  Transformation optics, a recent geometrical design strategy of controlling
light by combining Maxwell's principles of electromagnetism with Einstein's
general relativity, promises without precedent an invisibility cloaking device
that can render a macroscopic object invisible in three dimensions. However,
most previous proof-of-concept transformation-optics cloaking devices focused
predominantly on two dimensions, whereas detection of a macroscopic object
along its third dimension was always unfailing. Here, we report the first
experimental demonstration of transformation-optics macroscopic visible-light
cloaking beyond two dimensions. This almost-three-dimensional cloak exhibits
three-dimensional (3D) invisibility for illumination near its center (i.e. with
a limited field of view), and its ideal wide-angle invisibility performance is
preserved in multiple two-dimensional (2D) planes intersecting in the 3D space.
Both light ray trajectories and optical path lengths have been verified
experimentally at the macroscopic scale, which provides unique evidence on the
geometrical nature of transformation optics.


  Readout of superconducting qubits faces a trade-off between measurement speed
and unwanted back-action on the qubit caused by the readout drive, such as
$T_1$ degradation and leakage out of the computational subspace. The readout is
typically benchmarked by integrating the readout signal and choosing a binary
threshold to extract the "readout fidelity". We show that such a
characterization may significantly overlook readout-induced leakage errors. We
introduce a method to quantitatively assess this error by repeatedly executing
a composite operation -- a readout preceded by a randomized qubit-flip. We
apply this technique to characterize the dispersive readout of an intrinsically
Purcell-protected qubit. We report a binary readout fidelity of $99.63\%$ and
quantum non-demolition (QND) fidelity exceeding $99.00\%$ which takes into
account a leakage error rate of $0.12\pm0.03\%$, under a repetition rate of
$(380 \rm{ns})^{-1}$ for the composite operation.


  Mechanisms for one-dimensional photon sorting are theoretically studied in
the framework of a couple mode method. The considered system is a nanopatterned
structure composed of two different pixels drilled on the surface of a thin
gold layer. Each pixel consists of a slit-groove array designed to squeeze a
large fraction of the incident light into the central slit. The Double-Pixel is
optimized to resolve two different frequencies in the near infrared. This
system shows a high transmission efficiency and a small crosstalk. Its response
is found to strongly depend on the effective area shared by overlapping pixels.
Three different regimes for the process of photon sorting are identified and
the main physical trends underneath in such regimes are unveiled. Optimal
efficiencies for the photon sorting are obtained for a moderate number of
grooves that overlap with grooves of the neighbor pixel. Results could be
applied to optical and infrared detectors.


  This paper proposes a novel method for testing observability in Gaussian
models using discrete density approximations (deterministic samples) of
(multivariate) Gaussians. Our notion of observability is defined by the
existence of the maximum a posteriori estimator. In the first step of the
proposed algorithm, the discrete density approximations are used to generate a
single representative design observation vector to test for observability. In
the second step, a number of carefully chosen design observation vectors are
used to obtain information on the properties of the estimator. By using
measures like the variance and the so-called local variance, we do not only
obtain a binary answer to the question of observability but also provide a
quantitative measure.


  We present a fast, fully parameterizable GPU implementation of Convolutional
Neural Network variants. Our feature extractors are neither carefully designed
nor pre-wired, but rather learned in a supervised way. Our deep hierarchical
architectures achieve the best published results on benchmarks for object
classification (NORB, CIFAR10) and handwritten digit recognition (MNIST), with
error rates of 2.53%, 19.51%, 0.35%, respectively. Deep nets trained by simple
back-propagation perform better than more shallow ones. Learning is
surprisingly rapid. NORB is completely trained within five epochs. Test error
rates on MNIST drop to 2.42%, 0.97% and 0.48% after 1, 3 and 17 epochs,
respectively.


  Recently an operator space version of type and cotype, namely type $(p,H)$
and cotype $(q,H)$ of operator spaces for $1\leq p \leq 2\leq q \leq \infty$
and a subquadratic and homogeneous Hilbetian operator space $H$ were introduced
and investigated by the author. In this paper we define weak type $(2,H)$
(resp. weak cotype $(2,H)$) of operator spaces, which lies strictly between
type $(2,H)$ (resp. cotype $(2,H)$) and type $(p,H)$ for all $1\leq p <2$
(resp. cotype $(q,H)$ for all $2<q \leq \infty$). This is an analogue of weak
type 2 and weak cotype 2 in the Banach space case, so we develop analogous
equivalent formulations. We also consider weak-$H$ space, spaces with weak type
$(2,H)$ and weak cotype $(2,H^*)$ simultaneously and establish corresponding
equivalent formulations.


  We derive the node structure of the radial functions which are solutions of
the Dirac equation with scalar $S$ and vector $V$ confining central potentials,
in the conditions of exact spin or pseudospin symmetry, i.e., when one has
$V=\pm S+C$, where $C$ is a constant. We show that the node structure for exact
spin symmetry is the same as the one for central potentials which go to zero at
infinity but for exact pseudospin symmetry the structure is reversed. We obtain
the important result that it is possible to have positive energy bound
solutions in exact pseudospin symmetry conditions for confining potentials of
any shape, including naturally those used in hadron physics, from nuclear to
quark models. Since this does not happen for potentials going to zero at large
distances, used in nuclear relativistic mean-field potentials or in the atomic
nucleus, this shows the decisive importance of the asymptotic behavior of the
scalar and vector central potentials on the onset of pseudospin symmetry and on
the node structure of the radial functions. Finally, we show that these results
are still valid for negative energy bound solutions for anti-fermions.


  Understanding 3D scenes from a single image is fundamental to a wide variety
of tasks, such as for robotics, motion planning, or augmented reality. Existing
works in 3D perception from a single RGB image tend to focus on geometric
reconstruction only, or geometric reconstruction with semantic segmentation or
instance segmentation. Inspired by 2D panoptic segmentation, we propose to
unify the tasks of geometric reconstruction, 3D semantic segmentation, and 3D
instance segmentation into the task of panoptic 3D scene reconstruction - from
a single RGB image, predicting the complete geometric reconstruction of the
scene in the camera frustum of the image, along with semantic and instance
segmentations. We thus propose a new approach for holistic 3D scene
understanding from a single RGB image which learns to lift and propagate 2D
features from an input image to a 3D volumetric scene representation. We
demonstrate that this holistic view of joint scene reconstruction, semantic,
and instance segmentation is beneficial over treating the tasks independently,
thus outperforming alternative approaches.


  Oblivious transfer is the cryptographic primitive where Alice sends one of
two bits to Bob but is oblivious to the bit received. Using quantum
communication, we can build oblivious transfer protocols with security provably
better than any protocol built using classical communication. However, with
imperfect apparatus one needs to consider other attacks. In this paper we
present an oblivious transfer protocol which is impervious to lost messages.


  A dielectric-modulated double gate bilayer electrodes organic thin-film
transistor (DMDGBE-OTFT) based sensor is proposed for label-free biomolecule
detection. The double gate of DMDGBE-OTFT is used for creating two symmetrical
gates underlap regions on both sides of the organic semiconductor. The parallel
immobilization of biomolecule in two gates underlaps region changes the
on-current (ION) of the DMDGBEOTFT. Bilayer electrode is also used for
significant reduction of barrier height to enhance the performance of the
proposed device. The change in the drain current has been utilized to evaluate
the sensitivity of the DMDGBE-OTFT for biomolecule recognition having different
dielectric constants and corresponding charge densities using 2-D physics-based
numerical simulation when biomolecules are immobilized in the gate underlap
area. The ATLAS TCAD tool is used to investigate the sensitivity performance of
the DMDGBE-OTFT. The proposed DMDGBE-OTFT has 24.2% higher sensitivity in
comparison to the recently reported OTFT-based biosensors for label-free
detection of biomolecules. The DMDGBE-OTFT biosensor has a lot of potential for
flexible biosensing applications in the future because of its flexibility, high
sensitivity, biocompatibility and low cost.


  We introduce atoms for dyadic atomic $H^1$ for which the equivalence between
atomic and maximal function defnitions is dimension independent. We give the
sharp, up to $\log(d)$ factor, estimates for the $H^1 \to L^1$ norm estimates
for the special maximal function.


  We describe a geometric model for synchrotron and synchrotron self-Compton
(SSC) radiation from blazar jets, involving multiple emission zones with
turbulent magnetic fields and fully self-consistent seed photon mixing for SSC.
Including the effects of jet divergence, particle cooling and the Relativistic
PA rotation (RPAR) to the observer frame, we find that the multi-zone model
recovers simple predictions for SSC polarization, but describes new
dependencies on jet viewing geometry and zone multiplicity. Increasing the zone
number decreases both synchrotron and SSC polarization, but with different
scaling. A rise in synchrotron polarization fraction $\Pi_{\rm Sync}$ at high
energies is guaranteed by basic relativity considerations, and strengthened by
jet non-uniformity. Finite light travel time effects can suppress the
synchrotron polarization at energies well below the $\nu_{\rm Sync}$ peak. In
general $\Pi_{\rm Sync}$ and $\Pi_{\rm SSC}$ are correlated with $\Pi_{\rm
SSC}/\Pi_{\rm Sync}\approx 0.3$, but individual realizations can lie far from
this trend. This study lets us estimate $\Pi$ across the SED, leading to
predictions in the X-ray band helpful for planning observations with {\it IXPE}
and other upcoming X-ray polarization missions.


  The effective interaction between charged colloidal particles confined
between two planar like-charged walls is investigated using computer
simulations of the primitive model describing asymmetric electrolytes. In
detail, we calculate the effective force acting onto a single macroion and onto
a macroion pair in the presence of slit-like confinement. For moderate Coulomb
coupling, we find that this force is repulsive. Under strong coupling
conditions, however, the sign of the force depends on the distance to the
plates and on the interparticle distance. In particular, the particle-plate
interaction becomes strongly attractive for small distances which may explain
the occurrence of colloidal crystalline layers near the plates observed in
recent experiments.


  We present results from three world-wide campaigns that resulted in the
detections of two single-chord and one multi-chord stellar occultations by the
Plutino object (84922) 2003~VS$_2$. From the single-chord occultations in 2013
and 2014 we obtained accurate astrometric positions for the object, while from
the multi-chord occultation on November 7th, 2014, we obtained the parameters
of the best-fitting ellipse to the limb of the body at the time of occultation.
We also obtained short-term photometry data for the body in order to derive its
rotational phase during the occultation. The rotational light curve present a
peak-to-peak amplitude of 0.141 $\pm$ 0.009 mag. This allows us to reconstruct
the three-dimensional shape of the body, with principal semi-axes $a = 313.8
\pm 7.1$ km, $b = 265.5^{+8.8}_{-9.8}$ km, and $c = 247.3^{+26.6}_{-43.6}$ km,
which is not consistent with a Jacobi triaxial equilibrium figure. The derived
spherical volume equivalent diameter of $548.3 ^{+29.5}_{-44.6}$ km is about
5\% larger than the radiometric diameter of 2003~VS$_2$ derived from Herschel
data of $523 \pm 35$ km, but still compatible with it within error bars. From
those results we can also derive the geometric albedo ($0.123
^{+0.015}_{-0.014}$) and, under the assumption that the object is a Maclaurin
spheroid, the density $\rho = 1400^{+1000}_{-300}$ for the plutino. The
disappearances and reappearances of the star during the occultations do not
show any compelling evidence for a global atmosphere considering a pressure
upper limit of about 1 microbar for a pure nitrogen atmosphere, nor secondary
features (e.g. rings or satellite) around the main body.


  Geometric approaches to network analysis combine simply defined models with
great descriptive power. In this work we provide a method for embedding
directed acyclic graphs into Minkowski spacetime using Multidimensional scaling
(MDS). First we generalise the classical MDS algorithm, defined only for
metrics with a Euclidean signature, to manifolds of any metric signature. We
then use this general method to develop an algorithm to be used on networks
which have causal structure allowing them to be embedded in Lorentzian
manifolds. The method is demonstrated by calculating embeddings for both causal
sets and citation networks in Minkowski spacetime. We finally suggest a number
of applications in citation analysis such as paper recommendation, identifying
missing citations and fitting citation models to data using this geometric
approach.


  N = 2 supersymmetry in four space-time dimensions is intimately related to
hyperkahler and quaternionic Kahler geometries. On one hand, the target spaces
for rigid supersymmetric sigma-models are necessarily hyperkahler manifolds. On
the other hand, when coupled to N = 2 supergravity, the sigma-model target
spaces must be quaternionic Kahler. It is known that such manifolds of
restricted holonomy are difficult to generate explicitly. Projective superspace
is a field-theoretic approach to constructing general N = 2 supersymmetric
nonlinear sigma-models, and hence to generate new hyperkahler and quaternionic
Kahler metrics. Intended for a mixed audience consisting of both physicists and
mathematicians, these lectures provide a pedagogical introduction to the
projective-superspace approach.


  This report is an update and extension of our paper accepted for publication
in ApJ (arXiv:0802.4262). Since objects at the same redshift should have the
same luminosity distance and the distance moduli of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia)
obtained directly from observations are completely cosmology independent, we
obtain the distance modulus of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) at a given redshift by
interpolating or iterating from the Hubble diagram of SNe Ia. Then we calibrate
five GRB relations without assuming a particular cosmological model, from
different regression methods, and construct the GRB Hubble diagram to constrain
cosmological parameters. Based upon these relations we list the
cosmology-independent distance moduli of 42 GRBs between redshift of 1.44 and
6.60, with the 1-$\sigma$ uncertainties of 1-3%.


  The dynamics of point vortices is generalized in two ways: first by making
the strengths complex, which allows for sources and sinks in superposition with
the usual vortices, second by making them functions of position. These
generalizations lead to a rich dynamical system, which is nonlinear and yet has
conservation laws coming from a Hamiltonian-like formalism. We then discover
that in this system the motion of a pair mimics the behavior of rays in
geometric optics. We describe several exact solutions with optical analogues,
notably Snell's law and the law of reflection off a mirror, and perform
numerical experiments illustrating some striking behavior.


  We give a class of Fourier multipliers with non-symmetric symbols and
explicit norm bounds on $L^p$ spaces by using the stochastic calculus of L\'evy
processes and Burkholder-Wang estimates for differentially subordinate
martingales.


  Publicly verifiable quantum money is a protocol for the preparation of
quantum states that can be efficiently verified by any party for authenticity
but is computationally infeasible to counterfeit. We develop a cryptographic
scheme for publicly verifiable quantum money based on Gaussian superpositions
over random lattices. We introduce a verification-of-authenticity procedure
based on the lattice discrete Fourier transform, and subsequently prove the
unforgeability of our quantum money under the hardness of the short vector
problem from lattice-based cryptography.


  The stability of the modular field in a warped brane world scenario has been
a subject of interest for a long time. Goldberger \& Wise ( GW ) proposed a
mechanism to achieve this by invoking a massive scalar field in the bulk
space-time neglecting the back-reaction. In this work, we examine the
possibility of stabilizing the modulus without bringing in any external scalar
field. We show that instead of flat 3-branes as considered in Randall-Sundrum (
RS ) warped braneworld model, if one considers a more generalized version of
warped geometry with de-Sitter 3-brane, then the brane vacuum energy
automatically leads to a modulus potential with a metastable minimum. Our
result further reveals that in this scenario the gauge hierarchy problem can
also be resolved for appropriate choice of brane cosmological constant.


  The twist-bend nematic phase, $N_{\rm TB}$, may be viewed as a heliconical
molecular arrangement in which the director $\bf n$ precesses uniformly about
an extra director field, $\bf t$. It corresponds to a nematic ground state
exhibiting nanoscale periodic modulation. To demonstrate the stability of this
phase from the elastic point of view, a natural extension of the Frank elastic
energy density is proposed. The elastic energy density is built in terms of the
elements of symmetry of the new phase in which intervene the components of
these director fields together with the usual Cartesian tensors. It is shown
that the ground state corresponds to a deformed state for which $K_{22} >
K_{33}$. When the elastic free energy is interpreted in analogy with the Landau
theory, it is demonstrated the existence of a second order phase transition
between the usual and the twist-bend nematic phase, driven by a new elastic
parameter playing a role similar to the one of the main dielectric anisotropy
of classical nematics and being closely related to the bulk compression modulus
representing the pseudo-layers of twist-bend nematic phases. A phase transition
and the value of the nanoscale pitch are predicted in accordance to
experimental results.


  The goal of property testing is to quickly distinguish between objects which
satisfy a property and objects that are $\epsilon$-far from satisfying the
property. There are now several general results in this area which show that
natural properties of combinatorial objects can be tested with "constant" query
complexity, depending only on $\epsilon$ and the property, and not on the size
of the object being tested. The upper bound on the query complexity coming from
the proof techniques are often enormous and impractical. It remains a major
open problem if better bounds hold.
  Maybe surprisingly, for testing with respect to the rectangular distance, we
prove there is a universal (not depending on the property), polynomial in
$1/\epsilon$ query complexity bound for two-sided testing hereditary properties
of sufficiently large permutations. We further give a nearly linear bound with
respect to a closely related metric which also depends on the smallest
forbidden subpermutation for the property. Finally, we show that several
different permutation metrics of interest are related to the rectangular
distance, yielding similar results for testing with respect to these metrics.


  Algebraic effect handlers is a programming paradigm where programmers can
declare their own syntactic operations, and modularly define the semantics of
these using effect handlers.
  However, we cannot directly define algebraic effect handlers for many
higher-order operations (or higher-order effects) -- i.e., operations that have
computations as parameters.
  Examples of such higher-order effects include common programming features,
such as try-catch exception handlers, function abstraction, and more.
  In this paper we present a new kind of effect handler that addresses this
shortcoming.
  Our effect handler approach is closely related to previous work on scoped
effect handlers, which also supports higher-order effects.
  A key difference is that our effect handlers make it easy to understand
separate (higher-order) effects as separate concerns, since effects do not
interact.
  In contrast, effect interaction is the default with scoped effect handlers.
  While separate concerns is the default with our handlers, it is also possible
to define handlers where effects interact.


  Multivariate time series data in practical applications, such as health care,
geoscience, and biology, are characterized by a variety of missing values. In
time series prediction and other related tasks, it has been noted that missing
values and their missing patterns are often correlated with the target labels,
a.k.a., informative missingness. There is very limited work on exploiting the
missing patterns for effective imputation and improving prediction performance.
In this paper, we develop novel deep learning models, namely GRU-D, as one of
the early attempts. GRU-D is based on Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), a
state-of-the-art recurrent neural network. It takes two representations of
missing patterns, i.e., masking and time interval, and effectively incorporates
them into a deep model architecture so that it not only captures the long-term
temporal dependencies in time series, but also utilizes the missing patterns to
achieve better prediction results. Experiments of time series classification
tasks on real-world clinical datasets (MIMIC-III, PhysioNet) and synthetic
datasets demonstrate that our models achieve state-of-the-art performance and
provides useful insights for better understanding and utilization of missing
values in time series analysis.


  To what extent are two images picturing the same 3D surfaces? Even when this
is a known scene, the answer typically requires an expensive search across
scale space, with matching and geometric verification of large sets of local
features. This expense is further multiplied when a query image is evaluated
against a gallery, e.g. in visual relocalization. While we don't obviate the
need for geometric verification, we propose an interpretable image-embedding
that cuts the search in scale space to essentially a lookup.
  Our approach measures the asymmetric relation between two images. The model
then learns a scene-specific measure of similarity, from training examples with
known 3D visible-surface overlaps. The result is that we can quickly identify,
for example, which test image is a close-up version of another, and by what
scale factor. Subsequently, local features need only be detected at that scale.
We validate our scene-specific model by showing how this embedding yields
competitive image-matching results, while being simpler, faster, and also
interpretable by humans.


  K. Cho and S. Nelson introduced the notion of a quandle coloring quiver,
which is a quiver-valued link invariant, and a quandle cocycle quiver which is
an enhancement of the quandle coloring quiver by assigning to each vertex a
weight computed using a quandle 2-cocycle. In this paper, we study quandle
coloring quivers using dihedral quandles and introduce the notions of a shadow
quandle coloring quiver and a shadow quandle cocycle quiver, which are shadow
versions of the quandle coloring quiver and the quandle cocycle quiver. We show
that, when we use a dihedral quandle of prime order, the quandle coloring
quivers are equivalent to the quandle coloring numbers and when we use a
dihedral quandle of prime order and Mochizuki's 3-cocycle, the shadow quandle
cocycle quivers are equivalent to the shadow quandle cocycle invariants.


  We have detected H$_2$O and O$_2$ absorption against the far-UV continuum of
stars located on lines of sight near the nucleus of Comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko using the Alice imaging spectrograph on Rosetta.
These stellar appulses occurred at impact parameters of $\rho=4$-20 km, and
heliocentric distances ranging from $R_h=-1.8$ to 2.3 AU (negative values
indicate pre-perihelion observations). The measured H$_2$O column densities
agree well with nearly contemporaneous values measured by VIRTIS-H. The clear
detection of O$_2$ independently confirms the initial detection by the ROSINA
mass spectrometer; however, the relative abundance of O$_2$/H$_2$O derived from
the stellar spectra (11%-68%, with a median value of 25%) is considerably
larger than published values found by ROSINA. The cause of this difference is
unclear, but potentially related to ROSINA measuring number density at the
spacecraft position while Alice measures column density along a line of sight
that passes near the nucleus.


  We present an analysis of two key sets of data constraining the high $x$
gluon at up to approximate N${}^3$LO in QCD within the MSHT global PDF fitting
framework. We begin with LHC 7 and 8 TeV inclusive jet and dijet production at
both NNLO and aN${}^3$LO. This makes use of the formalism established in the
previous global MSHT20aN${}^3$LO PDF fit, but now considers the role of dijet
production for the first time at this order. We present a detailed comparison
of the fit quality and PDF impact for both cases, and consider the role that
electroweak corrections, and the scale choice for inclusive jet production has.
Some mild tension between these data sets in the impact on the high $x$ gluon
is seen at NNLO, but this is largely eliminated at aN${}^3$LO. While a good fit
quality to the dijet data is achieved at both orders, the fit quality to the
inclusive jet data is relatively poor. We examine the impact of including full
colour corrections in a global PDF fit for the first time, finding this to be
relatively mild. We also revisit the fit to the ATLAS 8 TeV $Z$ $p_T$ data,
considering the role that the $p_T$ cuts, data selection and different aspects
of the aN${}^3$LO treatment have on the fit quality and PDF impact. We observe
that in all cases the aN${}^3$LO fit quality is consistently improved relative
to the NNLO, indicating a clear preference for higher order theory for these
data.


  In cosmologies with more than four dimensions, of the type required for
unification, it is possible for signals to have velocities in excess of that of
light. Using a five-dimensional model which otherwise agrees with observations,
two subjects are reviewed: (a) An exact solution of the field equations which
describes a 4D spacetime with a large cosmological constant and waves
travelling in ordinary 3D space with velocities exceeding lightspeed. (b) An
example where the 4D interval or proper time is modulated by the systematic
variation of the scalar field associated with the fifth dimension, providing a
simple signalling method. These and related consequences of higher-dimensional
cosmology have significant implications for astrophysics, and especially the
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.


  Enhanced Raman scattering can be obtained by injecting a seeded light field
which is correlated with the initially prepared collective atomic excitation.
This Raman amplification process can be used to realize atom-light hybrid
interferometer. We numerically calculate the phase sensitivities and the
signal-to-noise ratios of this interferometer with the method of homodyne
detection and intensity detection, and give their differences between this two
methods. In the presence of loss of light field and atomic decoherence the
measure precision will be reduced which can be explained by the break of the
intermode decorrelation conditions of output modes


  We consider the proton and neutron quasiparticle orbits around the
closed-shell 56Ni and 48Ca isotopes. It is found that large model spaces
(beyond the capability of shell-model applications) are necessary for
predicting the quenchings of spectroscopic factors.
  The particle-vibration coupling is identified as the principal mechanism.
Additional correlations--due to configuration with several particle-hole
excitations--are estimated using shell-model calculations and generate an extra
reduction which is < ~4% for most quasiparticle states. The theoretical
calculations nicely agree with (e,e'p) and heavy ion knock-out experiments.
These results open a new path for a microscopic understanding of the
shell-model.


  We consider a classical toy model of a massive scalar field in 1+1 dimensions
with a constant exponential expansion rate of space. The nonlinear theory under
consideration supports approximate oscillon solutions, but they eventually
decay due to their coupling to the expanding background. Although all the
parameters of the theory and the oscillon energies are of order one in units of
the scalar field mass $m$, the oscillon lifetime is exponentially large in
these natural units. For typical values of the parameters, we see oscillon
lifetimes scaling approximately as $\tau \propto \exp(k E/m)/m$ where $E$ is
the oscillon energy and the constant $k$ is on the order of 5 to 15 for
expansion rates between $H=0.02m$ and $H=0.01m$.


  Recent studies find existing self-supervised speech encoders contain
primarily acoustic rather than semantic information. As a result, pipelined
supervised automatic speech recognition (ASR) to large language model (LLM)
systems achieve state-of-the-art results on semantic spoken language tasks by
utilizing rich semantic representations from the LLM. These systems come at the
cost of labeled audio transcriptions, which is expensive and time-consuming to
obtain. We propose a task-agnostic unsupervised way of incorporating semantic
information from LLMs into self-supervised speech encoders without labeled
audio transcriptions. By introducing semantics, we improve existing speech
encoder spoken language understanding performance by over 10\% on intent
classification, with modest gains in named entity resolution and slot filling,
and spoken question answering FF1 score by over 2\%. Our unsupervised approach
achieves similar performance as supervised methods trained on over 100 hours of
labeled audio transcripts, demonstrating the feasibility of unsupervised
semantic augmentations to existing speech encoders.


  Algorithm designers typically assume that the input data is correct, and then
proceed to find "optimal" or "sub-optimal" solutions using this input data.
However this assumption of correct data does not always hold in practice,
especially in the context of online learning systems where the objective is to
learn appropriate feature weights given some training samples. Such scenarios
necessitate the study of inverse optimization problems where one is given an
input instance as well as a desired output and the task is to adjust the input
data so that the given output is indeed optimal. Motivated by learning
structured prediction models, in this paper we consider inverse optimization
with a margin, i.e., we require the given output to be better than all other
feasible outputs by a desired margin. We consider such inverse optimization
problems for maximum weight matroid basis, matroid intersection, perfect
matchings, minimum cost maximum flows, and shortest paths and derive the first
known results for such problems with a non-zero margin. The effectiveness of
these algorithmic approaches to online learning for structured prediction is
also discussed.


  A theoretical approach is proposed for quantitative modeling of SABRE (Signal
Amplification By Reversible Exchange) experiments performed at a high magnetic
field of an NMR spectrometer. SABRE is a method, which exploits the spin order
of parahydrogen (the H$_2$ molecule in its nuclear singlet state) for
hyper-polarizing the spins of various substrates to enhance their NMR signals.
An important feature of SABRE is that the substrate is not modified chemically:
instead spin order transfer takes place in a transient complex with
parahydrogen. In high-field SABRE experiments, such a transfer is achieved by
using suitable NMR excitation schemes. The approach presented here can
explicitly treat the spin dynamics in the SABRE complex as well as the kinetics
of substrate exchange (between the free and bound form) and complex interplay
of spin evolution and chemical processes. One more important effect included in
the model is the alteration of the spin state of parahydrogen giving rise to
the formation of anti-phase spin order from the initial singlet order. Such a
treatment enables a detailed analysis of known high-field SABRE schemes,
quantitative comparison with experiments and elucidation of the key factors
that limit the resulting NMR signal enhancement.


  The Crab pulsar experienced a major flare in 2010 as observed by Fermi LAT.
Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that the flare was
accompanied by a structural change in the anvil region of the Crab Nebula. In
the framework of a photometric analysis we reconstruct the energetics of this
event. Reconnection zones near the light cylinder are expected to release
energy by accelerating beams of electrons, leading to flares of varying
amplitude. In this case the major flare would have reduced the magnetic energy
stored in the reconnection zones, and would thus have had an impact on the
properties of the giant radio flares presumably originating from these regions.
We test this scenario by observing giant radio pulses with the Westerbork
Synthesis Radio Telescope.


  This document describes the symmetric encryption algorithm called Puzzle. It
is free and open. The objective of this paper is to get an opinion about its
security from the cryptology community. It is separated in two parts, a
technical description of the algorithm and its cryptanalysis. The algorithm has
some interesting properties :
  The block size is variable and unknown from an attacker. The size of the key
has no limit and is unknown from an attacker. The key size does not affect the
algorithm speed (using a 256 bit key is the same as using a 1024 bit key). The
algorithm is much faster than the average cryptographic function. Experimental
test showed 600 Mo/s - 4 cycles/byte on an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 2.40GHz and
1,2 Go/s - 2 cycles/byte on an Intel i5-3210M 2.50GHz. Both CPU had only 2
cores.


  The existential k-pebble game characterizes the expressive power of the
existential-positive k-variable fragment of first-order logic on finite
structures. The winner of the existential k-pebble game on two given finite
structures can be determined in time O(n2k) by dynamic programming on the graph
of game configurations. We show that there is no O(n(k-3)/12)-time algorithm
that decides which player can win the existential k-pebble game on two given
structures. This lower bound is unconditional and does not rely on any
complexity-theoretic assumptions. Establishing strong k-consistency is a
well-known heuristic for solving the constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). By
the game characterization of Kolaitis and Vardi our result implies that there
is no O(n(k-3)/12)-time algorithm that decides if strong k-consistency can be
established for a given CSP-instance.


  Existence, uniqueness and non-explosion of the mild solution are proved for a
class of semi-linear functional SPDEs with multiplicative noise and Dini
continuous drifts. In the finite-dimensional and bounded time delay setting,
the log-Harnack inequality and $L^2$-gradient estimate are derived. As the
Markov semigroup is associated to the functional (segment) solution of the
equation, one needs to make analysis on the path space of the solution in the
time interval of delay.


  I show that the principle of equipartition, applied to area elements of a
surface which are in equilibrium at the local Davies-Unruh temperature, allows
one to determine the surface number density of the microscopic spacetime
degrees of freedom in any diffeomorphism invariant theory of gravity. The
entropy associated with these degrees of freedom matches with the Wald entropy
for the theory. This result also allows one to attribute an entropy density to
the spacetime in a natural manner. The field equations of the theory can then
be obtained by extremising this entropy. Moreover, when the microscopic degrees
of freedom are in local thermal equilibrium, the spacetime entropy of a bulk
region resides on its boundary.


  The arrangement of all Galois lines for the quotient curve of the Hermitian
curve by an involution in the projective 3-space is described, in terms of the
geometry over finite fields. All Galois points for three plane models of this
curve admitting three or more Galois points are also determined.


  We propose monolithic diamond cavities that can be used to convert
color-center Fock-state single photons from emission wavelengths to
telecommunication bands. We present a detailed theoretical description of the
conversion process, analyzing important practical concerns such as nonlinear
phase shifts and frequency mismatch. Our analysis predicts sustainable power
requirements ($ \lesssim 1~\mathrm{W}$) for a chipscale nonlinear device with
high conversion efficiencies.


  We explore connections among Monstrous Moonshine, orbifolds, the Kitaev chain
and topological modular forms. Symmetric orbifolds of the Monster CFT, together
with further orbifolds by subgroups of Monster, are studied and found to
satisfy the divisibility property, which was recently used to rule out extremal
holomorphic conformal field theories. For orbifolds by cyclic subgroups of
Monster, we arrive at divisibility properties involving the full McKay-Thompson
series. Orbifolds by non-abelian subgroups of Monster are further considered by
utilizing the data of Generalized Moonshine.


  The reionization of helium describes the transition from its singly ionized
state to a doubly-ionized state in the intergalactic medium (IGM). This process
is important for the thermal evolution of the IGM and influences the mean free
path of photons with energies above $54.4$~eV. While it is well-known that
helium reionization is mostly driven by the contribution of energetic quasars
at $z<6$, we study here how helium reionization proceeds if there is an
additional contribution due to the annihilation of dark matter. We explore the
effects of different dark matter profiles for the dark matter clumping factor,
which can significantly enhance the annihilation rate at late times. We find
that the presence of dark matter annihilation enhances the He$^{++}$ abundance
at early stages where it would be zero within the standard model, and it can
further increase during structure formation, reflecting the increase of the
dark matter clumping factor. The latter is, however, degenerate with the
build-up of the quasar contribution, and we therefore expect no significant
changes at late times. We expect that future studies of the He$^+$ Lyman
$\alpha$ forest may help to assess whether the evolution is consistent with the
contribution from quasars alone, or if an additional component may be required.


  The chromium arsenides BaCr2As2 and BaCrFeAs2 with ThCr2Si2 type structure
(space group I4/mmm; also adopted by '122' iron arsenide superconductors) have
been suggested as mother compounds for possible new superconductors. DFT-based
calculations of the electronic structure evidence metallic antiferromagnetic
ground states for both compounds. By powder neutron diffraction we confirm for
BaCr2As2 a robust ordering in the antiferromagnetic G-type structure at T_N =
580 K with mu_Cr = 1.9 mu_B at T = 2K. Anomalies in the lattice parameters
point to magneto-structural coupling effects. In BaCrFeAs2 the Cr and Fe atoms
randomly occupy the transition-metal site and G-type order is found below 265 K
with mu_Cr/Fe = 1.1 mu_B. 57Fe Moessbauer spectroscopy demonstrates that only a
small ordered moment is associated with the Fe atoms, in agreement with
electronic structure calculations with mu_Fe ~ 0. The temperature dependence of
the hyperfine field does not follow that of the total moments. Both compounds
are metallic but show large enhancements of the linear specific heat
coefficient gamma with respect to the band structure values. The metallic state
and the electrical transport in BaCrFeAs2 is dominated by the atomic disorder
of Cr and Fe and partial magnetic disorder of Fe. Our results indicate that
Neel-type order is unfavorable for the Fe moments and thus it is destabilized
with increasing iron content.


  The massive stars in the Galactic center inner arcsecond share analogous
properties with the so-called Hot Jupiters. Most of these young stars have
highly eccentric orbits, and were probably not formed in-situ. It has been
proposed that these stars acquired their current orbits from the tidal
disruption of compact massive binaries scattered toward the proximity of the
central supermassive black hole. Assuming a binary star formed in a thin
gaseous disk beyond 0.1 pc from the central object, we investigate the
relevance of disk-satellite interactions to harden the binding energy of the
binary, and to drive its inward migration. A massive, equal-mass binary star is
found to become more tightly wound as it migrates inwards toward the central
black hole. The migration timescale is very similar to that of a single-star
satellite of the same mass. The binary's hardening is caused by the formation
of spiral tails lagging the stars inside the binary's Hill radius. We show that
the hardening timescale is mostly determined by the mass of gas inside the
binary's Hill radius, and that it is much shorter than the migration timescale.
We discuss some implications of the binary's hardening process. When the more
massive (primary) components of close binaries eject most their mass through
supernova explosion, their secondary stars may attain a range of eccentricities
and inclinations. Such processes may provide an alternative unified scenario
for the origin of the kinematic properties of the central cluster and S-stars
in the Galactic center as well as the high velocity stars in the Galactic halo.


  We present a compact, fibre-coupled single photon source using gradient-index
(GRIN) lenses and an InAsP semiconductor quantum dot embedded within an InP
photonic nanowire waveguide. A GRIN lens assembly is used to collect photons
close to the tip of the nanowire, coupling the light immediately into a single
mode optical fibre. The system provides a stable, high brightness source of
fibre-coupled single photons. Using pulsed excitation, we demonstrate on-demand
operation with a single photon purity of 98.5% when exciting at saturation in a
device with a source-fibre collection efficiency of 35% and an overall single
photon collection efficiency of 10%. We also demonstrate "plug and play"
operation using room temperature photoluminescence from the InP nanowire for
room temperature alignment.


  We try to reconcile the tension between the local 2.4\% determination of
Hubble constant and its global determination by $\textit{Planck}$ CMB data and
BAO data through modeling the dark energy variously. We find that the
chi-square is significantly reduced by $\Delta\chi^2_\text{all}=-6.76$ in the
redshift-binned dark energy model where the $68\%$ limits of the equation of
state of dark energy read $w(0\leq z\leq 0.1)=-1.958_{-0.508}^{+0.509}$,
$w(0.1< z\leq 1.5)=-1.006_{-0.082}^{+0.092}$, and here $w(z>1.5)$ is fixed to
$-1$.


  The magnetic phase diagram of the quasi one-dimensional spinchain system
CsNiF$_3$ below the N\'eel temperature is determined. For magnetic fields
perpendicular to the spin chains incommensurate phases are predicted. From
linear spin-wave theory we obtain the instability line of the paramagnetic
phase as a function of the strength and the direction of the field. The system
undergoes a transition to a commensurate or an incommensurate phase depending
on the direction of the magnetic field. In the commensurate phase the
characterizing wave vector is locked to values describing a two-sublattice
structure, whereas in the incommensurate phase the wave vector changes
continuously between the corresponding two-sublattice wave vectors.


  We exploit a plasmon mediated two-step momentum downconversion scheme to
convert low-energy tunneling electrons into propagating photons. Surface
plasmon polaritons (SPPs) propagating along an extended gold nanowire are
excited on one end by low-energy electron tunneling and are then converted to
free-propagating photons at the other end. The separation of excitation and
outcoupling proofs that tunneling electrons excite gap plasmons that
subsequently couple to propagating plasmons. Our work shows that electron
tunneling provides a non-optical, voltage-controlled and low-energy pathway for
launching SPPs in nanostructures, such as plasmonic waveguides


  We show how to construct a Gamma-bicategory from a symmetric monoidal
bicategory, and use that to show that the classifying space is an infinite loop
space upon group completion. We also show a way to relate this construction to
the classic Gamma-category construction for a bipermutative category. As an
example, we use this machinery to construct a delooping of the K-theory of a
bimonoidal category as defined by Baas-Dundas-Rognes.


  The addition of the QCD axion to the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model
(MSSM) not only solves the strong CP problem but also modifies the dark sector
with new dark matter candidates. While SUSY axion phenomenology is usually
restricted to searches for the axion itself or searches for the ordinary SUSY
particles, this work focuses on scenarios where the axion's superpartner, the
axino, may be detectable at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the decays of
neutralinos displaced from the primary vertex. In particular, we focus on the
KSVZ axino within the hadronic axion window. The decay length of neutralinos in
this scenario easily fits the ATLAS detector for SUSY spectra expected to be
testable at the 14 TeV LHC. We compare this signature of displaced decays to
axinos to other well motivated scenarios containing a long lived neutralino
which decays inside the detector. These alternative scenarios can in some cases
very closely mimic the expected axino signature, and the degree to which they
are distinguishable is discussed. We also briefly comment on the cosmological
viability of such a scenario.


  More than 90\% of colorectal cancer is gradually transformed from colorectal
polyps. In clinical practice, precise polyp segmentation provides important
information in the early detection of colorectal cancer. Therefore, automatic
polyp segmentation techniques are of great importance for both patients and
doctors. Most existing methods are based on U-shape structure and use
element-wise addition or concatenation to fuse different level features
progressively in decoder. However, both the two operations easily generate
plenty of redundant information, which will weaken the complementarity between
different level features, resulting in inaccurate localization and blurred
edges of polyps. To address this challenge, we propose a multi-scale
subtraction network (MSNet) to segment polyp from colonoscopy image.
Specifically, we first design a subtraction unit (SU) to produce the difference
features between adjacent levels in encoder. Then, we pyramidally equip the SUs
at different levels with varying receptive fields, thereby obtaining rich
multi-scale difference information. In addition, we build a training-free
network "LossNet" to comprehensively supervise the polyp-aware features from
bottom layer to top layer, which drives the MSNet to capture the detailed and
structural cues simultaneously. Extensive experiments on five benchmark
datasets demonstrate that our MSNet performs favorably against most
state-of-the-art methods under different evaluation metrics. Furthermore, MSNet
runs at a real-time speed of $\sim$70fps when processing a $352 \times 352$
image. The source code will be publicly available at
\url{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/MSNet}. \keywords{Colorectal Cancer
\and Automatic Polyp Segmentation \and Subtraction \and LossNet.}


  The recent multi-modality models have achieved great performance in many
vision tasks because the extracted features contain the multi-modality
knowledge. However, most of the current registration descriptors have only
concentrated on local geometric structures. This paper proposes a method to
boost point cloud registration accuracy by transferring the multi-modality
knowledge of pre-trained multi-modality model to a new descriptor neural
network. Different to the previous multi-modality methods that requires both
modalities, the proposed method only requires point clouds during inference.
Specifically, we propose an ensemble descriptor neural network combining
pre-trained sparse convolution branch and a new point-based convolution branch.
By fine-tuning on a single modality data, the proposed method achieves new
state-of-the-art results on 3DMatch and competitive accuracy on 3DLoMatch and
KITTI.


  In order to quantify isospin effects in the comparison of elementary to
nuclear collisions, p-p and n-p interactions have been studied in the NA49
experiment in addition to p-Pb and Pb-Pb reactions. Together with first
measurements of cascade hyperon and Omega production in p-p collisions,
isospin-corrected K/pi ratios and cascade yields are discussed. The
Antiomega/Omega ratio in p-p collisions is found to be less than 0.5 with 95%
confidence level.


  We present a factorization formula for the inclusive production of the Higgs
boson at large transverse momentum $P_T$ that includes all terms with the
leading power of $1/P_T^2$. The cross section is factorized into convolutions
of parton distributions, infrared-safe hard-scattering cross sections for
producing a parton, and fragmentation functions that give the distribution of
the longitudinal momentum fraction of the Higgs relative to the fragmenting
parton. The infrared-safe cross sections and the fragmentation functions are
perturbatively calculable. The factorization formula enables the resummation of
large logarithms of $P_T/M_H$ due to final-state radiation by integrating
evolution equations for the fragmentation functions. By comparing the cross
section for the process $q\bar{q}\to H t\bar t$ from the leading-power
factorization formula at leading order in the coupling constants with the
complete leading-order cross section, we infer that the error in the
factorization formula decreases to less than 5% for $P_T>600$ GeV at a future
$100$ TeV collider.


  Let $G$ be an ordered group that is a direct sum of a rank-one torsion-free
abelian group and a finite-rank torsion-free abelian group, with order
structure arising from the natural order on the first summand. A necessary
condition and a sufficient condition are given for $G$ to have an ordered-group
inductive limit representation using injective maps.


  A $\Lambda$CDM model with dark matter that decays into inert relativistic
energy on a timescale longer than the Hubble time will produce an expansion
history that can be misinterpreted as stable dark matter with time-varying dark
energy. We calculate the corresponding spurious equation of state parameter,
$\widetilde w_\phi$, as a function of redshift, and show that the evolution of
$\widetilde w_\phi$ depends strongly on the assumed value of the dark matter
density, erroneously taken to scale as $a^{-3}$. Depending on the latter, one
can obtain models that mimic quintessence ($\widetilde w_\phi > -1$), phantom
models ($\widetilde w_\phi < -1$) or models in which the equation of state
parameter crosses the phantom divide, evolving from $\widetilde w_\phi > -1$ at
high redshift to $\widetilde w_\phi < -1$ at low redshift. All of these models
generically converge toward $\widetilde w_\phi \approx -1$ at the present. The
degeneracy between the $\Lambda$CDM model with decaying dark matter and the
corresponding spurious quintessence model is broken by the growth of density
perturbations.


  This study proposes a novel Graph Convolutional Neural Network with
Data-driven Graph Filter (GCNN-DDGF) model that can learn hidden heterogeneous
pairwise correlations between stations to predict station-level hourly demand
in a large-scale bike-sharing network. Two architectures of the GCNN-DDGF model
are explored; GCNNreg-DDGF is a regular GCNN-DDGF model which contains the
convolution and feedforward blocks, and GCNNrec-DDGF additionally contains a
recurrent block from the Long Short-term Memory neural network architecture to
capture temporal dependencies in the bike-sharing demand series. Furthermore,
four types of GCNN models are proposed whose adjacency matrices are based on
various bike-sharing system data, including Spatial Distance matrix (SD),
Demand matrix (DE), Average Trip Duration matrix (ATD), and Demand Correlation
matrix (DC). These six types of GCNN models and seven other benchmark models
are built and compared on a Citi Bike dataset from New York City which includes
272 stations and over 28 million transactions from 2013 to 2016. Results show
that the GCNNrec-DDGF performs the best in terms of the Root Mean Square Error,
the Mean Absolute Error and the coefficient of determination (R2), followed by
the GCNNreg-DDGF. They outperform the other models. Through a more detailed
graph network analysis based on the learned DDGF, insights are obtained on the
black box of the GCNN-DDGF model. It is found to capture some information
similar to details embedded in the SD, DE and DC matrices. More importantly, it
also uncovers hidden heterogeneous pairwise correlations between stations that
are not revealed by any of those matrices.


  The simplicity constraint is studied in the context of 4d spinfoam models
with cosmological constant. We find that the quantum simplicity constraint is
realized as the 2d surface defect in SL(2,$\mathbb{C}$) Chern-Simons theory in
the construction of spinfoam amplitudes. By this realization of simplicity
constraint in Chern-Simons theory, we are able to construct the new spinfoam
amplitude with cosmological constant for arbitrary simplicial complex (with
many 4-simplices). The semiclassical asymptotics of the amplitude is shown to
reproduce correctly the 4-dimensional Einstein-Regge action with cosmological
constant term.


  The deuteron electromagnetic form factors, $A(Q^2)$ and $B(Q^2)$, and the
tensor polarization $T_{20}(Q^2)$, are unambiguously calculated within the
front-form relativistic Hamiltonian dynamics, by using a novel current, built
up from one-body terms, which fulfills Poincar\'e, parity and time reversal
covariance, together with Hermiticity and the continuity equation. A
simultaneous description of the experimental data for the three deuteron form
factors is achieved up to $Q^2 < 0.4 (GeV/c)^2$. At higher momentum transfer,
different nucleon-nucleon interactions strongly affect $A(Q^2)$, $B(Q^2)$, and
$T_{20}(Q^2)$ and the effects of the interactions can be related to $S$-state
kinetic energy in the deuteron. Different nucleon form factor models have huge
effects on $A(Q^2)$, smaller effects on $B(Q^2)$ and essentially none on
$T_{20}(Q^2)$.


  The R programming language is built on an ecosystem of packages, some that
allow analysts to accomplish the same tasks. For example, there are at least
two clear workflows for creating data visualizations in R: using the base
graphics package (referred to as "base R") and the ggplot2 add-on package based
on the grammar of graphics. Here we perform an empirical study of the quality
of scientific graphics produced by beginning R users. In our experiment,
learners taking a data science course on the Coursera platform were randomized
to complete identical plotting exercises in either the base R or the ggplot2
system. Learners were then asked to evaluate their peers in terms of visual
characteristics key to scientific cognition. We observed that graphics created
with the two systems rated similarly on many characteristics. However, ggplot2
graphics were generally judged to be more visually pleasing and, in the case of
faceted scientific plots, easier to understand. Our results suggest that while
both graphic systems are useful in the hands of beginning users, ggplot2's
natural faceting system may be easier to use by beginning users for displaying
more complex relationships.


  Random forest is a classification algorithm well suited for microarray data:
it shows excellent performance even when most predictive variables are noise,
can be used when the number of variables is much larger than the number of
observations, and returns measures of variable importance. Thus, it is
important to understand the performance of random forest with microarray data
and its use for gene selection.
  We first show the effects of changes in parameters of random forest on the
prediction error. Then we present an approach for gene selection that uses
measures of variable importance and error rate, and is targeted towards the
selection of small sets of genes. Using simulated and real microarray data, we
show that the gene selection procedure yields small sets of genes while
preserving predictive accuracy.
  Availability: All code is available as an R package, varSelRF, from CRAN,
http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/PACKAGES.html, or from the supplementary
material page.
  Supplementary information:
http://ligarto.org/rdiaz/Papers/rfVS/randomForestVarSel.html


  A module over a ring $R$ is pure projective provided it is isomorphic to a
direct summand of a direct sum of finitely presented modules. We develop tools
for the classification of pure projective modules over commutative noetherian
rings. In particular, for a fixed finitely presented module $M$, we consider
$\mathrm{Add}\, (M)$, which consists of direct summands of direct sums of
copies of $M$. We are primarily interested in the case where $R$ is a
one-dimensional, local domain, and in torsion-free (or Cohen-Macaulay) modules.
We show that, even in this case, $\mathrm{Add}\, (M)$ can have an abundance of
modules that are not direct sums of finitely generated ones.
  Our work is based on the fact that such infinitely generated direct summands
are all determined by finitely generated data. Namely, idempotent/trace ideals
of the endomorphism ring of $M$ and finitely generated projective modules
modulo such idempotent ideals. This allows us to extend the classical theory
developed to study the behavior of direct sum decomposition of finitely
generated modules comparing with their completion to the infinitely generated
case.
  We study the structure of the monoid $V^*(M)$, of isomorphism classes of
countably generated modules in $\mathrm{Add}\, (M)$ with the addition induced
by the direct sum. We show that $V^*(M)$ is a submonoid of $V^*(M\otimes _R
\widehat R)$, this allows us to make computations with examples and to prove
some realization results.


  Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) leverages a labeled domain to learn
an object detector generalizing to a novel domain free of annotations. Recent
advances align class-conditional distributions by narrowing down cross-domain
prototypes (class centers). Though great success,they ignore the significant
within-class variance and the domain-mismatched semantics within the training
batch, leading to a sub-optimal adaptation. To overcome these challenges, we
propose a novel SemantIc-complete Graph MAtching (SIGMA) framework for DAOD,
which completes mismatched semantics and reformulates the adaptation with graph
matching. Specifically, we design a Graph-embedded Semantic Completion module
(GSC) that completes mismatched semantics through generating hallucination
graph nodes in missing categories. Then, we establish cross-image graphs to
model class-conditional distributions and learn a graph-guided memory bank for
better semantic completion in turn. After representing the source and target
data as graphs, we reformulate the adaptation as a graph matching problem,
i.e., finding well-matched node pairs across graphs to reduce the domain gap,
which is solved with a novel Bipartite Graph Matching adaptor (BGM). In a
nutshell, we utilize graph nodes to establish semantic-aware node affinity and
leverage graph edges as quadratic constraints in a structure-aware matching
loss, achieving fine-grained adaptation with a node-to-node graph matching.
Extensive experiments verify that SIGMA outperforms existing works
significantly. Our code is available at
https://github.com/CityU-AIM-Group/SIGMA.


  Spin evolution of stellar-mass Black Holes (sBHs) embedded in AGN accretion
disks is an important process relevant to production of gravitaional waves from
binary Black Hole (BBH) merger events through the AGN channel. Since embedded
sBHs are surrounded by circum-stellar disks (CSDs), the rotation of CSD gas
flows determine the direction of the angular momentum it accretes. In this
Letter, we use global 2D hydrodynamic simulations to show that while a
disk-embedded sBH on a circular orbit transforms the initial retrograde
Keplerian shear of the background accretion disk into a prograde CSD flow, as
in the classical picture of companion-disk interaction theory, moderate orbital
eccentricity could disrupt the steady-state tidal perturbation and preserve a
retrograde CSD flow around the sBH. This switch of CSD orientation occurs at a
transition eccentricity that scales nearly proportional with local sound speed.
This bifurcation in the CSD flow and thereafter spin-up direction of SBHs leads
to formation of a population of nearly anti-aligned sBHs and should be
incorporated in future population models of sBH and BBH evolutions.


  In this work, we develop an efficient incomplete iterative scheme for the
numerical solution of the subdiffusion model involving a Caputo derivative of
order $\alpha\in(0,1)$ in time. It is based on piecewise linear Galerkin finite
element method in space and backward Euler convolution quadrature in time and
solves one linear algebraic system inexactly by an iterative algorithm at each
time step. We present theoretical results for both smooth and nonsmooth
solutions, using novel weighted estimates of the time-stepping scheme. The
analysis indicates that with the number of iterations at each time level chosen
properly, the error estimates are nearly identical with that for the exact
linear solver, and the theoretical findings provide guidelines on the choice.
Illustrative numerical results are presented to complement the theoretical
analysis.


  A relativistic model for the quasifree exclusive photoproduction of $\eta$
mesons on nuclei is extended to include both non-local and medium effects. The
reaction is assumed to proceed via the dominant contribution of the
S$_{11}$(1535) resonance. The complicated integrals resulting from the
non-locality are simplified using a modified version of a method given by
Cooper and Maxwell. The non-locality effects are found to affect the magnitude
of the cross section. Some possibilities reflecting the effects of the medium
on the propagation and properties of the intermediate S$_{11}$ resonance are
studied. The effects of allowing the S$_{11}$ to interact with the medium via
mean field scalar and vector potentials are considered. Both broadening of
width and reduction in mass of the resonance lead to a suppression of the
calculated cross sections.


  Optical excitation of chiral phonons plays a vital role in studying the
phonon-driven magnetic phenomena in solids. Transition metal dichalcogenides
host chiral phonons at high symmetry points of the Brillouin zone, providing an
ideal platform to explore the interplay between chiral phonons and valley
degree of freedom. Here, we investigate the helicity-resolved magneto-Raman
response of monolayer MoS2 and identify a doubly degenerate
Brillouin-zone-center chiral phonon mode at ~270 cm-1. Our wavelength- and
temperature-dependent measurements show that this chiral phonon is activated
through the resonant excitation of A exciton. Under an out-of-plane magnetic
field, the chiral phonon exhibits giant Zeeman splitting, which corresponds to
an effective magnetic moment of ~2.5mu_B. Moreover, we carry out theoretical
calculations based on the morphic effects in nonmagnetic crystals, which
reproduce the linear Zeeman splitting and Raman cross-section of the chiral
phonon. Our study provides important insights into lifting the chiral phonon
degeneracy in an achiral covalent material, paving a new route to excite and
control chiral phonons.


  We first investigate the Lipschitz continuity of $(K, K')$-quasiregular $C^2$
mappings between two Jordan domains with smooth boundaries, satisfying certain
partial differential inequalities concerning Laplacian. Then two applications
of the obtained result are given: As a direct consequence, we get the Lipschitz
continuity of $\rho$-harmonic $(K, K')$-quasiregular mappings, and as the other
application, we study the Lipschitz continuity of $(K,K')$-quasiconformal
self-mappings of the unit disk, which are the solutions of the Poisson equation
$\Delta w=g$. These results generalize and extend several recently obtained
results by Kalaj, Mateljevi\'{c} and Pavlovi\'{c}.


  We measure the Casimir force between a gold sphere and a silicon plate with
nanoscale, rectangular corrugations with depth comparable to the separation
between the surfaces. In the proximity force approximation (PFA), both the top
and bottom surfaces of the corrugations contribute to the force, leading to a
distance dependence that is distinct from a flat surface. The measured Casimir
force is found to deviate from the PFA by up to 15%, in good agreement with
calculations based on scattering theory that includes both geometry effects and
the optical properties of the material.


  We develop a Levenberg-Marquardt method for minimizing the sum of a smooth
nonlinear least-squar es term $f(x) = \tfrac{1}{2} \|F(x)\|_2^2$ and a
nonsmooth term $h$. Both $f$ and $h$ may be nonconvex. Steps are computed by
minimizing the sum of a regularized linear least-squares model and a model of
$h$ using a first-order method such as the proximal gradient method. We
establish global convergence to a first-order stationary point of both a
trust-region and a regularization variant of the Levenberg-Marquardt method
under the assumptions that $F$ and its Jacobian are Lipschitz continuous and
$h$ is proper and lower semi-continuous. In the worst case, both methods
perform $O(\epsilon^{-2})$ iterations to bring a measure of stationarity below
$\epsilon \in (0, 1)$. We report numerical results on three examples: a
group-lasso basis-pursuit denoise example, a nonlinear support vector machine,
and parameter estimation in neuron firing. For those examples to be
implementable, we describe in detail how to evaluate proximal operators for
separable $h$ and for the group lasso with trust-region constraint. In all
cases, the Levenberg-Marquardt methods perform fewer outer iterations than a
proximal-gradient method with adaptive step length and a quasi-Newton
trust-region method, neither of which exploit the least-squares structure of
the problem. Our results also highlight the need for more sophisticated
subproblem solvers than simple first-order methods.


  We present a theory of the infrared conductivity and absorption coefficients
of metallic (III,Mn)V ferromagnetic semiconductors. We find that the
conductivity is dominated by inter-valence-band transitions that produce peaks
at $\hbar \omega \sim 220 {\rm meV}$ and obscure the broadened Drude peak. We
demonstrate that transverse f-sum rule measurements can be used to extract
accurate values for the free carrier density, bypassing the severe
characterization difficulties that have till now been created by the large
anomalous Hall effect in these materials.


  We present a new listening head generation benchmark, for synthesizing
responsive feedbacks of a listener (e.g., nod, smile) during a face-to-face
conversation. As the indispensable complement to talking heads generation,
listening head generation has seldomly been studied in literature.
Automatically synthesizing listening behavior that actively responds to a
talking head, is critical to applications such as digital human, virtual agents
and social robots. In this work, we propose a novel dataset "ViCo",
highlighting the listening head generation during a face-to-face conversation.
A total number of 92 identities (67 speakers and 76 listeners) are involved in
ViCo, featuring 483 clips in a paired "speaking-listening" pattern, where
listeners show three listening styles based on their attitudes: positive,
neutral, negative. Different from traditional speech-to-gesture or talking-head
generation, listening head generation takes as input both the audio and visual
signals from the speaker, and gives non-verbal feedbacks (e.g., head motions,
facial expressions) in a real-time manner. Our dataset supports a wide range of
applications such as human-to-human interaction, video-to-video translation,
cross-modal understanding and generation. To encourage further research, we
also release a listening head generation baseline, conditioning on different
listening attitudes. Code & ViCo dataset: https://project.mhzhou.com/vico.


  Weight at delivery is a standard cumulative measure of placental growth. But
weight is a crude summary of other placental characteristics, such as the size
and shape of the chorionic plate and the location of the umbilical cord
insertion. Distributions of such measures across a cohort reveal information
about the developmental history of the chorionic plate that is unavailable from
an analysis based solely on the mean and standard deviation. Various measures
were determined from digitized images of chorionic plates obtained from the
Pregnancy, Infection, and Nutrition Study, a prospective cohort study of
preterm birth in central North Carolina between 2002 and 2004. The centroids
(the geometric centers) and umbilical cord insertions were taken directly from
the images. The chorionic plate outlines were obtained from an interpolation
based on a Fourier series, while eccentricity (of the best-fit ellipse),
skewness, and kurtosis were determined from a shape analysis using the method
of moments. The distribution of each variable was compared against the normal,
lognormal, and Levy distributions. We found only a single measure
(eccentricity) with a normal distribution. All other placental measures
required lognormal or "heavy-tailed" distributions to account for moderate to
extreme deviations from the mean, where relative likelihoods in the cohort far
exceeded those of a normal distribution. Normal and lognormal distributions
result from the accumulated effects of a large number of independent additive
(normal) or multiplicative (lognormal) events. Thus, while most placentas
appear to develop by a series of small, regular, and independent steps, the
presence of heavy-tailed distributions suggests that many show shape features
which are more consistent with a large number of correlated steps or fewer, but
substantially larger, independent steps.


  The concept of unified local field theory is considered. According to this
concept the quantum description and the classical one must be the levels for
investigation of some world solution of the unified field model. It is shown
that in the framework of the unified local field theory there are nonlocal
correlations between space separate events. Thus the experiments of Aspect type
for testing of the Bell inequalities and for showing of the nonlocal
correlations do not reject a possibility for description of matter with the
unified local field theory. Advantages of such theory for new technologies are
considered.


  Higgs bosons with enhanced coupling to bottom quarks are copiously produced
at hadron colliders via b\bar{b} -> h, where the initial b quarks reside in the
proton sea. We revisit the calculation of the next-to-leading-order cross
section for this process and argue that the appropriate factorization scale for
the b distribution functions is approximately m_h/4, rather than m_h, as had
been previously assumed. This greatly improves the convergence of the
perturbation series, and yields a result with mild factorization-scale
dependence. We also show that the leading-order calculation of gg -> b\bar{b}h,
integrated over the momenta of the final-state particles, is very sensitive to
the factorization and renormalization scales. For scales of order m_h/4 the gg
-> b\bar{b}h cross section is comparable to that of b\bar{b} -> h, in contrast
to the order-of-magnitude discrepancy between these two calculations for the
scale m_h. The result we obtain improves the prospects for Higgs-boson
discovery at hadron colliders for large values of tan(\beta).


  Typical Wannier-function downfolding starts with a mean-field or density
functional set of bands to construct the Wannier functions. Here we carry out a
controlled approach, using DMRG-computed natural orbital bands, to downfold the
three-band Hubbard model to an effective single band model. A sharp drop-off in
the natural orbital occupancy at the edge of the first band provides a clear
justification for a single-band model. Constructing Wannier functions from the
first band, we compute all possible two-particle terms and retain those with
significant magnitude. The resulting single-band model includes two-site
density-assisted hopping terms with $t_n \sim 0.6 t$. These terms lead to a
reduction of the ratio $U/t_{\rm eff}$, and are important in capturing the
doping-asymmetric carrier mobility, as well as in enhancing the pairing in a
single-band model for the hole-doped cuprates.


  Consider a homogeneous polynomial $p(z_1,...,z_n)$ of degree $n$ in $n$
complex variables . Assume that this polynomial satisfies the property : \\
  $|p(z_1,...,z_n)| \geq \prod_{1 \leq i \leq n} Re(z_i)$ on the domain
$\{(z_1,...,z_n) : Re(z_i) \geq 0, 1 \leq i \leq n \}$ . \\
  We prove that $|\frac{\partial^n}{\partial z_1...\partial z_n} p | \geq
\frac{n!}{n^n}$ . Our proof is relatively short and self-contained (i.e. we
only use basic properties of hyperbolic polynomials). As the van der Waerden
conjecture for permanents, proved by D.I. Falikman and G.P. Egorychev, as well
Bapat's conjecture for mixed discriminants, proved by the author, are
particular cases of this result. We also prove so called "small rank" lower
bound (in the permanents context it corresponds to sparse doubly-stochastic
matrices, i.e. with small number of non-zero entries in each column). The later
lower bound generalizes (with simpler proofs) recent lower bounds by
A.Schrijver for the number of perfect matchings of $k$-regular bipartite
graphs.
  We present some important algorithmic applications of the result, including a
polynomial time deterministic algorithm approximating the permanent of $n
\times n$ nonnegative entry-wise matrices within multiplicative factor
$\frac{e^n}{n^m}$ for any fixed positive $m$ .


  We present results of submillimeter observations of a low-mass young stellar
objects (YSOs) condensation in the Cederblad 110 region of the Chamaeleon I
dark cloud with Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment. Our HCO+(J=4-3) map
reveals a dense molecular gas with an extent of ~ 0.1 pc, which is a complex of
two envelopes associated with class I sources Ced110 IRS4 and IRS11 and a very
young object Cha-MMS1. The other two class I sources in this region, IRS6 and
NIR89, are located outside the clump and have no extended HCO+ emission. HCO+
abundance is calculated to be 2.6 x 10^{-10} for MMS1 and 3.4 x 10^{-9} for
IRS4, which are comparable to the reported value for other young sources.
Bipolar outflows from IRS4 and IRS6 are detected in our 12CO(J=3-2) map. The
outflow from IRS4 seems to collide with Cha-MMS1. The outflow has enough
momentum to affect gas motion in MMS1, although no sign has been detected to
indicate that a triggered star formation has occurred.


  Deep learning techniques have provided significant improvements in
hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. The current deep learning based HSI
classifiers follow a patch-based learning framework by dividing the image into
overlapping patches. As such, these methods are local learning methods, which
have a high computational cost. In this paper, a fast patch-free global
learning (FPGA) framework is proposed for HSI classification. In FPGA, an
encoder-decoder based FCN is utilized to consider the global spatial
information by processing the whole image, which results in fast inference.
However, it is difficult to directly utilize the encoder-decoder based FCN for
HSI classification as it always fails to converge due to the insufficiently
diverse gradients caused by the limited training samples. To solve the
divergence problem and maintain the abilities of FCN of fast inference and
global spatial information mining, a global stochastic stratified sampling
strategy is first proposed by transforming all the training samples into a
stochastic sequence of stratified samples. This strategy can obtain diverse
gradients to guarantee the convergence of the FCN in the FPGA framework. For a
better design of FCN architecture, FreeNet, which is a fully end-to-end network
for HSI classification, is proposed to maximize the exploitation of the global
spatial information and boost the performance via a spectral attention based
encoder and a lightweight decoder. A lateral connection module is also designed
to connect the encoder and decoder, fusing the spatial details in the encoder
and the semantic features in the decoder. The experimental results obtained
using three public benchmark datasets suggest that the FPGA framework is
superior to the patch-based framework in both speed and accuracy for HSI
classification. Code has been made available at:
https://github.com/Z-Zheng/FreeNet.


  Peer-to-peer protocols play an increasingly instrumental role in Internet
content distribution. It is therefore important to gain a complete
understanding of how these protocols behave in practice and how their operating
parameters affect overall system performance. This paper presents the first
detailed experimental investigation of the peer selection strategy in the
popular BitTorrent protocol. By observing more than 40 nodes in instrumented
private torrents, we validate three protocol properties that, though believed
to hold, have not been previously demonstrated experimentally: the clustering
of similar-bandwidth peers, the effectiveness of BitTorrent's sharing
incentives, and the peers' high uplink utilization. In addition, we observe
that BitTorrent's modified choking algorithm in seed state provides uniform
service to all peers, and that an underprovisioned initial seed leads to
absence of peer clustering and less effective sharing incentives. Based on our
results, we provide guidelines for seed provisioning by content providers, and
discuss a tracker protocol extension that addresses an identified limitation of
the protocol.


  We prove that if $B$ is a $p$-block with non-trivial defect group $D$ of a
finite $p$-solvable group $G$, then $\ell(B) < p^r$, where $r$ is the sectional
rank of $D$. We remark that there are infinitely many $p$-blocks $B$ with
non-Abelian defect groups and $\ell(B) = p^r - 1$.
  We conjecture that the inequality $\ell(B) \leq p^r$ holds for an arbitrary
$p$-block with defect group of sectional rank $r$. We show this to hold for a
large class of $p$-blocks of various families of quasi-simple and nearly simple
groups.


  Byzantine fault tolerant protocols enable state replication in the presence
of crashed, malfunctioning, or actively malicious processes. Designing such
protocols without the assistance of verification tools, however, is remarkably
error-prone. In an adversarial environment, performance and flexibility come at
the cost of complexity, making the verification of existing protocols extremely
difficult. We take a different approach and propose a formally verified
consensus protocol designed for a specific use case: secure logging. Our
protocol allows each node to propose entries in a parallel subroutine, and
guarantees that correct nodes agree on the set of all proposed entries, without
leader election. It is simple yet practical, as it can accommodate the workload
of a logging system such as Certificate Transparency. We show that it is
optimal in terms of both required rounds and tolerable faults. Using
Isabelle/HOL, we provide a fully machine-checked security proof based upon the
Heard-Of model, which we extend to support signatures. We also present and
evaluate a prototype implementation.


  We show how active-sterile neutrino oscillations in the early Universe can
play an interesting role in explaining the current observations of CMBR
anisotropies and light element abundances. We describe different possible
phenomenological scenarios in the interpretation of present data and how
active-sterile neutrino oscillations can provide a viable theoretical
framework.


  In this paper, we introduce a novel predict-and-optimize method for
profit-driven churn prevention. We frame the task of targeting customers for a
retention campaign as a regret minimization problem. The main objective is to
leverage individual customer lifetime values (CLVs) to ensure that only the
most valuable customers are targeted. In contrast, many profit-driven
strategies focus on churn probabilities while considering average CLVs. This
often results in significant information loss due to data aggregation. Our
proposed model aligns with the guidelines of Predict-and-Optimize (PnO)
frameworks and can be efficiently solved using stochastic gradient descent
methods. Results from 12 churn prediction datasets underscore the effectiveness
of our approach, which achieves the best average performance compared to other
well-established strategies in terms of average profit.


  A direct proof is given here which shows that instead of 6 complex numbers,
the triangular mass matrix for each sector could just be expressed in terms of
5 by performing a specific weak basis transformation, leading therefore to a
new textures for triangular mass matrices.
  Furthermore, starting with the set of 20 real parameters for both sectors, it
can shown that 6 redundant parameters can be removed by using the rephasing
freedom.


  The aim of this study is first to determine the gravity field of the comet
67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko and second to derive the solar component of the
precession rate and nutation coefficients of the spin axis of the comet
nucleus, i.e. without the direct, usually larger, effect of outgassing. The
gravity field, and related moments of inertia, are obtained from two polyhedra,
that are provided by the OSIRIS and NAV-CAM experiments on Rosetta, and are
based on the assumption of uniform density for the comet nucleus. We also
calculate the forced precession rate as well as the nutation coefficients on
the basis of Kinoshita's theory of rotation of the rigid Earth and adapted it
to be able to indirectly include the effect of outgassing on the rotational
parameters. The 2nd degree denormalized Stokes coefficients of comet 67P C-G
turn out to be (bracketed numbers refer to second shape model) C20 = -6.74
[-7.93] * 10^-2, C22 = 2.60 [2.71] * 10^-2 consistent with normalized principal
moments of inertia A/MR^2 = 0.13 [0.11], B/MR^2 = 0.23 [0.22], with polar
moment c = C/MR^2 = 0.25, depending on the choice of the polyhedron model. The
obliquity between the rotation axis and the mean orbit normal is 52 degree, and
the precession rate only due to solar torques becomes 20-30 "/y. Oscillations
in longitude caused by the gravitational pull of the Sun turn out to be of the
order of 1', oscillations in obliquity can be estimated to be of the order of
0.5'.


  Quantum computers require technologies that offer both sufficient control
over coherent quantum phenomena and minimal spurious interactions with the
environment. We show, that photons confined to photonic crystals, and in
particular to highly efficient waveguides formed from linear chains of defects
doped with atoms can generate strong non-linear interactions which allow to
implement both single and two qubit quantum gates. The simplicity of the gate
switching mechanism, the experimental feasibility of fabricating two
dimensional photonic crystal structures and integrability of this device with
optoelectronics offers new interesting possibilities for optical quantum
information processing networks.


  In this paper we consider certain proejctions in the corona algebra of
$C(X)\otimes B$ associated to $(p_0, p_1, \dots, p_n)$ where $p_i: X_i \to
\mt_s$ a continuous projection valued section to the multiplier algebra of a
stable $C\sp*$-algebra $B$ for each i. Here $X_i$'s are closed intervals given
by a partition $\{x_1, \dots, x_n\}$ on the interior of $X$ and adjacent
sections differ by compacts at each partition point. Assuming a kind of
homogeneity on the projection we characterize when two such projections are
homotopy equivalent.


  We propose that thermal electron attachment to C$_{60}$ should occur
preferentially in the p-wave channel, following an analysis of the vibron
excitation spectrum of C$_{60}^-$. A very simple model based on this idea is
shown to account very well for recent attachment data. The unexplained
activation energy of $\approx$ 0.26 eV found experimentally is attributed to
the p-wave centrifugal barrier.


  The single particle equations describing motion of carriers in external
potential in 2D Dirac-like and Kane intrinsic semiconductors are obtained
within second quantization method. The terms renormalizing external potential
in these equations, referred to as spin-orbit (SO) terms, are compared with
their classical counterpart. The well-known expression for SO obtained in
relativistic Dirac theory arises in considered approach in the second order in
$\gamma k / E_g$ ($\gamma$ - characteristic velocity, $E_g$ - energy gap)
parameter if electron-hole pair production terms are neglected. It is shown
that in Kane problem the modifying terms are of standard SO functional
Dirac-like form only for electrons in the case of ``positive'' energy gap and
for light holes in semiconductors with ``negative'' energy gap. The general
expression for renormalizing terms has in all cases non-local character. The
arising of correction terms to single particle potentials which do not depend
on band parameters is demonstrated for 2D gapless Dirac problem (graphene) and
for Kane model. The origin of such ``topological'' terms is attributed to the
presence of degenerate bands in considered problems.


  We report inelastic electron tunneling spectroscopy (IETS) of multilayer
molecular junctions with and without incorporated metal nano-particles. The
incorporation of metal nanoparticles into our devices leads to enhanced IET
intensity and a modified line-shape for some vibrational modes. The enhancement
and line-shape modification are both the result of a low lying hybrid metal
nanoparticle-molecule electronic level. These observations explain the apparent
discrepancy between earlier IETS measurements of alkane thiolate junctions by
Kushmerick \emph{et al.} [Nano Lett. \textbf{4}, 639 (2004)] and Wang \emph{et
al.} [Nano Lett. \textbf{4}, 643 (2004)].


  This is a survey of the exciting recent progress made in understanding the
complexity of distributed subgraph finding problems. It overviews the results
and techniques for assorted variants of subgraph finding problems in various
models of distributed computing, and states intriguing open questions. This
version contains some updates over the ICALP 2021 version, and I will try to
keep updating it as additional progress is made.


  Recently, there has been a surge of significant interest on application of
Deep Learning (DL) models to autonomously perform hand gesture recognition
using surface Electromyogram (sEMG) signals. DL models are, however, mainly
designed to be applied on sparse sEMG signals. Furthermore, due to their
complex structure, typically, we are faced with memory constraints; require
large training times and a large number of training samples, and; there is the
need to resort to data augmentation and/or transfer learning. In this paper,
for the first time (to the best of our knowledge), we investigate and design a
Vision Transformer (ViT) based architecture to perform hand gesture recognition
from High Density (HD-sEMG) signals. Intuitively speaking, we capitalize on the
recent breakthrough role of the transformer architecture in tackling different
complex problems together with its potential for employing more input
parallelization via its attention mechanism. The proposed Vision
Transformer-based Hand Gesture Recognition (ViT-HGR) framework can overcome the
aforementioned training time problems and can accurately classify a large
number of hand gestures from scratch without any need for data augmentation
and/or transfer learning. The efficiency of the proposed ViT-HGR framework is
evaluated using a recently-released HD-sEMG dataset consisting of 65 isometric
hand gestures. Our experiments with 64-sample (31.25 ms) window size yield
average test accuracy of 84.62 +/- 3.07%, where only 78, 210 number of
parameters is utilized. The compact structure of the proposed ViT-based ViT-HGR
framework (i.e., having significantly reduced number of trainable parameters)
shows great potentials for its practical application for prosthetic control.


  We present an impossibility result, called a theorem about facts and words,
which pertains to a general communication system. The theorem states that the
number of distinct words used in a finite text is roughly greater than the
number of independent elementary persistent facts described in the same text.
In particular, this theorem can be related to Zipf's law, power-law scaling of
mutual information, and power-law-tailed learning curves. The assumptions of
the theorem are: a finite alphabet, linear sequence of symbols, complexity that
does not decrease in time, entropy rate that can be estimated, and finiteness
of the inverse complexity rate.


  This paper reports the characterization of hollow metallic waveguides (HMW)
to be used as single-mode wavefront filters for nulling interferometry in the
6-20 microns range. The measurements presented here were performed using both
single-mode and multimode conductive waveguides at 10.6 microns. We found
propagation losses of about 16dB/mm, which are mainly due to the theoretical
skin effect absorption in addition to the roughness of the waveguide metallic
walls. The input and output coupling efficiency of our samples has been
improved by adding tapers to minimize the impedance mismatch. A proper
distinction between propagation losses and coupling losses is presented.
Despite their elevate propagation losses, HMW show excellent spatial filtering
capabilities in a spectral range where photonics technologies are only
emerging.


  It follows from the work of Burban and Drozd arXiv:0905.1231 that for nodal
curves $C$, the derived category of modules over the Auslander order
$\mathcal{A}_C$ provides a categorical (smooth and proper) resolution of the
category of perfect complexes $\mathrm{Perf}(C)$. On the A-side, it follows
from the work of Haiden-Katzarkov-Kontsevich arXiv:1409.8611 that for punctured
surfaces $X$ with stops $\Lambda$ at their boundary, the partially wrapped
Fukaya category $\mathcal{W}(X,\Lambda)$ provides a categorical (smooth and
proper) resolution of the compact Fukaya category $\mathcal{F}(X)$. Inspired by
this analogy, we establish an equivalence between the derived category of
modules over the Auslander orders over certain nodal stacky curves and
partially wrapped Fukaya categories associated to punctured surfaces of
arbitrary genus equipped with stops at their boundary. As an application, we
deduce equivalences between derived categories of coherent sheaves (resp.
perfect complexes) on such nodal stacky curves and the wrapped (resp. compact)
Fukaya categories of punctured surfaces of arbitrary genus.


  We work on the breast imaging malignancy segmentation task while focusing on
the training process instead of network complexity. We designed a training
process based on a modified U-Net, increasing the overall segmentation
performances by using both, benign and malignant data for training. Our
approach makes use of only a small amount of annotated data and relies on
transfer learning from a self-supervised reconstruction task, and favors
explainability.


  We extend the formulation of relativistic Coulomb sum rules to account for
the average effects of nuclear binding on the initial and final states of
ejected nucleons. Relativistic interactions are included by using a Dirac
representation adapted from a vector-scalar field theory. The scalar field
reduces the effective nucleon mass $M^*$ and increases the relativistic effects
of recoil and Fermi motion. We consider two models for the off-shell behavior
of the nuclear electromagnetic current, and demonstrate that the sum rule is
accurate for applications to data over the interesting range of $M^*$ and three
momentum $q$. We further indicate that the form of the sum rule is sufficiently
general to accommodate a broad class of off-shell form factor models.


  We calculate, in the standard Bogoliubov approximation, the ground state
energy of the spinor BEC with hyperfine spin $f=1$ where the two-body repulsive
hard-core and spin exchange interactions are both included. The coupling
constants characterized these two competing interactions are expressed in terms
of the corresponding s-wave scattering lengths using second-order perturbation
methods. We show that the ultraviolet divergence arising in the ground state
energy corrections can be exactly eliminated.


  Since the proposition of Quality of Service architectures by the IETF, the
interaction between TCP and the QoS services has been intensively studied. This
paper proposes to look forward to the results obtained in terms of TCP
throughput guarantee in the DiffServ Assured Forwarding (DiffServ/AF) service
and to present an overview of the different proposals to solve the problem. It
has been demonstrated that the standardized IETF DiffServ conditioners such as
the token bucket color marker and the time sliding window color maker were not
good TCP traffic descriptors. Starting with this point, several propositions
have been made and most of them presents new marking schemes in order to
replace or improve the traditional token bucket color marker. The main problem
is that TCP congestion control is not designed to work with the AF service.
Indeed, both mechanisms are antagonists. TCP has the property to share in a
fair manner the bottleneck bandwidth between flows while DiffServ network
provides a level of service controllable and predictable. In this paper, we
build a classification of all the propositions made during these last years and
compare them. As a result, we will see that these conditioning schemes can be
separated in three sets of action level and that the conditioning at the
network edge level is the most accepted one. We conclude that the problem is
still unsolved and that TCP, conditioned or not conditioned, remains
inappropriate to the DiffServ/AF service.


  We study the applicability of the derivative nonlinear Schr\"{o}dinger (DNLS)
equation, for the evolution of high frequency nonlinear waves, observed at the
foreshock region of the terrestrial quasi-parallel bow shock. The use of a
pseudo-potential is elucidated and, in particular, the importance of canonical
representation in the correct interpretation of solutions in this formulation
is discussed. Numerical solutions of the DNLS equation are then compared
directly with the wave forms observed by Cluster spacecraft. Non harmonic slow
variations are filtered out by applying the empirical mode decomposition. We
find large amplitude nonlinear wave trains at frequencies above the proton
cyclotron frequency, followed in time by nearly harmonic low amplitude
fluctuations. The approximate phase speed of these nonlinear waves, indicated
by the parameters of numerical solutions, is of the order of the local
Alfv\'{e}n speed.


  We discuss several low-energy backgrounds to sub-GeV dark matter searches,
which arise from high-energy particles of cosmic or radioactive origin that
interact with detector materials. We focus in particular on Cherenkov
radiation, transition radiation, and luminescence or phonons from electron-hole
pair recombination, and show that these processes are an important source of
backgrounds at both current and planned detectors. We perform detailed analyses
of these backgrounds at several existing and proposed experiments based on a
wide variety of detection strategies and levels of shielding. We find that a
large fraction of the observed single-electron events in the SENSEI 2020 run
originate from Cherenkov photons generated by high-energy events in the Skipper
Charge Coupled Device, and from recombination photons generated in a
phosphorus-doped layer of the same instrument. In a SuperCDMS HVeV 2020 run,
Cherenkov photons produced in printed-circuit-boards located near the sensor
likely explain the origin of most of the events containing 2 to 6 electrons. At
SuperCDMS SNOLAB, radioactive contaminants inside the Cirlex located inside or
on the copper side walls of their detectors will produce many Cherenkov
photons, which could dominate the low-energy backgrounds. For the EDELWEISS
experiment, Cherenkov or luminescence backgrounds are subdominant to their
observed event rate, but could still limit the sensitivity of their future
searches. We also point out that Cherenkov radiation, transition radiation, and
recombination could be a significant source of backgrounds at future
experiments aiming to detect dark-matter via scintillation or phonon signals.
We also discuss the implications of our results for the development of
superconducting qubits and low-threshold searches for coherent neutrino
scattering, and comment on design strategies that can be implemented to
mitigate these backgrounds.