview a
selection of next generation technologies, demonstrating low-loss silicon
nitride waveguides and components, fabrication-tolerant photon sources,
high-efficiency photon-number-resolving detectors, low-loss chip-to-fiber
coupling, and barium titanate electro-optic phase shifters.


  We review the recent developments of analytic solutions in transverse
magneto-hydrodynamics under Bjorken expansion. It is found that the time
dependence of magnetic fields can either increase or reduce the energy density
depending on the decay exponent of magnetic fields. Moreover, perturbative
solutions under weak magnetic fields with spatial inhomogeneity results in
transverse flow, where the directions of flow also depend on the decay exponent
of magnetic fields in time.


  We investigate the effects of the social interactions of a finite set of
agents on an equilibrium pricing mechanism. A derivative written on
non-tradable underlyings is introduced to the market and priced in an
equilibrium framework by agents who assess risk using convex dynamic risk
measures expressed by Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (BSDE). Each
agent is not only exposed to financial and non-financial risk factors, but she
also faces performance concerns with respect to the other agents.
  Within our proposed model we prove the existence and uniqueness of an
equilibrium whose analysis involves systems of fully coupled multi-dimensional
quadratic BSDEs. We extend the theory of the representative agent by showing
that a non-standard aggregation of risk measures is possible via
weighted-dilated infimal convolution. We analyze the impact of the problem's
parameters on the pricing mechanism, in particular how the agents' performance
concern rates affect prices and risk perceptions. In extreme situations, we
find that the concern rates destroy the equilibrium while the risk measures
themselves remain stable.


  We present an extension to the Tacotron speech synthesis architecture that
learns a latent embedding space of prosody, derived from a reference acoustic
representation containing the desired prosody. We show that conditioning
Tacotron on this learned embedding space results in synthesized audio that
matches the prosody of the reference signal with fine time detail even when the
reference and synthesis speakers are different. Additionally, we show that a
reference prosody embedding can be used to synthesize text that is different
from that of the reference utterance. We define several quantitative and
subjective metrics for evaluating prosody transfer, and report results with
accompanying audio samples from single-speaker and 44-speaker Tacotron models
on a prosody transfer task.


  False discovery rate (FDR) controlling procedures provide important
statistical guarantees for the replicability in signal identification based on
multiple hypotheses testing. In many fields of study, FDR controlling
procedures are used in high-dimensional (HD) analyses to discover features that
are truly associated with the outcome. In some recent applications, data on the
same set of candidate features are independently collected in multiple
different studies. For example, gene expression data are collected at different
facilities and with different cohorts, to identify the genetic biomarkers of
multiple types of cancers. These studies provide us opportunities to identify
signals by considering information from different sources (with potential
heterogeneity) jointly. This paper is about how to provide FDR control
guarantees for the tests of union null hypotheses of conditional independence.
We present a knockoff-based variable selection method (\textit{Simultaneous
knockoffs}) to identify mutual signals from multiple independent data sets,
providing exact FDR control guarantees under finite sample settings. This
method can work with very general model settings and test statistics. We
demonstrate the performance of this method with extensive numerical studies and
two real data examples.


  We analyze the mixing between $\Sigma^0$ and $\Lambda^0$ based on the baryon
masses. We distinguish the contributions from QCD and QED in the baryon mass
splittings. We find that the mixing angle between $\Sigma^0$ and $\Lambda^0$ is
$(2.07\pm 0.03)\times 10^{-2} $, which leads to the decay branching fraction
and up-down asymmetry of $\Lambda_c^+ \to \Sigma^0 e^+ \nu_e$ to be ${\cal
B}(\Lambda_c^+ \to \Sigma^0 e^+ \nu_e)=(1.5\pm 0.2)\times 10^{-5}$ and
$\alpha(\Lambda_c^+ \to \Sigma^0 e^+ \nu_e)=-0.86\pm 0.04$, respectively.
Moreover, we obtain that $\Delta {\cal B}\equiv {\cal B}(\Lambda_c^+\to
\Sigma^0 \pi^+) - {\cal B}(\Lambda_c^+\to \Sigma^+\pi^0)=(3.8\pm 0.5)\times
10^{-4}$ and $\Delta \alpha \equiv\alpha(\Lambda_c^+\to \Sigma^0 \pi^+)
-\alpha(\Lambda_c^+\to \Sigma^+\pi^0)=(-1.6\pm 0.7)\times10^{-2}$, which should
vanish without the mixing.


  The formalism of generalized Wigner transformations developped in a previous
paper, is applied to kinetic equations of the Lindblad type for quantum
harmonic oscillator models. It is first applied to an oscillator coupled to an
equilibrium chain of other oscillators having nearest-neighbour interactions.
The kinetic equation is derived without using the so called rotating-wave
approximation. Then it is shown that the classical limit of the corresponding
phase-space equation is independent of the ordering of operators corresponding
to the inverse of the generalized Wigner transformation, provided the latter is
involutive. Moreover, this limit equation, which conserves the probabilistic
nature of the distribution function and obeys an H-theorem, coincides with the
kinetic equation for the corresponding classical system, which is derived
independently and is distinct from that usually obtained in the litterature and
not sharing the above properties. Finally the same formalism is applied to more
general model equations used in quantum optics and it is shown that the above
results remain unaltered.


  Our overall aim is focused on exploring whether we could use Bluetooth Low
Energy (BLE) technology to track poacher vehicles in remote and rural areas
such as Sabah, in Malaysia, especially deep inside the jungle terrain with
little or no communication technologies exists. Tracking technologies are
currently limited to relying on satellites or cellular towers, for environments
that do not permit access to these signals, very few viable alternatives exist.
This paper explores the use of BLE as a method to track vehicles. It works by
mounting Bluetooth beacons beside a road and placing a receiver concealed
somewhere inside the vehicle. As the vehicle drives past the beacon, the
receiver and beacon are momentarily in range, the receiver then stores a unique
ID from the beacon and when the vehicle is then in an area with GSM signal, an
SMS is sent containing the unique IDs of the beacons that have been detected.
This project is prototyped and tested in collaboration with the Danau Girang
Field Centre in Sabah, Malaysia. The results offer insights for how effective
BLE beacons are in a tracking situation for where the beacon and receiver are
in range for a short period of time as well as how different obstructions will
affect the range and strength of the signal. It is important to note that our
objective is not to catch the poacher, instead to understand how they move
around within jungle terrain, as we can use such information to develop a
comprehensive plan against poaching activities.


  In this article we propose a dynamic quantum state tomography model for
qutrits subject to laser cooling. We prove that one can reduce the number of
distinct measurement setups required for state reconstruction by employing the
stroboscopic approach. The results are in line with current advances in quantum
tomography where there is a strong tendency to investigate the optimal criteria
for state reconstruction. We believe that the stroboscopic approach can be
considered an efficient tool for density matrix identification since it allows
to determine the minimal number of distinct observables needed for quantum
state tomography.


  We build on the theory of capital requirements (CRs) to create a new
framework for modeling dynamic risk preferences. The key question is how to
evaluate the risk of a payoff stream sequentially as new information is
revealed. In our model, we associate each payoff stream with a disbursement
strategy and a premium schedule to form a triple of stochastic processes. We
characterize risk preferences in terms of a single set that we call the risk
frontier which characterizes acceptable triples. We then propose the
generalized capital requirement (GCR) which evaluates the risk of a payoff
stream by minimizing the premium schedule over acceptable triples. We apply
this model to a risk-aware decision maker (DM) who controls a Markov decision
process (MDP) and wants to find a policy to minimize the GCR of its payoff
stream. The resulting GCR-MDP recovers many well-known risk-aware MDPs as
special cases. To make this approach computationally viable, we obtain the
temporal decomposition of the GCR in terms of the risk frontier. Then, we
connect the temporal decomposition with the notion of an information state to
compactly capture the dependence of DM's risk preferences on the problem
history, where augmented dynamic programming can be used to compute an optimal
policy. We report numerical experiments for the GCR-minimizing newsvendor.


  The spectral asymmetry of the wave energy distribution of dust particles
during mode-coupling induced melting, observed for the first time in plasma
crystals by Cou\"edel et al. [Phys. Rev. E 89, 053108 (2014)], is studied
theoretically and by molecular-dynamics simulations. It is shown that an
anisotropy of the well confining the microparticles selects the directions of
preferred particle motion. The observed differences in intensity of waves of
opposed directions is explained by a nonvanishing phonon flux. Anisotropic
phonon scattering by defects and Umklapp scattering are proposed as possible
reasons for the mean phonon flux.