title:
Zero-temperature spinglass-ferromagnetic transition : scaling analysis
  of the domain-wall energy

abstract:
  For the Ising model with Gaussian random coupling of average $J_0$ and unit
variance, the zero-temperature spinglass-ferromagnetic transition as a function
of the control parameter $J_0$ can be studied via the size-$L$ dependent
renormalized coupling defined as the domain-wall energy $J^R(L) \equiv
E_{GS}^{(AF)}(L)-E_{GS}^{(F)}(L)$ (i.e. the difference between the ground state
energies corresponding to AntiFerromagnetic and and Ferromagnetic boundary
conditions in one direction). We study numerically the critical exponents of
this zero-temperature transition within the Migdal-Kadanoff approximation as a
function of the dimension $d=2,3,4,5,6$. We then compare with the mean-field
spherical model. Our main conclusion is that in low dimensions, the critical
stiffness exponent $\theta^c$ is clearly bigger than the spin-glass stiffness
exponent $\theta^{SG}$, but that they turn out to coincide in high enough
dimension and in the mean-field spherical model. We also discuss the
finite-size scaling properties of the averaged value and of the width of the
distribution of the renormalized couplings.


title: On non-perturbative analysis of massive and bimetric gravity

abstract:
  This is my contribution to Proceedings of II Russian-Spanish Congress on
Particle and Nuclear Physics at all Scales and Cosmology, Saint Petersburg,
Russia, October 1 - 4, 2013. We give a brief overview of the ghost-free massive
and bimetric gravity emphasising its non-perturbative aspects and ADM approach
to calculating the precise number of degrees of freedom. To the standard
material, we add some thoughts concerning existence and uniqueness problems of
matrix square roots in non-perturbative metric formulations of massive gravity.


title: Mechanic: the MPI/HDF code framework for dynamical astronomy

abstract:
  We introduce the Mechanic, a new open-source code framework. It is designed
to reduce the development effort of scientific applications by providing
unified API (Application Programming Interface) for configuration, data storage
and task management. The communication layer is based on the well-established
Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard, which is widely used on variety of
parallel computers and CPU-clusters. The data storage is performed within the
Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5). The design of the code follows em core-module
approach which allows to reduce the user's codebase and makes it portable for
single- and multi-CPU environments. The framework may be used in a local user's
environment, without administrative access to the cluster, under the PBS or
Slurm job schedulers. It may become a helper tool for a wide range of
astronomical applications, particularly focused on processing large data sets,
such as dynamical studies of long-term orbital evolution of planetary systems
with Monte Carlo methods, dynamical maps or evolutionary algorithms. It has
been already applied in numerical experiments conducted for Kepler-11
(Migaszewski et al., 2012), and nuOctantis planetary systems (Go\'zdziewski et
al., 2013). In this paper we describe the basics of the framework, including
code listings for the implementation of a sample user's module. The code is
illustrated on a model Hamiltonian introduced by (Froeschle et al., 2000)
presenting the Arnold diffusion. The Arnold Web is shown with the help of the
MEGNO (Mean Exponential Growth of Nearby Orbits) fast indicator (Go\'zdziewski
et al., 2008a) applied onto symplectic SABA integrators family (Laskar and
Robutel, 2001).


title: Monochromatic Clique Decompositions of Graphs

abstract:
  Let $G$ be a graph whose edges are coloured with $k$ colours, and $\mathcal
H=(H_1,\dots , H_k)$ be a $k$-tuple of graphs. A monochromatic $\mathcal
H$-decomposition of $G$ is a partition of the edge set of $G$ such that each
part is either a single edge or forms a monochromatic copy of $H_i$ in colour
$i$, for some $1\le i\le k$. Let $\phi_{k}(n,\mathcal H)$ be the smallest
number $\phi$, such that, for every order-$n$ graph and every
$k$-edge-colouring, there is a monochromatic $\mathcal H$-decomposition with at
most $\phi$ elements. Extending the previous results of Liu and Sousa
["Monochromatic $K_r$-decompositions of graphs", Journal of Graph Theory},
76:89--100, 2014], we solve this problem when each graph in $\mathcal H$ is a
clique and $n\ge n_0(\mathcal H)$ is sufficiently large.


title: On Combinatorial Generation of Prefix Normal Words

abstract:
  A prefix normal word is a binary word with the property that no substring has
more 1s than the prefix of the same length. This class of words is important in
the context of binary jumbled pattern matching. In this paper we present an
efficient algorithm for exhaustively listing the prefix normal words with a
fixed length. The algorithm is based on the fact that the language of prefix
normal words is a bubble language, a class of binary languages with the
property that, for any word w in the language, exchanging the first occurrence
of 01 by 10 in w results in another word in the language. We prove that each
prefix normal word is produced in O(n) amortized time, and conjecture, based on
experimental evidence, that the true amortized running time is O(polylog(n)).


title:
Chemical reactions of conformationally selected molecules in a beam with
  Coulomb-crystallized ions

abstract:
  Many molecules exhibit multiple conformers that often easily interconvert
under thermal conditions. Therefore, single conformations are difficult to
isolate which renders the study of their distinct chemical reactivities
challenging. We have recently reported a new experimental method for the
characterization of conformer-specific effects in chemical reactions [Y. P.
Chang et al., Science 342, 98 (2013)]. Different conformers are spatially
separated using inhomogeneous electric fields and reacted with a Coulomb
crystal of cold, spatially localized ions in a trap. As a first application, we
studied reactions between the two conformers of 3-aminophenol and Ca$^+$. We
observed a twofold larger rate constant for the $cis$ compared to the $trans$
conformer which was rationalized in terms of the differences in the long-range
ion-molecule interactions. The present article provides a detailed description
of the new method and a full account of the experimental results as well as the
accompanying theoretical calculations.


title: Fuzzy Logic Based Multi User Adaptive Test System

abstract:
  The present proliferation of e-learning has been actively underway for the
last 10 years. Current research in Adaptive Testing System focuses on the
development of psychometric models with items selection strategies applicable
to adaptive testing processes. The key aspect of proposed Adaptive Testing
System is to develop an increasingly sophisticated latent trait model which can
assist users in developing and enhancing their skills. Computerized Adaptive
Test (CAT) System requires a lot of investment in time and effort to develop
analyze and administrate an adaptive test. In this paper a fuzzy logic based
Multi User Adaptive Test System (MUATS) is developed. Which is a Short
Messaging Service (SMS) based System, currently integrated with GSM network
based on the new psychometric model in education assessment. MUATS is not only
a platform independent Adaptive Test System but also it eases the evaluation
effort for adaptive test process. It further uses fuzzy logic to pick the most
appropriate question from the pool of database for a specific user to be asked
which makes the overall system an intelligent one.


title: The Taylor property in non-negative bilinear models

abstract:
  The aim of this paper is to discuss the presence of the Taylor property in
the class of non-negative simple bilinear models. Considering strictly and
weakly stationary models, we deduce autocorrelations of the process and of the
square process and analyze the presence of the Taylor property considering
several error process distributions. The relationship between the Taylor
property and leptokurtosis of the corresponding bilinear process is discussed.
  With the goal of extending this research to real valued bilinear models, a
simulation study is developed in a class of such models with symmetrical
innovations.


title: Measurement-free topological protection using dissipative feedback

abstract:
  Protecting quantum information from decoherence due to environmental noise is
vital for fault-tolerant quantum computation. To this end, standard quantum
error correction employs parallel projective measurements of individual
particles, which makes the system extremely complicated. Here we propose
measurement-free topological protection in two dimension without any selective
addressing of individual particles. We make use of engineered dissipative
dynamics and feedback operations to reduce the entropy generated by decoherence
in such a way that quantum information is topologically protected. We calculate
an error threshold, below which quantum information is protected, without
assuming selective addressing, projective measurements, nor instantaneous
classical processing. All physical operations are local and translationally
invariant, and no parallel projective measurement is required, which implies
high scalability. Furthermore, since the engineered dissipative dynamics we
utilized has been well studied in quantum simulation, the proposed scheme can
be a promising route progressing from quantum simulation to fault-tolerant
quantum information processing.


title: Simple estimation of thermodynamic properties of Yukawa systems

abstract:
  A simple analytical approach to estimate thermodynamic properties of model
Yukawa systems is presented. The approach extends the traditional
Debye-H\"{u}ckel theory into the regime of moderate coupling and is able to
qualitatively reproduce thermodynamics of Yukawa systems up to the fluid-solid
phase transition. The simplistic equation of state (pressure equation) is
derived and applied to the hydrodynamic description of the longitudinal waves
in Yukawa fluids. The relevance of this study to the topic of complex (dusty)
plasmas is discussed.


title: Stochastic ${\cal PT}$-symmetric coupler

abstract:
  We introduce a stochastic ${\cal PT}$-symmetric coupler, which is based on
dual-core waveguides with fluctuating parameters, such that the gain and the
losses are exactly balanced in average. We consider different parametric
regimes which correspond to the broken and unbroken ${\cal PT}$ symmetry, as
well as to the exceptional point of the underlying deterministic system. We
demonstrate that in all the cases the statistically averaged intensity of the
field grows. This result holds for either linear or nonlinear coupler and is
independent on the type of fluctuations.


title:
One-dimensional Fermi polaron in a combined harmonic and periodic
  potential

abstract:
  We study an impurity in a one-dimensional potential consisting of a harmonic
and a periodic part using both the time-evolving block decimation (TEBD)
algorithm and a variational ansatz. Attractive and repulsive contact
interactions with a sea of fermions are considered. We find excellent agreement
between TEBD and variational results and use the variational ansatz to
investigate higher lattice bands. We conclude that the lowest band
approximation fails at sufficiently strong interactions and develop a new
method for computing the Tan contact parameter.


title: Local Identification of Overcomplete Dictionaries

abstract:
  This paper presents the first theoretical results showing that stable
identification of overcomplete $\mu$-coherent dictionaries $\Phi \in
\mathbb{R}^{d\times K}$ is locally possible from training signals with sparsity
levels $S$ up to the order $O(\mu^{-2})$ and signal to noise ratios up to
$O(\sqrt{d})$. In particular the dictionary is recoverable as the local maximum
of a new maximisation criterion that generalises the K-means criterion. For
this maximisation criterion results for asymptotic exact recovery for sparsity
levels up to $O(\mu^{-1})$ and stable recovery for sparsity levels up to
$O(\mu^{-2})$ as well as signal to noise ratios up to $O(\sqrt{d})$ are
provided. These asymptotic results translate to finite sample size recovery
results with high probability as long as the sample size $N$ scales as $O(K^3dS
\tilde \varepsilon^{-2})$, where the recovery precision $\tilde \varepsilon$
can go down to the asymptotically achievable precision. Further, to actually
find the local maxima of the new criterion, a very simple Iterative
Thresholding and K (signed) Means algorithm (ITKM), which has complexity
$O(dKN)$ in each iteration, is presented and its local efficiency is
demonstrated in several experiments.


title: Hopfions interaction from the viewpoint of the product ansatz

abstract:
  We discuss the relation between the solutions of the Skyrme model of lower
degrees and the corresponding axially symmetric Hopfions which is given by the
projection onto the coset space SU(2)/U(1). The interaction energy of the
Hopfions is evaluated directly from the product ansatz. Our results show that
if the separation between the constituents is not very small, the product
ansatz can be considered as a relatively good approximation to the general
pattern of the charge one Hopfions interaction both in repulsive and attractive
channel.


title:
Comparison of commercial thermoluminescent readers regarding high-dose
  high-temperature measurements

abstract:
  Three different thermoluminescent measuring systems have been compared with
respect to the differences in temperature profiles, spectral sensitivities, as
well as linearity of dose response characteristics. The comparison was
performed using the Harshaw 3500, Riso DA-20 and RA94 TLD readers. The
instruments were tested for the readouts of highly irradiated LiF:Mg,Cu,P (MCP)
TL detectors, which require readout up to 550 C, in case of doses exceeding 1
kGy. It was found that the Harshaw 3500 can be used, without any additional
light attenuation, for the measurements of MCP detectors exposed to doses up to
about 5 Gy. For the other two readers the upper dose limit is about 5 times
lower. It was also found that the Harshaw 3500 shows the best thermal stability
considering the peak maximum position. For the ultra-high doses the differences
in the spectral characteristics of the applied optical filters and
photomultipliers, in conjunction with an evolution of the MCP TL emission
spectrum with increasing dose, significantly influence the shape of TL glow
curves measured with the Riso reader. The detailed characteristic of the
compared TLD readers, at high-dose high-temperature range is discussed.


title: On a conjecture of Widom

abstract:
  In 1969 Harold Widom published his seminal paper, which gave a complete
description of orthogonal and Chebyshev polynomials on a system of smooth
Jordan curves. When there were Jordan arcs present the theory of orthogonal
polynomials turned out to be just the same, but for Chebyshev polynomials
Widom's approach proved only an upper estimate, which he conjectured to be the
correct asymptotic behavior. In this note we make some clarifications which
will show that the situation is more complicated.


title:
$\mathcal{A}$-quasiconvexity and weak lower semicontinuity of integral
  functionals

abstract:
  We state necessary and sufficient conditions for weak lower semicontinuity of
$u\mapsto\int_\Omega h(x,u(x))\,d x$ where $|h(x,s)|\le C(1+|s|^p)$ is
continuous and possesses a recession function, and $u\in
L^p(\Omega;\mathbb{R}^m)$, $p>1$, lives in the kernel of a constant-rank
first-order differential operator $\mathcal{A}$ which admits an extension
property. Our newly defined notion coincides for
$\mathcal{A}=\operatorname{curl}$ with quasiconvexity at the boundary due to
J.M. Ball and J. Marsden. Moreover, we give an equivalent condition for weak
lower semicontinuity of the above functional along sequences weakly converging
in $L^p(\Omega;\mathbb{R}^m)$ and approaching the kernel of $\mathcal{A}$ even
if $\mathcal{A}$ does not have the extension property.


title: Subsumption Checking in Conjunctive Coalgebraic Fixpoint Logics

abstract:
  While reasoning in a logic extending a complete Boolean basis is coNP-hard,
restricting to conjunctive fragments of modal languages sometimes allows for
tractable reasoning even in the presence of greatest fixpoints. One such
example is the EL family of description logics; here, efficient reasoning is
based on satisfaction checking in suitable small models that characterize
formulas in terms of simulations. It is well-known, though, that not every
conjunctive modal language has a tractable reasoning problem. Natural questions
are then how common such tractable fragments are and how to identify them. In
this work we provide sufficient conditions for tractability in a general way by
considering unlabeled tableau rules for a given modal logic. We work in the
framework of coalgebraic logic as a unifying semantic setting. Apart from
recovering known results for description logics such as EL and FL0, we obtain
new ones for conjunctive fragments of relational and non-relational modal
logics with greatest fixpoints. Most notably we find tractable fragments of
game logic and the alternating-time mu-calculus.


title: EagleTree: Exploring the Design Space of SSD-Based Algorithms

abstract:
  Solid State Drives (SSDs) are a moving target for system designers: they are
black boxes, their internals are undocumented, and their performance
characteristics vary across models. There is no appropriate analytical model
and experimenting with commercial SSDs is cumbersome, as it requires a careful
experimental methodology to ensure repeatability. Worse, performance results
obtained on a given SSD cannot be generalized. Overall, it is impossible to
explore how a given algorithm, say a hash join or LSM-tree insertions,
leverages the intrinsic parallelism of a modern SSD, or how a slight change in
the internals of an SSD would impact its overall performance. In this paper, we
propose a new SSD simulation framework, named EagleTree, which addresses these
problems, and enables a principled study of SSD-Based algorithms. The
demonstration scenario illustrates the design space for algorithms based on an
SSD-based IO stack, and shows how researchers and practitioners can use
EagleTree to perform tractable explorations of this complex design space.


title:
Control of Multiple Remote Servers for Quality-Fair Delivery of
  Multimedia Contents

abstract:
  This paper proposes a control scheme for the quality-fair delivery of several
encoded video streams to mobile users sharing a common wireless resource. Video
quality fairness, as well as similar delivery delays are targeted among
streams. The proposed controller is implemented within some aggregator located
near the bottleneck of the network. The transmission rate among streams is
adapted based on the quality of the already encoded and buffered packets in the
aggregator. Encoding rate targets are evaluated by the aggregator and fed back
to each remote video server (fully centralized solution), or directly evaluated
by each server in a distributed way (partially distributed solution). Each
encoding rate target is adjusted for each stream independently based on the
corresponding buffer level or buffering delay in the aggregator. Communication
delays between the servers and the aggregator are taken into account. The
transmission and encoding rate control problems are studied with a
control-theoretic perspective. The system is described with a multi-input
multi-output model. Proportional Integral (PI) controllers are used to adjust
the video quality and control the aggregator buffer levels. The system
equilibrium and stability properties are studied. This provides guidelines for
choosing the parameters of the PI controllers. Experimental results show the
convergence of the proposed control system and demonstrate the improvement in
video quality fairness compared to a classical transmission rate fair streaming
solution and to a utility max-min fair approach.


title: The Capacity of Known Interference Channel (updated)

abstract:
  In this paper, we investigate the capacity of known interference channel,
where the receiver knows the interference data but not the channel gain of the
interference data. We first derive a tight upper bound for the capacity of this
known-interference channel. After that, we obtain an achievable rate of the
channel with a blind known interference cancellation (BKIC) scheme in closed
form. We prove that the aforementioned upper bound in the high SNR regime can
be approached by our achievable rate. Moreover, the achievable rate of our BKIC
scheme is much larger than that of the traditional interference cancellation
scheme. In particular, the achievable rate of BKIC continues to increase with
SNR in the high SNR regime (non-zero degree of freedom), while that of the
traditional scheme approaches a fixed bound that does not improve with SNR
(zero degree of freedom).


title: Exact solution of vacuum field equation in Finsler spacetime

abstract:
  We suggest that the vacuum field equation in Finsler spacetime is equivalent
to vanishing of Ricci scalar. Schwarzschild metric can be deduced from a
solution of our field equation if the spacetime preserve spherical symmetry.
Supposing spacetime to preserve the symmetry of "Finslerian sphere", we find a
non-Riemannian exact solution of the Finslerian vacuum field equation. The
solution is similar to the Schwarzschild metric. It reduces to Schwarzschild
metric while the Finslerian parameter $\epsilon$ vanishes. It is proved that
the Finslerian covariant derivative of the geometrical part of the
gravitational field equation is conserved. The interior solution is also given.
We get solutions of geodesic equation in such a Schwarzschild-like spacetime,
and show that the geodesic equation returns to the counterpart in Newton's
gravity at weak field approximation. The celestial observations give constraint
on the Finslerian parameter $\epsilon<10^{-4}$. And the recent Michelson-Morley
experiment requires $\epsilon<10^{-16}$. The counterpart of Birkhoff's theorem
exist in Finslerian vacuum. It shows that the Finslerian gravitational field
with the symmetry of "Finslerian sphere" in vacuum must be static.


title: A parton shower based on factorization of the quantum density matrix

abstract:
  We present first results from a new parton shower event generator, Deductor.
Anticipating a need for an improved treatment of parton color and spin, the
structure of the generator is based on the quantum density matrix in color and
spin space. So far, Deductor implements only a standard spin-averaged treatment
of spin in parton splittings. Although Deductor implements an improved
treatment of color, in this paper we present results in the standard leading
color approximation so that we can compare to the generator Pythia. The
algorithms used incorporate a virtuality based shower ordering parameter and
massive initial state bottom and charm quarks.


title: User Interface Design for E-Learning Software

abstract:
  User interface (UI) is point of interaction between user and computer
software. The success and failure of a software application depends on User
Interface Design (UID). Possibility of using a software, easily using and
learning are issues influenced by UID. The UI is significant in designing of
educational software (e-Learning). Principles and concepts of learning should
be considered in addition to UID principles in UID for e-learning. In this
regard, to specify the logical relationship between education, learning, UID
and multimedia at first we readdress the issues raised in previous studies. It
is followed by examining the principle concepts of e-learning and UID. Then, we
will see how UID contributes to e-learning through the educational software
built by authors. Also we show the way of using UI to improve learning and
motivating the learners and to improve the time efficiency of using e-learning
software.


title: Ordering variable for parton showers

abstract:
  The parton splittings in a parton shower are ordered according to an ordering
variable, for example the transverse momentum of the daughter partons relative
to the direction of the mother, the virtuality of the splitting, or the angle
between the daughter partons. We analyze the choice of the ordering variable
and conclude that one particular choice has the advantage of factoring softer
splittings from harder splittings graph by graph in a physical gauge.


title: Castelnuovo-Mumford Regularity And Segre-Veronese Transform

abstract:
  In this paper we give a nice formula for the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity
of the Segre product of modules, under some suitable hypotheses. This extends
recent results of David A. Cox, and Evgeny Materov (2009).


title: Parton distribution functions in the context of parton showers

abstract:
  When the initial state evolution of a parton shower is organized according to
the standard "backward evolution'' prescription, ratios of parton distribution
functions appear in the splitting probabilities. The shower thus organized
evolves from a hard scale to a soft cutoff scale. At the end of the shower, one
expects that only the parton distributions at the soft scale should affect the
results. The other effects of the parton distributions should have cancelled.
This means that the kernels for parton evolution should be related to the
shower splitting functions. If the initial state partons can have non-zero
masses, this requires that the evolution kernels cannot be the usual MSbar
kernels. We work out what the parton evolution kernels should be to match the
shower evolution contained in the parton shower event generator Deductor, in
which the b and c quarks have non-zero masses.


title:
A regularity result for quasilinear stochastic partial differential
  equations of parabolic type

abstract:
  We consider a quasilinear parabolic stochastic partial differential equation
driven by a multiplicative noise and study regularity properties of its weak
solution satisfying classical a priori estimates. In particular, we determine
conditions on coefficients and initial data under which the weak solution is
H\"older continuous in time and possesses spatial regularity that is only
limited by the regularity of the given data. Our proof is based on an efficient
method of increasing regularity: the solution is rewritten as the sum of two
processes, one solves a linear parabolic SPDE with the same noise term as the
original model problem whereas the other solves a linear parabolic PDE with
random coefficients. This way, the required regularity can be achieved by
repeatedly making use of known techniques for stochastic convolutions and
deterministic PDEs.


title:
Design of a High Speed XAUI Based on Dynamic Reconfigurable Transceiver
  IP Core

abstract:
  By using the dynamic reconfigurable transceiver in high speed interface
design, designer can solve critical technology problems such as ensuring signal
integrity conveniently, with lower error binary rate. In this paper, we
designed a high speed XAUI (10Gbps Ethernet Attachment Unit Interface) to
transparently extend the physical reach of the XGMII. The following points are
focused: (1) IP (Intellectual Property) core usage. Altera Co. offers two
transceiver IP cores in Quartus II MegaWizard Plug-In Manager for XAUI design
which is featured of dynamic reconfiguration performance, that is,
ALTGX_RECO?FIG instance and ALTGX instance, we can get various groups by
changing settings of the devices without power off. These two blocks can
accomplish function of PCS (Physical Coding Sub-layer) and PMA (Physical Medium
Attachment), however, with higher efficiency and reliability. (2) 1+1
protection. In our design, two ALTGX IP cores are used to work in parallel,
which named XAUI0 and XAUI1. The former works as the main channel while the
latter redundant channel. When XAUI0 is out of service for some reasons, XAUI1
will start to work to keep the business. (3) RTL (Register Transfer Level)
coding with Verilog HDL and simulation. Create the ALTGX_RECO?FIG instance and
ALTGX instance, enable dynamic reconfiguration in the ALTGXB Megafunction, then
connect the ALTGX_RECO?FIG with the ALTGX instances. After RTL coding, the
design was simulated on VCS simulator. The validated result indicates that the
packets are transferred efficiently. FPGA makes high-speed optical
communication system design simplified.


title: A general procedure to combine estimators

abstract:
  A general method to combine several estimators of the same quantity is
investigated. In the spirit of model and forecast averaging, the final
estimator is computed as a weighted average of the initial ones, where the
weights are constrained to sum to one. In this framework, the optimal weights,
minimizing the quadratic loss, are entirely determined by the mean square error
matrix of the vector of initial estimators. The averaging estimator is built
using an estimation of this matrix, which can be computed from the same
dataset. A non-asymptotic error bound on the averaging estimator is derived,
leading to asymptotic optimality under mild conditions on the estimated mean
square error matrix. This method is illustrated on standard statistical
problems in parametric and semi-parametric models where the averaging estimator
outperforms the initial estimators in most cases.


title: Stellar populations in the ELT perspective

abstract:
  We discuss the impact that the next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes
will have on the open astrophysical problems of resolved stellar populations.
In particular, we address the interplay between multiband photometry and
spectroscopy.


title:
Heat content with singular initial temperature and singular specific
  heat

abstract:
  Let (M,g) be a compact Riemannian manifold without boundary. Let D be a
compact subdomain of M with smooth boundary. We examine the heat content
asymptotics for the heat flow from D into M where both the initial temperature
and the specific heat are permitted to have controlled singularities on the
boundary of D. The operator driving the heat process is assumed to be an
operator of Laplace type


title:
Incompressible Navier-Stokes-Fourier Limit from The Boltzmann Equation:
  Classical Solutions

abstract:
  The global classical solution to the incompressible Navier-Stokes-Fourier
equation with small initial data in the whole space is constructed through a
zero Knudsen number limit from the solutions to the Boltzmann equation with
general collision kernels. The key point is the uniform estimate of the Sobolev
norm on the global solutions to the Boltzmann equation.


title:
Design of an Encryption-Decryption Module Oriented for Internet
  Information Security SOC Design

abstract:
  In order to protect the security of network data, a high speed chip module
for encrypting and decrypting of network data packet is designed. The chip
module is oriented for internet information security SOC (System on Chip)
design. During the design process, AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and 3DES
(Data Encryption Standard) encryption algorithm are adopted to protect the
security of network data. The following points are focused: (1) The SOC (System
on Chip) design methodology based on IP (Intellectual Property) core is used.
AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and 3DES (Data Encryption Standard) IP
(Intellectual Property) cores are embedded in the chip module, peripheral
control sub-modules are designed to control the encryption-decryption module,
which is capable of shortening the design period of the chip module. (2) The
implementation of encryption-decryption with hardware was presented, which
improves the safety of data through the encryption-decryption chip and reduce
the load of CPU. (3) In our hardware solution, two AES (Advanced Encryption
Standard) cores are used to work in parallel, which improves the speed of the
encryption module. Moreover, the key length of AES (Advanced Encryption
Standard) encryption algorithm is designed with three optional configurations
at 128 bits, 256 bits and 192 bits respectively and six optional encryption
algorithm modes: CBC (Cipher Block Chaining) mode, ECB (Electronic Code Book)
mode, GCM (Galois/Counter Mode) mode, XTS(cipherteXT Stealing) mode, CTR
(CounTeR) mode and 3DES respectively, which adds the flexibility to its
applications.


title:
Steady-state performance of non-negative least-mean-square algorithm and
  its variants

abstract:
  Non-negative least-mean-square (NNLMS) algorithm and its variants have been
proposed for online estimation under non-negativity constraints. The transient
behavior of the NNLMS, Normalized NNLMS, Exponential NNLMS and Sign-Sign NNLMS
algorithms have been studied in our previous work. In this technical report, we
derive closed-form expressions for the steady-state excess mean-square error
(EMSE) for the four algorithms. Simulations results illustrate the accuracy of
the theoretical results. This is a complementary material to our previous work.


title:
$1/f$ Spectrum and 1-Stable Law in One-Dimensional Intermittent Map with
  Uniform Invariant Measure and Nekhoroshev Stability

abstract:
  We investigate ergodic properties of a one-dimensional intermittent map that
has not only an indifferent fixed point but also a singular structure such that
a uniform measure is invariant under mapping. The most striking aspect of our
model is that stagnant motion around the indifferent fixed point is induced by
the log-Weibull law, which is derived from Nekhoroshev stability in the context
of nearly-integrable Hamiltonian systems. Using renewal analysis, we derive a
logarithmic inverse power decay of the correlation function and a
$1/\omega$-like power spectral density. We also derive the so-called 1-stable
law as a component of the time-average distribution of a simple observable
function. This distributional law enables us to calculate a logarithmic inverse
power law of large deviations. Numerical results confirm these analytical
results. Finally, we discuss the relationship between the parameters of our
model and the degrees of freedom in nearly-integrable Hamiltonian systems.


title:
Observations of the Most Massive Deeply Embedded Star Clusters in the
  Milky Way

abstract:
  We summarize our comprehensive gas surveys of some of the most luminous,
deeply embedded (optically obscured) star formation regions in the Milky Way,
which are the local cases of massive star clusters and/or associations in the
making. Our approach emphasizes multi-scale, multi-resolution imaging in dust
and free-free continuum, as well as in molecular- and hydrogen recombination
lines, to trace the multiple gas components from 0.1 pc (core scale) all the
way up to the scales of the entire giant molecular cloud (GMC), or $\sim 100$
pc. We highlight our results in W49A, the most luminous Galactic star formation
region ($L\sim 10^7~L_\odot$), which appears to be forming a young massive
cluster (or a binary star cluster) with $M_\star > 5\times10^4~M_\odot$ that
may remain bound after gas dispersal. The surveyed sources share elements in
common, in particular, the 10-100 pc scale GMCs are filamentary but have one or
two central condensations (clumps) far denser than the surrounding filaments
and that host the (forming) massive stars.


title:
Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous
  Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A
  Peer-Reviewed Monograph

abstract:
  Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and
challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more
sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides
constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if
implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous
weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval
operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of
developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that
address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that
is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many
instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these
often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with
the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The
Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of
Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that
required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of
the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.


title: Properties of spatial coupling in compressed sensing

abstract:
  In this paper we address a series of open questions about the construction of
spatially coupled measurement matrices in compressed sensing. For hardware
implementations one is forced to depart from the limiting regime of parameters
in which the proofs of the so-called threshold saturation work. We investigate
quantitatively the behavior under finite coupling range, the dependence on the
shape of the coupling interaction, and optimization of the so-called seed to
minimize distance from optimality. Our analysis explains some of the properties
observed empirically in previous works and provides new insight on spatially
coupled compressed sensing.


title: "Massless'' Spin-$\frac{3}{2}$ Fields in the de Sitter Space

abstract:
  In this paper, the ``massless" spin-$\frac{3}{2}$ fields in the de Sitter
space are considered. This work is in the continuation of a previous paper
devoted to the quantization of the de Sitter ``massive" spin-$\frac{3}{2}$
fields. Due to the appearance of gauge invariance and indefinite metric, the
covariant quantization of the ``massless" spin-$\frac{3}{2}$ fields requires an
indecomposable representation of the de Sitter group. The gauge fixing
corresponding to the simplest Gupta-Bleuler structure is used, and gauge
invariant field is discussed. The field equation is obtained by using the
Casimir operator of the de Sitter group. The solutions are written in terms of
the coordinate-independent de Sitter plane waves. Finally, the generalized
two-point function is calculated.


title: Chemical evolution in the early phases of massive star formation. I

abstract:
  Understanding the chemical evolution of young (high-mass) star-forming
regions is a central topic in star formation research. Chemistry is employed as
a unique tool 1) to investigate the underlying physical processes and 2) to
characterize the evolution of the chemical composition. We observed a sample of
59 high-mass star-forming regions at different evolutionary stages varying from
the early starless phase of infrared dark clouds to high-mass protostellar
objects to hot molecular cores and, finally, ultra-compact HII regions at 1mm
and 3mm with the IRAM 30m telescope. We determined their large-scale chemical
abundances and found that the chemical composition evolves along with the
evolutionary stages. On average, the molecular abundances increase with time.
We modeled the chemical evolution, using a 1D physical model where density and
temperature vary from stage to stage coupled with an advanced gas-grain
chemical model and derived the best-fit chi^2 values of all relevant
parameters. A satisfying overall agreement between observed and modeled column
densities for most of the molecules was obtained. With the best-fit model we
also derived a chemical age for each stage, which gives the timescales for the
transformation between two consecutive stages. The best-fit chemical ages are
~10,000 years for the IRDC stage, ~60,000 years for the HMPO stage, ~40,000
years for the HMC stage, and ~10,000 years for the UCHII stage. The total
chemical timescale for the entire evolutionary sequence of the high-mass star
formation process is on the order of 10^5 years, which is consistent with
theoretical estimates. Furthermore, based on the approach of a multiple-line
survey of unresolved data, we were able to constrain an intuitive and
reasonable physical and chemical model. The results of this study can be used
as chemical templates for the different evolutionary stages in high-mass star
formation.


title:
Multidimensional Breeden-Litzenberger representation for state price
  densities and static hedging

abstract:
  In this article, we consider European options of type $h(X^1_T, X^2_T,\ldots,
X^n_T)$ depending on several underlying assets. We study how such options can
be valued in terms of simple vanilla options in non-specified market models. We
consider different approaches related to static hedging and derive several
pricing formulas for a wide class of payoff functions $h:\R_+^n\rightarrow \R$.
We also give new relations between prices of different options both in one
dimensional and multidimensional case.


title: On Convergence of Approximate Message Passing

abstract:
  Approximate message passing is an iterative algorithm for compressed sensing
and related applications. A solid theory about the performance and convergence
of the algorithm exists for measurement matrices having iid entries of zero
mean. However, it was observed by several authors that for more general
matrices the algorithm often encounters convergence problems. In this paper we
identify the reason of the non-convergence for measurement matrices with iid
entries and non-zero mean in the context of Bayes optimal inference. Finally we
demonstrate numerically that when the iterative update is changed from parallel
to sequential the convergence is restored.


title:
An exact algorithm for the weighed mutually exclusive maximum set cover
  problem

abstract:
  In this paper, we introduce an exact algorithm with a time complexity of
$O^*(1.325^m)$ for the {\sc weighted mutually exclusive maximum set cover}
problem, where $m$ is the number of subsets in the problem. This is an NP-hard
motivated and abstracted from a bioinformatics problem of identifying signaling
pathways based gene mutations. Currently, this problem is addressed using
heuristic algorithms, which cannot guarantee the performance of the solution.
By providing a relatively efficient exact algorithm, our approach will like
increase the capability of finding better solutions in the application of
cancer research.


title: Universal low-energy behavior in three-body systems

abstract:
  We consider a pairwise interacting quantum 3-body system in 3-dimensional
space with finite masses and the interaction term $V_{12} + \lambda(V_{13} +
V_{23})$, where all pair potentials are assumed to be nonpositive. The pair
interaction of the particles $\{1,2\}$ is tuned to make them have a zero energy
resonance and no negative energy bound states. The coupling constant $\lambda
>0$ is allowed to take the values for which the particle pairs $\{1,3\}$ and
$\{2,3\}$ have no bound states with negative energy. Let $\lambda_{cr}$ denote
the critical value of the coupling constant such that $E(\lambda) \to -0$ for
$\lambda \to \lambda_{cr}$, where $E(\lambda)$ is the ground state energy of
the 3-body system. We prove the theorem, which states that near $\lambda_{cr}$
one has $E(\lambda) = C (\lambda-\lambda_{cr})[\ln
(\lambda-\lambda_{cr})]^{-1}+$h.t., where $C$ is a constant and h.t. stands for
"higher terms". This behavior of the ground state energy is universal (up to
the value of the constant $C$), meaning that it is independent of the form of
pair interactions.


title: Squaring the square with integer linear programming

abstract:
  We consider so-called squaring the square-puzzles where a given square (or
rectangle) should be dissected into smaller squares. For a specific instance of
such problems we demonstrate that a mathematically rigorous solution can be
quite involved. As an alternative to exhaustive enumeration using tailored
algorithms we describe the general approach of formulating the problem as an
integer linear program.


title: Rotating quantum states

abstract:
  We revisit the definition of rotating thermal states for scalar and fermion
fields in unbounded Minkowski space-time. For scalar fields such states are
ill-defined everywhere, but for fermion fields an appropriate definition of the
vacuum gives thermal states regular inside the speed-of-light surface. For a
massless fermion field, we derive analytic expressions for the thermal
expectation values of the fermion current and stress-energy tensor. These
expressions may provide qualitative insights into the behaviour of thermal
rotating states on more complex space-time geometries.


title: Parallel Optimisation of Bootstrapping in R

abstract:
  Bootstrapping is a popular and computationally demanding resampling method
used for measuring the accuracy of sample estimates and assisting with
statistical inference. R is a freely available language and environment for
statistical computing popular with biostatisticians for genomic data analyses.
A survey of such R users highlighted its implementation of bootstrapping as a
prime candidate for parallelization to overcome computational bottlenecks. The
Simple Parallel R Interface (SPRINT) is a package that allows R users to
exploit high performance computing in multi-core desktops and supercomputers
without expert knowledge of such systems. This paper describes the
parallelization of bootstrapping for inclusion in the SPRINT R package.
Depending on the complexity of the bootstrap statistic and the number of
resamples, this implementation has close to optimal speed up on up to 16 nodes
of a supercomputer and close to 100 on 512 nodes. This performance in a
multi-node setting compares favourably with an existing parallelization option
in the native R implementation of bootstrapping.


title: F{\o}lner sequences and sum-free sets

abstract:
  Erd\H{o}s showed that every set of $n$ positive integers contains a subset of
size at least $n/(k+1)$ containing no solutions to $x_1 + \cdots + x_k = y$. We
prove that the constant $1/(k+1)$ here is best possible by showing that if
$(F_m)$ is a multiplicative F{\o}lner sequence in $\mathbf{N}$ then $F_m$ has
no $k$-sum-free subset of size greater than $(1/(k+1)+o(1))|F_m|$. This
provides a new proof and a generalisation of a recent theorem of Eberhard,
Green, and Manners.


title: Tunguska cosmic body of 1908: is it from planet Mars?

abstract:
  The aim of the study was to discover remnants of the 1908 Tunguska meteorite.
Main objective of the field studies was identification of exotic rocks,
furrows, and penetration funnels reported by the first eyewitnesses, residents
of the area with severe forest destruction. Main methods included decoding of
aerial survey photographs, systematic survey of the epicenter area of the
Tunguska explosion, exploratory excavations of the objects of interest,
reconstruction studies of exotic boulder by using its splinters, mineralogical
and spectral analysis of specimens, experimental attempt of plasma-induced
reproduction of the fusion crust on specimen. The authors present results on
discovery of penetration funnel-like structures; exotic boulder (known as
John's Stone)) with its shear-fractured splinters and fresh furrow in the
permafrost; several splinters with glassy coatings; evidence of high-speed
John's Stone deceleration in the permafrost; and clear consistency in geometry
of spacial arrangements of all splinters, furrows, cleaved pebbles according to
data of reconstruction studies. John's Stone is composed of highly silicified
gravelite sandstone (98.5% SiO2) with grain size of 0.5 to 1.5 cm. Outer
surface of several splinters showed continuous glassy coating similar to shiny
fusion crust reminiscent of freshly applied enamel. Plasma-induced heating of
John's Stone specimen led to its explosive disintegration; residue presented
with whitish semi-transparent pumice-like grains and irregularly shaped fused
particles. Overall, our data suggest that John's Stone is Tunguska meteorite
candidate. Recent discoveries of sedimentary rocks, lithified gravelite
sandstone, clay, and quartz on Mars provide rationale for search and
identification of silica-rich Martian meteorites of sedimentary origin.


title: Counting multijoints

abstract:
  Let $\mathfrak{L}_1$, $\mathfrak{L}_2$, $\mathfrak{L}_3$ be finite
collections of $L_1$, $L_2$, $L_3$, respectively, lines in $\mathbb{R}^3$, and
$J(\mathfrak{L}_1, \mathfrak{L}_2,\mathfrak{L}_3)$ the set of multijoints
formed by them, i.e. the set of points $x \in \mathbb{R}^3$, each of which lies
in at least one line $l_i \in \mathfrak{L}_i$, for all $i=1,2,3$, such that the
directions of $l_1$, $l_2$ and $l_3$ span $\mathbb{R}^3$. We prove here that
$|J(\mathfrak{L}_1, \mathfrak{L}_2,\mathfrak{L}_3)|\lesssim (L_1L_2L_3)^{1/2}$,
and we extend our results to multijoints formed by real algebraic curves in
$\mathbb{R}^3$ of uniformly bounded degree, as well as by curves in
$\mathbb{R}^3$ parametrised by real univariate polynomials of uniformly bounded
degree. The multijoints problem is a variant of the joints problem, as well as
a discrete analogue of the endpoint multilinear Kakeya problem.


title: Automatic Detection of Calibration Grids in Time-of-Flight Images

abstract:
  It is convenient to calibrate time-of-flight cameras by established methods,
using images of a chequerboard pattern. The low resolution of the amplitude
image, however, makes it difficult to detect the board reliably. Heuristic
detection methods, based on connected image-components, perform very poorly on
this data. An alternative, geometrically-principled method is introduced here,
based on the Hough transform. The projection of a chequerboard is represented
by two pencils of lines, which are identified as oriented clusters in the
gradient-data of the image. A projective Hough transform is applied to each of
the two clusters, in axis-aligned coordinates. The range of each transform is
properly bounded, because the corresponding gradient vectors are approximately
parallel. Each of the two transforms contains a series of collinear peaks; one
for every line in the given pencil. This pattern is easily detected, by
sweeping a dual line through the transform. The proposed Hough-based method is
compared to the standard OpenCV detection routine, by application to several
hundred time-of-flight images. It is shown that the new method detects
significantly more calibration boards, over a greater variety of poses, without
any overall loss of accuracy. This conclusion is based on an analysis of both
geometric and photometric error.


title:
Evaluation of a new supply strategy based on stochastic programming for
  a fashion discounter

abstract:
  Fashion discounters face the problem of ordering the right amount of pieces
in each size of a product. The product is ordered in pre-packs containing a
certain size-mix of a product. For this so-called lot-type design problem, a
stochastic mixed integer linear programm was developed, in which price cuts
serve as recourse action for oversupply. Our goal is to answer the question,
whether the resulting supply strategy leads to a supply that is significantly
more consistent with the demand for sizes compared to the original manual
planning. Since the total profit is influenced by too many factors unrelated to
sizes (like the popularity of the product, the weather or a changing economic
situation), we suggest a comparison method which excludes many outer effects by
construction. We apply the method to a real-world field study: The improvements
in the size distributions of the supply are significant.


title: Computing Teichm\"{u}ller Maps between Polygons

abstract:
  By the Riemann-mapping theorem, one can bijectively map the interior of an
$n$-gon $P$ to that of another $n$-gon $Q$ conformally. However, (the boundary
extension of) this mapping need not necessarily map the vertices of $P$ to
those $Q$. In this case, one wants to find the ``best" mapping between these
polygons, i.e., one that minimizes the maximum angle distortion (the
dilatation) over \textit{all} points in $P$. From complex analysis such maps
are known to exist and are unique. They are called extremal quasiconformal
maps, or Teichm\"{u}ller maps.
  Although there are many efficient ways to compute or approximate conformal
maps, there is currently no such algorithm for extremal quasiconformal maps.
This paper studies the problem of computing extremal quasiconformal maps both
in the continuous and discrete settings.
  We provide the first constructive method to obtain the extremal
quasiconformal map in the continuous setting. Our construction is via an
iterative procedure that is proven to converge quickly to the unique extremal
map. To get to within $\epsilon$ of the dilatation of the extremal map, our
method uses $O(1/\epsilon^{4})$ iterations. Every step of the iteration
involves convex optimization and solving differential equations, and guarantees
a decrease in the dilatation. Our method uses a reduction of the polygon
mapping problem to that of the punctured sphere problem, thus solving a more
general problem.
  We also discretize our procedure. We provide evidence for the fact that the
discrete procedure closely follows the continuous construction and is therefore
expected to converge quickly to a good approximation of the extremal
quasiconformal map.


title: Symbolic Abstractions of Networked Control Systems

abstract:
  The last decade has witnessed significant attention on networked control
systems (NCS) due to their ubiquitous presence in industrial applications, and,
in the particular case of wireless NCS, because of their architectural
flexibility and low installation and maintenance costs. In wireless NCS the
communication between sensors, controllers, and actuators is supported by a
communication channel that is likely to introduce variable communication
delays, packet losses, limited bandwidth, and other practical non-idealities
leading to numerous technical challenges. Although stability properties of NCS
have been investigated extensively in the literature, results for NCS under
more complex and general objectives, and in particular results dealing with
verification or controller synthesis for logical specifications, are much more
limited. This work investigates how to address such complex objectives by
constructively deriving symbolic models of NCS, while encompassing the
mentioned network non-idealities. The obtained abstracted (symbolic) models can
then be employed to synthesize hybrid controllers enforcing rich logical
specifications over the concrete NCS models. Examples of such general
specifications include properties expressed as formulae in linear temporal
logic (LTL) or as automata on infinite strings. We thus provide a general
synthesis framework that can be flexibly adapted to a number of NCS setups. We
illustrate the effectiveness of the results over some case studies.


title:
A massless neutrino and lepton mixing patterns from finite discrete
  subgroups of U(3)

abstract:
  Finite discrete subgroups of $U(3)$ as possible flavour symmetries $G_f$ for
a massless neutrinos with predictive mixing angles are studied. This is done by
assuming that a residual symmetry $S_\nu$ appropriate for describing a massless
neutrino is contained in $G_f$. It is shown that all the groups $G_f$ admitting
three dimensional faithful irreducible representation and generated from a
specific set of $3\times 3$ matrices imply only one of the three flavour
compositions for the massless state namely, unmixed, maximally mixed with equal
probabilities and bimaximally mixed with probabilities (0,1/2,1/2) and their
permutations. This result holds irrespective of the order of $G_f$ and the
choice of $S_{\nu}$ within it. All of these lead to unfavourable leading order
prediction for the solar mixing angle. Neutrino mixing pattern is then
numerically investigated in case of subgroups of $U(3)$ with order less than
512 and it is found that only one of these can lead to a massless neutrino and
leading order predictions for all the mixing angles close to their experimental
values. Ways to correct for the solar angle prediction are proposed and two
concrete examples giving the observed mixing pattern are discussed.


title: Complex Monge-Amp\`ere equations on quasi-projective varieties

abstract:
  We introduce generalized Monge-Amp\`ere capacities and use these to study
complex Monge-Amp\`ere equations whose right-hand side is smooth outside a
divisor. We prove, in many cases, that there exists a unique normalized
solution which is smooth outside the divisor.


title: SIMD Compression and the Intersection of Sorted Integers

abstract:
  Sorted lists of integers are commonly used in inverted indexes and database
systems. They are often compressed in memory. We can use the SIMD instructions
available in common processors to boost the speed of integer compression
schemes. Our S4-BP128-D4 scheme uses as little as 0.7 CPU cycles per decoded
integer while still providing state-of-the-art compression.
  However, if the subsequent processing of the integers is slow, the effort
spent on optimizing decoding speed can be wasted. To show that it does not have
to be so, we (1) vectorize and optimize the intersection of posting lists; (2)
introduce the SIMD Galloping algorithm. We exploit the fact that one SIMD
instruction can compare 4 pairs of integers at once.
  We experiment with two TREC text collections, GOV2 and ClueWeb09 (Category
B), using logs from the TREC million-query track. We show that using only the
SIMD instructions ubiquitous in all modern CPUs, our techniques for conjunctive
queries can double the speed of a state-of-the-art approach.


title:
The stationary distribution of a Markov jump process glued together from
  two state spaces at two vertices

abstract:
  We compute the stationary distribution of a continuous-time Markov chain
which is constructed by gluing together two finite, irreducible Markov chains
by identifying a pair of states of one chain with a pair of states of the other
and keeping all transition rates from either chain (the rates between the two
shared states are summed). The result expresses the stationary distribution of
the glued chain in terms of quantities of the two original chains. Some of the
required terms are nonstandard but can be computed by solving systems of linear
equations using the transition rate matrices of the two original chains.
Special emphasis is given to the cases when the stationary distribution of the
glued chain is a multiple of the equilibria of the original chains, and when
not, for which bounds are derived.


title:
Topological order-by-disorder in orbitally degenerate dipolar bosons in
  zig-zag lattice

abstract:
  Spinor bosons offer conceptually simple picture of macroscopic quantum
behavior of topological order-by-disorder: Paramagnetic state of two-component
dipolar bosons in orbitally degenerate zig-zag lattice is unstable against
infinitezimal quantum fluctuations of orbitals towards developing non-local
hidden order. Adjacent to the topological state locally correlated exact ground
state with spontaneously quadrupoled lattice constant is realized for the broad
parameter regime.


title:
Critical points and symmetries of a free energy function for biaxial
  nematic liquid crystals

abstract:
  We describe a general model for the free energy function for a homogeneous
medium of mutually interacting molecules, based on the formalism for a biaxial
nematic liquid crystal set out by Katriel {\em et al.} (1986) in an influential
paper in {\em Liquid Crystals} {\bf 1} and subsequently called the KKLS
formalism. The free energy is expressed as the sum of an entropy term and an
interaction (Hamiltonian) term. Using the language of group representation
theory we identify the order parameters as averaged components of a linear
transformation, and characterise the full symmetry group of the entropy term in
the liquid crystal context as a wreath product $SO(3)\wr Z_2$. The
symmetry-breaking role of the Hamiltonian, pointed out by Katriel {\em et al.},
is here made explicit in terms of centre manifold reduction at bifurcation from
isotropy. We use tools and methods of equivariant singularity theory to reduce
the bifurcation study to that of a $D_3\,$-invariant function on ${\bf R}^2$,
ubiquitous in liquid crystal theory, and to describe the 'universal'
bifurcation geometry in terms of the superposition of a familiar swallowtail
controlling uniaxial equilibria and another less familiar surface controlling
biaxial equilibria. In principle this provides a template for {\em all} nematic
liquid crystal phase transitions close to isotropy, although further work is
needed to identify the absolute minima that are the critical points
representing stable phases.


title:
Dielectric, electromechanical and elastic properties of
  K$_{1-x}$(NH$_4$)$_x$H$_2$PO$_4$ compounds

abstract:
  We present the results of the thermodynamic theory of piezoelectric
ferroelectrics and of the phenomenological theory of thermodynamic
characteristics of the KH$_{2}$PO$_{4}$ type ferroelectrics. Available
experimental data for the dielectric, piezoelectric, and elastic
characteristics of the KH$_{2}$PO$_{4}$ type ferroelectrics and
NH$_4$H$_{2}$PO$_{4}$ type antiferroelectrics are described using the proposed
microscopic theory of these crystals. Using the results of the thermodynamic
theory and experimental data we calculate the dielectric, piezoelectric, and
elastic characteristics of the K$_{1-x}$(NH$_4$)$_x$H$_2$PO$_4$ type systems.


title: Predicting Multi-actor collaborations using Hypergraphs

abstract:
  Social networks are now ubiquitous and most of them contain interactions
involving multiple actors (groups) like author collaborations, teams or emails
in an organizations, etc. Hypergraphs are natural structures to effectively
capture multi-actor interactions which conventional dyadic graphs fail to
capture. In this work the problem of predicting collaborations is addressed
while modeling the collaboration network as a hypergraph network. The problem
of predicting future multi-actor collaboration is mapped to hyperedge
prediction problem. Given that the higher order edge prediction is an
inherently hard problem, in this work we restrict to the task of predicting
edges (collaborations) that have already been observed in past. In this work,
we propose a novel use of hyperincidence temporal tensors to capture time
varying hypergraphs and provides a tensor decomposition based prediction
algorithm. We quantitatively compare the performance of the hypergraphs based
approach with the conventional dyadic graph based approach. Our hypothesis that
hypergraphs preserve the information that simple graphs destroy is corroborated
by experiments using author collaboration network from the DBLP dataset. Our
results demonstrate the strength of hypergraph based approach to predict higher
order collaborations (size>4) which is very difficult using dyadic graph based
approach. Moreover, while predicting collaborations of size>2 hypergraphs in
most cases provide better results with an average increase of approx. 45% in
F-Score for different sizes = {3,4,5,6,7}.


title:
Transverse spin and transverse momentum structure of the nucleon from
  the COMPASS experiment

abstract:
  A selection is presented of recent results from the COMPASS Collaboration on
transverse spin and transverse momentum effects in semi-inclusive deeply
inelastic scattering (SIDIS) of 160 GeV/c muons off proton and deuteron
targets.


title:
Super- and sub-rotating equatorial jets: Newtonian cooling versus
  Rayleigh friction

abstract:
  Numerical simulations of the shallow water equations on rotating spheres
produce mixtures of robust vortices and alternating zonal jets, as seen in the
atmospheres of the gas giant planets. However, simulations that include
Rayleigh friction invariably produce a sub-rotating (retrograde) equatorial jet
for Jovian parameter regimes, whilst observations of Jupiter show a
super-rotating (prograde) equatorial jet that has persisted over several
decades. Super-rotating equatorial jets have recently been obtained in shallow
water simulations that include a Newtonian relaxation of perturbations to the
layer thickness to model radiative cooling to space, and in simulations of the
thermal shallow water equations that include a similar relaxation term in their
temperature equation. Simulations of global quasigeostrophic forms of these
different models produce equatorial jets in the same directions as the parent
models, suggesting that the mechanism responsible for setting the direction
lies within quasigeostrophic theory. We provide such a mechanism by calculating
the effective force acting on the thickness-weighted zonal mean flow due to the
decay of an equatorially trapped Rossby wave. Decay due to Newtonian cooling
creates an eastward zonal mean flow at the equator, consistent with the
formation of a super-rotating equatorial jet, while decay due to Rayleigh
friction leads to a westward zonal mean flow at the equator, consistent with
the formation of a sub-rotating equatorial jet. In both cases the meridionally
integrated zonal mean of the absolute zonal momentum is westward, consistent
with the standard result that Rossby waves carry westward pseudomomentum, but
this does not preclude the zonal mean flow being eastward on and close to the
equator.


title:
Comment on "Detection of Microwave Spin Pumping Using the Inverse Spin
  Hall Effect"

abstract:
  A Comment on Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 217204 (2013), "Detection of Microwave
Spin Pumping Using the Inverse Spin Hall Effect"


title:
Interconnected risk contributions: an heavy-tail approach to analyse US
  financial sectors

abstract:
  In this paper we consider a multivariate model-based approach to measure the
dynamic evolution of tail risk interdependence among US banks, financial
services and insurance sectors. To deeply investigate the risk contribution of
insurers we consider separately life and non-life companies. To achieve this
goal we apply the multivariate student-t Markov Switching model and the
Multiple-CoVaR (CoES) risk measures introduced in Bernardi et. al. (2013b) to
account for both the known stylised characteristics of the data and the
contemporaneous joint distress events affecting financial sectors. Our
empirical investigation finds that banks appear to be the major source of risk
for all the remaining sectors, followed by the financial services and the
insurance sectors, showing that insurance sector significantly contributes as
well to the overall risk. Moreover, we find that the role of each sector in
contributing to other sectors distress evolves over time accordingly to the
current predominant financial condition, implying different interconnection
strength.


title:
Hydrodynamic radius approximation for spherical particles suspended in a
  viscous fluid: influence of particle internal structure and boundary

abstract:
  Systems of spherical particles moving in Stokes flow are studied for a
different particle internal structure and boundaries, including the Navier-slip
model. It is shown that their hydrodynamic interactions are well described by
treating them as solid spheres of smaller hydrodynamic radii, which can be
determined from measured single-particle diffusion or intrinsic viscosity
coefficients. Effective dynamics of suspensions made of such particles is quite
accurately described by mobility coefficients of the solid particles with the
hydrodynamic radii, averaged with the unchanged direct interactions between the
particles.


title: Compressing Sets and Multisets of Sequences

abstract:
  This article describes lossless compression algorithms for multisets of
sequences, taking advantage of the multiset's unordered structure. Multisets
are a generalisation of sets where members are allowed to occur multiple times.
A multiset can be encoded na\"ively by simply storing its elements in some
sequential order, but then information is wasted on the ordering. We propose a
technique that transforms the multiset into an order-invariant tree
representation, and derive an arithmetic code that optimally compresses the
tree. Our method achieves compression even if the sequences in the multiset are
individually incompressible (such as cryptographic hash sums). The algorithm is
demonstrated practically by compressing collections of SHA-1 hash sums, and
multisets of arbitrary, individually encodable objects.


title:
$W^*\gamma^*\pi$ form factors in the $\tau^- \to \pi^-\ell^+\ell^-
  \nu_{\tau}$ decays

abstract:
  We study the disintegration $\tau^- \to \pi^-\ell^+\ell^-\nu_\tau$, where $l$
denotes either an electron or a muon. This process requires knowledge about the
$W^*\gamma^*\pi$ interaction, which is modeled using Resonance Chiral Theory.
Within this framework we study the sensitivity of the observables of the
process, such as the branching ratios and the dilepton mass spectra, to the
model dependent contributions. The information of the hadronization of the
quark currents is encoded in form factors which are evaluated using the
lightest vector and axial-vector multiplets as degrees of freedom. We determine
the couplings by matching the asymptotic QCD behavior of the form factors in
the limit of an infinite number of colours. The branching ratios we obtain show
that the process with $l=e$ should be measured soon in $B$ factories.


title:
Electronic structure and phonon instabilities in the vicinity of the
  structural transition and superconductivity of (Sr,Ca)$_3$Ir$_4$Sn$_{13}$

abstract:
  The nature of the lattice instability connected to the structural transition
and superconductivity of (Sr,Ca)$_3$Ir$_4$Sn$_{13}$ is not yet fully
understood. In this work density functional theory (DFT) calculations of the
phonon instabilities as a function of chemical and hydrostatic pressure show
that the primary lattice instabilities in Sr$_3$Ir$_4$Sn$_{13}$ lie at phonon
modes of wavevectors $\mathbf{q}=(0.5,0,0)$ and $\mathbf{q}=(0.5,0.5,0)$.
Following these modes by calculating the energy of supercells incorporating the
mode distortion results in an energy advantage of -14.1 meV and -9.0 meV per
formula unit respectively. However, the application of chemical pressure to
form Ca$_3$Ir$_4$Sn$_{13}$ reduces the energetic advantage of these
instabilities, which is completely removed by the application of a hydrostatic
pressure of 35 kbar to Ca$_3$Ir$_4$Sn$_{13}$. The evolution of these lattice
instabilities is consistent with experimental phase diagram. The structural
distortion associated with the mode at $\mathbf{q}=(0.5,0.5,0)$ produces a
distorted cell with the same space group symmetry as the experimentally refined
low temperature structure. Furthermore, calculation of the deformation
potential due to these modes quantitatively demonstrates a strong
electron-phonon coupling. Therefore, these modes are likely to be implicated in
the structural transition and superconductivity of this system.


title: Predicting Nearly As Well As the Optimal Twice Differentiable Regressor

abstract:
  We study nonlinear regression of real valued data in an individual sequence
manner, where we provide results that are guaranteed to hold without any
statistical assumptions. We address the convergence and undertraining issues of
conventional nonlinear regression methods and introduce an algorithm that
elegantly mitigates these issues via an incremental hierarchical structure,
(i.e., via an incremental decision tree). Particularly, we present a piecewise
linear (or nonlinear) regression algorithm that partitions the regressor space
in a data driven manner and learns a linear model at each region. Unlike the
conventional approaches, our algorithm gradually increases the number of
disjoint partitions on the regressor space in a sequential manner according to
the observed data. Through this data driven approach, our algorithm
sequentially and asymptotically achieves the performance of the optimal twice
differentiable regression function for any data sequence with an unknown and
arbitrary length. The computational complexity of the introduced algorithm is
only logarithmic in the data length under certain regularity conditions. We
provide the explicit description of the algorithm and demonstrate the
significant gains for the well-known benchmark real data sets and chaotic
signals.


title: Trapped-ion quantum simulation of tunable-range Heisenberg chains

abstract:
  Quantum-optical techniques allow for generating controllable spin-spin
interactions between ions, making trapped ions an ideal quantum simulator of
Heisenberg chains. A single parameter, the detuning of the Raman coupling,
allows to switch between ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic chains, and to
modify the range of the interactions. On the antiferromagnetic side, the system
can be tuned from an extreme long-range limit, in which any pair of ions
interacts with almost equal strength, to interactions with a $1/r^3$ decay. By
exact diagonalization, we study how a system of up to 20 ions behaves upon
tuning the interactions. We find that it undergoes a transition from a
dimerized state with extremely short-ranged correlations towards a state with
quasi long-range order, that is, algebraically decaying correlations. On the
ferromagnetic side of the system, we demonstrate the feasibility of witnessing
non-locality of quantum correlations.


title: Abstract Ces\`aro Spaces. I. Duality

abstract:
  We study abstract Ces\`aro spaces $CX$, which may be regarded as
generalizations of Ces\`aro sequence spaces $ces_p$ and Ces\`aro function
spaces $Ces_p(I)$ on $I = [0,1]$ or $I = [0,\infty)$, and also as the
description of optimal domain from which Ces\`aro operator acts to $X$. We find
the dual of such spaces in a very general situation. What is however even more
important, we do it in the simplest possible way. Our proofs are more
elementary than the known ones for $ces_p$ and $Ces_p(I)$. This is the point
how our paper should be seen, i.e. not as generalization of known results, but
rather like grasping and exhibiting the general nature of the problem, which is
not so easy visible in the previous publications. Our results show also an
interesting phenomenon that there is a big difference between duality in the
cases of finite and infinite interval.


title: Orbital motion effects in astrometric microlensing

abstract:
  We investigate lens orbital motion in astrometric microlensing and its
detectability. In microlensing events, the light centroid shift in the source
trajectory (the astrometric trajectory) falls off much more slowly than the
light amplification as the source distance from the lens position increases. As
a result, perturbations developed with time such as lens orbital motion can
make considerable deviations in astrometric trajectories. The rotation of the
source trajectory due to lens orbital motion produces a more detectable
astrometric deviation because the astrometric cross-section is much larger than
the photometric one. Among binary microlensing events with detectable
astrometric trajectories, those with stellar-mass black holes have most likely
detectable astrometric signatures of orbital motion. Detecting lens orbital
motion in their astrometric trajectories helps to discover further secondary
components around the primary even without any photometric binarity signature
as well as resolve close/wide degeneracy. For these binary microlensing events,
we evaluate the efficiency of detecting orbital motion in astrometric
trajectories and photometric light curves by performing Monte Carlo simulation.
We conclude that astrometric efficiency is 87.3 per cent whereas the
photometric efficiency is 48.2 per cent.


title:
A low-order decomposition of turbulent channel flow via resolvent
  analysis and convex optimization

abstract:
  We combine resolvent-mode decomposition with techniques from convex
optimization to optimally approximate velocity spectra in a turbulent channel.
The velocity is expressed as a weighted sum of resolvent modes that are
dynamically significant, non-empirical, and scalable with Reynolds number. To
optimally represent DNS data at friction Reynolds number $2003$, we determine
the weights of resolvent modes as the solution of a convex optimization
problem. Using only $12$ modes per wall-parallel wavenumber pair and temporal
frequency, we obtain close agreement with DNS-spectra, reducing the wall-normal
and temporal resolutions used in the simulation by three orders of magnitude.


title: Combined tilings and separated set-systems

abstract:
  In 1998, Leclerc and Zelevinsky introduced the notion of weakly separated
collections of subsets of the ordered $n$-element set $[n]$ (using this notion
to give a combinatorial characterization for quasi-commuting minors of a
quantum matrix). They conjectured the purity of certain natural domains
$D\subseteq 2^{[n]}$ (in particular, of the hypercube $2^{[n]}$ itself, and the
hyper-simplex $\{X\subseteq[n]\colon |X|=m\}$ for $m$ fixed), where $D$ is
called pure if all maximal weakly separated collections in $D$ have the same
cardinality. These conjectures have been answered affirmatively.
  In this paper, generalizing those earlier results, we reveal wider classes of
pure domains in $2^{[n]}$. This is obtained as a consequence of our study of a
novel geometric--combinatorial model for weakly separated set-systems,
so-called \emph{combined (polygonal) tilings} on a zonogon, which yields a new
insight in the area.


title:
Structural stability for the splash singularities of the water waves
  problem

abstract:
  In this paper we show a structural stability result for water waves. The main
motivation for this result is that we would like to exhibit a water wave whose
interface starts as a graph and ends in a splash. Numerical simulations lead to
an approximate solution with the desired behaviour. The stability result will
conclude that near the approximate solution to water waves there is an exact
solution.


title:
Zombie Politics: Evolutionary Algorithms to Counteract the Spread of
  Negative Opinions

abstract:
  This paper is about simulating the spread of opinions in a society and about
finding ways to counteract that spread. To abstract away from potentially
emotionally laden opinions, we instead simulate the spread of a zombie outbreak
in a society. The virus causing this outbreak is different from traditional
approaches: it not only causes a binary outcome (healthy vs infected) but
rather a continuous outcome. To counteract the outbreak, a discrete number of
infection-level specific treatments is available. This corresponds to acts of
mild persuasion or the threats of legal action in the opinion spreading use
case. This paper offers a genetic and a cultural algorithm that find the
optimal mixture of treatments during the run of the simulation. They are
assessed in a number of different scenarios. It is shown, that albeit far from
being perfect, the cultural algorithm delivers superior performance at lower
computational expense.


title: Riffled Independence for Efficient Inference with Partial Rankings

abstract:
  Distributions over rankings are used to model data in a multitude of real
world settings such as preference analysis and political elections. Modeling
such distributions presents several computational challenges, however, due to
the factorial size of the set of rankings over an item set. Some of these
challenges are quite familiar to the artificial intelligence community, such as
how to compactly represent a distribution over a combinatorially large space,
and how to efficiently perform probabilistic inference with these
representations. With respect to ranking, however, there is the additional
challenge of what we refer to as human task complexity users are rarely willing
to provide a full ranking over a long list of candidates, instead often
preferring to provide partial ranking information. Simultaneously addressing
all of these challenges i.e., designing a compactly representable model which
is amenable to efficient inference and can be learned using partial ranking
data is a difficult task, but is necessary if we would like to scale to
problems with nontrivial size. In this paper, we show that the recently
proposed riffled independence assumptions cleanly and efficiently address each
of the above challenges. In particular, we establish a tight mathematical
connection between the concepts of riffled independence and of partial
rankings. This correspondence not only allows us to then develop efficient and
exact algorithms for performing inference tasks using riffled independence
based represen- tations with partial rankings, but somewhat surprisingly, also
shows that efficient inference is not possible for riffle independent models
(in a certain sense) with observations which do not take the form of partial
rankings. Finally, using our inference algorithm, we introduce the first method
for learning riffled independence based models from partially ranked data.


title: Automatic Aggregation by Joint Modeling of Aspects and Values

abstract:
  We present a model for aggregation of product review snippets by joint aspect
identification and sentiment analysis. Our model simultaneously identifies an
underlying set of ratable aspects presented in the reviews of a product (e.g.,
sushi and miso for a Japanese restaurant) and determines the corresponding
sentiment of each aspect. This approach directly enables discovery of
highly-rated or inconsistent aspects of a product. Our generative model admits
an efficient variational mean-field inference algorithm. It is also easily
extensible, and we describe several modifications and their effects on model
structure and inference. We test our model on two tasks, joint aspect
identification and sentiment analysis on a set of Yelp reviews and aspect
identification alone on a set of medical summaries. We evaluate the performance
of the model on aspect identification, sentiment analysis, and per-word
labeling accuracy. We demonstrate that our model outperforms applicable
baselines by a considerable margin, yielding up to 32% relative error reduction
on aspect identification and up to 20% relative error reduction on sentiment
analysis.


title: A Algorithm for the Hamilton Circuit Problem

abstract: We proposed an algorithm that covers some cases of Hamilton Circuit Problem.


title: Toward Supervised Anomaly Detection

abstract:
  Anomaly detection is being regarded as an unsupervised learning task as
anomalies stem from adversarial or unlikely events with unknown distributions.
However, the predictive performance of purely unsupervised anomaly detection
often fails to match the required detection rates in many tasks and there
exists a need for labeled data to guide the model generation. Our first
contribution shows that classical semi-supervised approaches, originating from
a supervised classifier, are inappropriate and hardly detect new and unknown
anomalies. We argue that semi-supervised anomaly detection needs to ground on
the unsupervised learning paradigm and devise a novel algorithm that meets this
requirement. Although being intrinsically non-convex, we further show that the
optimization problem has a convex equivalent under relatively mild assumptions.
Additionally, we propose an active learning strategy to automatically filter
candidates for labeling. In an empirical study on network intrusion detection
data, we observe that the proposed learning methodology requires much less
labeled data than the state-of-the-art, while achieving higher detection
accuracies.


title: Invited review: KPZ. Recent developments via a variational formulation

abstract:
  Recently, a variational approach has been introduced for the paradigmatic
Kardar--Parisi--Zhang (KPZ) equation. Here we review that approach, together
with the functional Taylor expansion that the KPZ nonequilibrium potential
(NEP) admits. Such expansion becomes naturally truncated at third order, giving
rise to a nonlinear stochastic partial differential equation to be regarded as
a gradient-flow counterpart to the KPZ equation. A dynamic renormalization
group analysis at one-loop order of this new mesoscopic model yields the KPZ
scaling relation alpha+z=2, as a consequence of the exact cancelation of the
different contributions to vertex renormalization. This result is quite
remarkable, considering the lower degree of symmetry of this equation, which is
in particular not Galilean invariant. In addition, this scheme is exploited to
inquire about the dynamical behavior of the KPZ equation through a
path-integral approach. Each of these aspects offers novel points of view and
sheds light on particular aspects of the dynamics of the KPZ equation.


title: The realization of higher-dimensional breaking mechanism

abstract:
  We study D-branes on Calabi-Yau threefolds, which are realized through the
blowing up the singularity of orbifold. This D-branes are represented as
sheaves, which can be stable or unstable, what is connected with the transition
in the Teichm$\ddot{u}$ller space. Using the derived category of McKay quiver
representations, which describe D-branes as quivers and open superstrings
between them by Ext groups, we can represent Higgs multiplets by the moduli
space of an open superstring, connecting two McKay quivers. Through the
equivalence between the derived category of coherent sheaves and triangulated
category of distinguished triangles over the abelian category of McKay quivers
we can associate D-branes with quivers or with sheaves, defined on Calabi-Yau.
After the dimensional reduction of the ten-dimensional space-time we can
receive matter content of the four-dimensional space-time. Thus, a
higher-dimensional breaking mechanism is associated with four-dimensional GUT
Higgs multiplets and symmetry breaking higgs mechanism.


title: Towards Unsupervised Learning of Temporal Relations between Events

abstract:
  Automatic extraction of temporal relations between event pairs is an
important task for several natural language processing applications such as
Question Answering, Information Extraction, and Summarization. Since most
existing methods are supervised and require large corpora, which for many
languages do not exist, we have concentrated our efforts to reduce the need for
annotated data as much as possible. This paper presents two different
algorithms towards this goal. The first algorithm is a weakly supervised
machine learning approach for classification of temporal relations between
events. In the first stage, the algorithm learns a general classifier from an
annotated corpus. Then, inspired by the hypothesis of "one type of temporal
relation per discourse, it extracts useful information from a cluster of
topically related documents. We show that by combining the global information
of such a cluster with local decisions of a general classifier, a bootstrapping
cross-document classifier can be built to extract temporal relations between
events. Our experiments show that without any additional annotated data, the
accuracy of the proposed algorithm is higher than that of several previous
successful systems. The second proposed method for temporal relation extraction
is based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. Within EM, we used
different techniques such as a greedy best-first search and integer linear
programming for temporal inconsistency removal. We think that the experimental
results of our EM based algorithm, as a first step toward a fully unsupervised
temporal relation extraction method, is encouraging.


title: Coalition Structure Generation over Graphs

abstract:
  We give the analysis of the computational complexity of coalition structure
generation over graphs. Given an undirected graph G = (N,E) and a valuation
function v : P(N) \to R over the subsets of nodes, the problem is to find a
partition of N into connected subsets, that maximises the sum of the components
values. This problem is generally NP-complete; in particular, it is hard for a
defined class of valuation functions which are independent of disconnected
members - that is, two nodes have no effect on each other's marginal
contribution to their vertex separator. Nonetheless, for all such functions we
provide bounds on the complexity of coalition structure generation over general
and minor-free graphs. Our proof is constructive and yields algorithms for
solving corresponding instances of the problem. Furthermore, we derive linear
time bounds for graphs of bounded treewidth. However, as we show, the problem
remains NP-complete for planar graphs, and hence, for any K_k minor free graphs
where k \geq 5. Moreover, a 3-SAT problem with m clauses can be represented by
a coalition structure generation problem over a planar graph with O(m^2) nodes.
Importantly, our hardness result holds for a particular subclass of valuation
functions, termed edge sum, where the value of each subset of nodes is simply
determined by the sum of given weights of the edges in the induced subgraph.


title: Almost contact curves in trans-Sasakian 3-manifolds

abstract:
  This paper is devoted to the study of curvature and torsion of almost contact
curves in trans-Sasakian 3-Manifolds. The conditions for the frenet curves to
be almost contact curves in trans-Sasakian 3-manifolds have been obtained.


title: Responding to the AIDS epidemic in Angola

abstract:
  The epidemic of HIV in Angola started later and stabilized at lower levels
than elsewhere in southern Africa. With a relatively small population and a
high GDP, Angola is in a good position to intervene decisively to control HIV.
The effectiveness, availability and affordability of anti-retroviral therapy
(ART) make it possible to contemplate ending the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in
Angola. We consider what would have happened without ART, the No ART
counterfactual, the impact on the epidemic if the current roll-out of ART is
maintained, the Current Programme, the impact if coverage is rapidly increased
to reach 90% of people with CD4+ cell counts below 350/micro-litre by 2015 and
HIV-positive pregnant women are all offered ART for life (Option B+), the
Accelerated Programme, and what might be possible under the 2013 guidelines
from the World Health Organization, starting in 2015 and reaching full coverage
of ART by 2018, the Expanded Programme.If Angola is to reach the 2015 targets
in the Presidents Acceleration Plan testing services will need to be expanded.
A regular, uninterrupted supply of drugs will have to be assured. Existing
health staff will need to be strengthened. Community health workers will need
to be mobilized and trained to encourage people to be tested and accept
treatment, to monitor progress and to support people on treatment; this in turn
will help to reduce stigma and discrimination, loss to follow up of people
diagnosed with HIV, and improve adherence for those on treatment. Effective
monitoring and evaluation systems will have to be in place and data collection
will have to be extended and improved to support the development of reliable
estimates of the current and future state of the epidemic, the success of the
programme, levels of viral load suppression for those on ART and the incidence
of infection.


title: Partial spin reversal in magnetic deflagration

abstract:
  The reversal of spins in a magnetic material as they relax toward equilibrium
is accompanied by the release of Zeeman energy which can lead to accelerated
spin relaxation and the formation of a well-defined self-sustained propagating
spin-reversal front known as magnetic deflagration. To date, studies of
Mn$_{12}$-acetate single crystals have focused mainly on deflagration in large
longitudinal magnetic fields and found a fully spin-reversed final state. We
report a systematic study of the effect of transverse magnetic field on
magnetic deflagration and demonstrate that in small longitudinal fields the
final state consists of only partially reversed spins. Further, we measured the
front speed as a function of applied magnetic field. The theory of magnetic
deflagration, together with a modification that takes into account the partial
spin reversal, fits the transverse field dependence of the front speed but not
its dependence on longitudinal field. The most significant result of this study
is the finding of a partially spin-reversed final state, which is evidence that
the spins at the deflagration front are also only partially reversed.


title: A Universal Decoder Relative to a Given Family of Metrics

abstract:
  Consider the following framework of universal decoding suggested in
[MerhavUniversal]. Given a family of decoding metrics and random coding
distribution (prior), a single, universal, decoder is optimal if for any
possible channel the average error probability when using this decoder is
better than the error probability attained by the best decoder in the family up
to a subexponential multiplicative factor. We describe a general universal
decoder in this framework. The penalty for using this universal decoder is
computed. The universal metric is constructed as follows. For each metric, a
canonical metric is defined and conditions for the given prior to be normal are
given. A sub-exponential set of canonical metrics of normal prior can be merged
to a single universal optimal metric. We provide an example where this decoder
is optimal while the decoder of [MerhavUniversal] is not.


title: Flexible behavioral capture-recapture modelling

abstract:
  We develop some new strategies for building and fitting new flexible classes
of parametric capture-recapture models for closed populations which can be used
to address a better understanding of behavioural patterns. We first rely on a
conditional probability parameterization and review how to regard a large
subset of standard capture-recapture models as a suitable partitioning in
equivalence classes of the full set of conditional probability parameters. We
then propose the use of new suitable quantifications of the conditioning binary
partial capture histories as a device for enlarging the scope of flexible
behavioural models and also exploring the range of all possible partitions. We
show how one can easily find unconditional MLE of such models within a
generalized linear model framework. We illustrate the potential of our approach
with the analysis of some known datasets and a simulation study.


title: Extracting a basis with fixed block inside a matrix

abstract:
  Given $U$ an $n\times m$ matrix of rank $n$ and $V$ block of columns inside
$U$, we consider the problem of extracting a block of columns of rank $n$ which
minimize the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the inverse while preserving the block
$V$. This generalizes a previous result of Gluskin-Olevskii, and improves the
estimates when given a "good" block $V$.


title: Nuclear Theory and Science of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams

abstract:
  The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) will be a world-leading laboratory
for the study of nuclear structure, reactions and astrophysics. Experiments
with intense beams of rare isotopes produced at FRIB will guide us toward a
comprehensive description of nuclei, elucidate the origin of the elements in
the cosmos, help provide an understanding of matter in neutron stars, and
establish the scientific foundation for innovative applications of nuclear
science to society. FRIB will be essential for gaining access to key regions of
the nuclear chart, where the measured nuclear properties will challenge
established concepts, and highlight shortcomings and needed modifications to
current theory. Conversely, nuclear theory will play a critical role in
providing the intellectual framework for the science at FRIB, and will provide
invaluable guidance to FRIB's experimental programs. This article overviews the
broad scope of the FRIB theory effort, which reaches beyond the traditional
fields of nuclear structure and reactions, and nuclear astrophysics, to explore
exciting interdisciplinary boundaries with other areas.
  \keywords{Nuclear Structure and Reactions. Nuclear
  Astrophysics. Fundamental Interactions. High Performance
  Computing. Rare Isotopes. Radioactive Beams.

categories: nucl-th astro-ph.CO astro-ph.GA astro-ph.SR nucl-ex


title:
Stripe Domains and First Order Phase Transition in the Vortex Matter of
  Anisotropic High-temperature Superconductors

abstract:
  We report the direct imaging of a novel modulated flux striped domain phase
in a nearly twin-free YBCO crystal. These domains arise from instabilities in
the vortex structure within a narrow region of tilted magnetic fields at small
angles from the in-plane direction. By comparing the experimental and
theoretically derived vortex phase diagrams we infer that the stripe domains
emerge from a first order phase transition of the vortex structure. The size of
domains containing vortices of certain orientations is controlled by the
balance between the vortex stray field energy and the positive energy of the
domain boundaries. Our results confirm the existence of the kinked vortex chain
phase in an anisotropic high temperature superconductor and reveal a sharp
transition in the state of this phase resulting in regular vortex domains.


title: On Phase Noise Suppression in Full-Duplex Systems

abstract:
  Oscillator phase noise has been shown to be one of the main performance
limiting factors in full-duplex systems. In this paper, we consider the problem
of self-interference cancellation with phase noise suppression in full-duplex
systems. The feasibility of performing phase noise suppression in full-duplex
systems in terms of both complexity and achieved gain is analytically and
experimentally investigated. First, the effect of phase noise on full-duplex
systems and the possibility of performing phase noise suppression are studied.
Two different phase noise suppression techniques with a detailed complexity
analysis are then proposed. For each suppression technique, both free-running
and phase locked loop based oscillators are considered. Due to the fact that
full-duplex system performance highly depends on hardware impairments,
experimental analysis is essential for reliable results. In this paper, the
performance of the proposed techniques is experimentally investigated in a
typical indoor environment. The experimental results are shown to confirm the
results obtained from numerical simulations on two different experimental
research platforms. At the end, the tradeoff between the required complexity
and the gain achieved using phase noise suppression is discussed.