title: More problems for Newtonian cosmology

abstract:
  I point out a radical indeterminism in potential-based formulations of
Newtonian gravity once we drop the condition that the potential vanishes at
infinity (as is necessary, and indeed celebrated, in cosmological
applications). This indeterminism, which is well known in theoretical cosmology
but has received little attention in foundational discussions, can be removed
only by specifying boundary conditions at all instants of time, which
undermines the theory's claim to be fully cosmological, i.e., to apply to the
Universe as a whole. A recent alternative formulation of Newtonian gravity due
to Saunders (Philosophy of Science 80 (2013) pp.22-48) provides a conceptually
satisfactory cosmology but fails to reproduce the Newtonian limit of general
relativity in homogenous but anisotropic universes. I conclude that Newtonian
gravity lacks a fully satisfactory cosmological formulation.


title: Electronic structure of (1e,1h) states of carbon nanotube quantum dots

abstract:
  We provide an atomistic tight-binding description of a few carriers confined
in ambipolar (n-p) double quantum dots defined in a semiconducting carbon
nanotube. We focus our attention on the charge state of the system in which
Pauli blockade of the current flow is observed [F. Pei et al., Nat.
Nanotechnol. 7, 630 (2012); E. A. Laird et al., ibid 8, 565 (2013)] with a
single excess electron in the n-dot and a single hole in the p-dot. We use the
configuration interaction approach to determine the spin-valley structure of
the states near the neutrality point and discuss its consequences for the
interdot exchange interaction, the degeneracy of the energy spectrum and the
symmetry of the confined states. We calculate the transition energies lifting
the Pauli blockade and analyze their dependence on the magnetic field vector.
Furthermore, we introduce bending of the nanotube and demonstrate its influence
on the transition energy spectra. The best qualitative agreement with the
experimental data is observed for nanotubes deflected in the gated areas in
which the carrier confinement is induced.


title:
Multi-modal Fusion for Diabetes Mellitus and Impaired Glucose Regulation
  Detection

abstract:
  Effective and accurate diagnosis of Diabetes Mellitus (DM), as well as its
early stage Impaired Glucose Regulation (IGR), has attracted much attention
recently. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) [3], [5] etc. has proved that
tongue, face and sublingual diagnosis as a noninvasive method is a reasonable
way for disease detection. However, most previous works only focus on a single
modality (tongue, face or sublingual) for diagnosis, although different
modalities may provide complementary information for the diagnosis of DM and
IGR. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal classification method to
discriminate between DM (or IGR) and healthy controls. Specially, the tongue,
facial and sublingual images are first collected by using a non-invasive
capture device. The color, texture and geometry features of these three types
of images are then extracted, respectively. Finally, our so-called multi-modal
similar and specific learning (MMSSL) approach is proposed to combine features
of tongue, face and sublingual, which not only exploits the correlation but
also extracts individual components among them. Experimental results on a
dataset consisting of 192 Healthy, 198 DM and 114 IGR samples (all samples were
obtained from Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine)
substantiate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method for the
diagnosis of DM and IGR, compared to the case of using a single modality.


title:
Modeling the Performance of the LSST in Surveying the Near-Earth Object
  Population

abstract:
  We have performed a detailed survey simulation of the LSST performance with
regards to near-Earth objects (NEOs) using the project's current baseline
cadence. The survey shows that if the project is able to reliably generate
linked sets of positions and times (a so-called "tracklet") using two
detections of a given object per night and can link these tracklets into a
track with a minimum of 3 tracklets covering more than a ~12 day length-of-arc,
they would be able to discover 62% of the potentially hazardous asteroids
(PHAs) larger than 140 m in its projected 10 year survey lifetime. This
completeness would be reduced to 58% if the project is unable to implement a
pipeline using the two detection cadence and has to adopt the four detection
cadence more commonly used by existing NEO surveys. When including the
estimated performance from the current operating surveys, assuming these would
continue running until the start of LSST and perhaps beyond, the completeness
fraction for PHAs larger than 140m would be 73% for the baseline cadence and
71% for the four detection cadence. This result is a lower than the estimate of
Ivezic et al. (2007,2014); however it is comparable to that of Jones et al.
(2016) who show completeness ~70$%. We also show that the traditional method of
using absolute magnitude H < 22 mag as a proxy for the population with
diameters larger than 140m results in completeness values that are too high by
~5%. Our simulation makes use of the most recent models of the physical and
orbital properties of the NEO populations, as well as simulated cadences and
telescope performance estimates provided by LSST. We further show that while
neither LSST nor a space-based IR platform like NEOCam individually can
complete the survey for 140m diameter NEOs, the combination of these systems
can achieve that goal after a decade of observation.


title:
General Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Binary Neutron
  Star Mergers with the APR4 Equation of State

abstract:
  We present new results of fully general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic
simulations of binary neutron star (BNS) mergers performed with the Whisky
code. All the models use a piecewise polytropic approximation of the APR4
equation of state for cold matter, together with a 'hybrid' part to incorporate
thermal effects during the evolution. We consider both equal and unequal-mass
models, with total masses such that either a supramassive NS or a black hole is
formed after merger. Each model is evolved with and without a magnetic field
initially confined to the stellar interior. We present the different
gravitational wave (GW) signals as well as a detailed description of the matter
dynamics (magnetic field evolution, ejected mass, post-merger remnant/disk
properties). Our simulations provide new insights into BNS mergers, the
associated GW emission and the possible connection with the engine of short
gamma-ray bursts (both in the 'standard' and in the 'time-reversal' scenarios)
and other electromagnetic counterparts.


title: The Importance of Computing Education Research

abstract:
  Interest in computer science is growing. As a result, computer science (CS)
and related departments are experiencing an explosive increase in undergraduate
enrollments and unprecedented demand from other disciplines for learning
computing. According to the 2014 CRA Taulbee Survey, the number of
undergraduates declaring a computing major at Ph.D. granting departments in the
US has increased 60% from 2011-2014 and the number of degrees granted has
increased by 34% from 2008-2013. However, this growth is not limited to higher
education. New York City, San Francisco and Oakland public schools will soon be
offering computer science to all students at all schools from preschool to 12th
grade, although it will be an elective for high school students. This
unprecedented demand means that CS departments are likely to teach not only
more students in the coming decades, but more diverse students, with more
varied backgrounds, motivations, preparations, and abilities.
  This growth is an unparalleled opportunity to expand the reach of computing
education. However, this growth is also a unique research challenge, as we know
very little about how best to teach our current students, let alone the
students soon to arrive. The burgeoning field of Computing Education Research
(CER) is positioned to address this challenge by answering research questions
such as, how should we teach computer science, from programming to advanced
principles, to a broader and more diverse audience? We argue that computer
science departments should lead the way in establishing CER as a foundational
research area of computer science, discovering the best ways to teach CS, and
inventing the best technologies with which to teach it. This white paper
provides a snapshot of the current state of CER and makes actionable
recommendations for academic leaders to grow CER as a successful research area
in their departments.


abstract:
  The columns of a $m\times n$ ACI-matrix over a field $\mathbb{F}$ are
independent affine subspaces of $\mathbb{F}^m$. An ACI-matrix has constant rank
$\rho$ if all its completions have rank $\rho$. Huang and Zhan (2011)
characterized the $m\times n$ ACI-matrices of constant rank when
$|\mathbb{F}|\geq \min\{m,n+1\}$. We complete their result characterizing the
$m\times n$ ACI-matrices of constant rank over arbitrary fields. Quinlan and
McTigue (2014) proved that every partial matrix of constant rank $\rho$ has a
$\rho\times \rho$ submatrix of constant rank $\rho$ if and only
$|\mathbb{F}|\geq \rho$. We obtain an analogous result for ACI-matrices over
arbitrary fields by introducing the concept of complete irreducibility.


title: Relative Entropy Bounds on Quantum, Private and Repeater Capacities

abstract:
  We find a strong-converse bound on the private capacity of a quantum channel
assisted by unlimited two-way classical communication. The bound is based on
the max-relative entropy of entanglement and its proof uses a new inequality
for the sandwiched R\'{e}nyi divergences based on complex interpolation
techniques. We provide explicit examples of quantum channels where our bound
improves both the transposition bound (on the quantum capacity assisted by
classical communication) and the bound based on the squashed entanglement
introduced by Takeoka et al.. As an application we study a repeater version of
the private capacity assisted by classical communication and provide an example
of a quantum channel with negligible private repeater capacity.


title: Testing quantised inertia on the emdrive

abstract:
  It has been shown that truncated cone-shaped cavities with microwaves
resonating within them move slightly towards their narrow ends (the emdrive).
Standard physics has no explanation for this and an error has not yet been
found. It is shown here that this effect can be predicted by assuming that the
inertial mass of the photons in the cavity is caused by Unruh radiation, whose
wavelengths must fit exactly within the cavity, using a theory already applied
successfully to astrophysical anomalies such as galaxy rotation where the Unruh
waves have to fit within the Hubble scale. In the emdrive this means that more
Unruh waves are allowed at the wide end, leading to a greater inertial mass for
the photons there, and to conserve momentum the cavity must move towards its
narrow end, as observed. The model predicts thrusts of: 3.8, 149, 7.3, 0.23,
0.57, 0.11, 0.64 and 0.02 mN compared with the observed thrusts of: 16, 147, 9,
0.09, 0.05, 0.06, 0.03, and 0.02 mN and predicts that if the axial length is
equal to the diameter of the small end of the cavity, the thrust should be
reversed.


title:
A Noise-Robust Method with Smoothed \ell_1/\ell_2 Regularization for
  Sparse Moving-Source Mapping

abstract:
  The method described here performs blind deconvolution of the beamforming
output in the frequency domain. To provide accurate blind deconvolution,
sparsity priors are introduced with a smooth \ell_1/\ell_2 regularization term.
As the mean of the noise in the power spectrum domain is dependent on its
variance in the time domain, the proposed method includes a variance estimation
step, which allows more robust blind deconvolution. Validation of the method on
both simulated and real data, and of its performance, are compared with two
well-known methods from the literature: the deconvolution approach for the
mapping of acoustic sources, and sound density modeling.


title:
High field magneto-transport in two-dimensional electron gas
  LaAlO3/SrTiO3

abstract:
  Transport properties of the complex oxide LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interface are
investigated under high magnetic field (55T). By rotating the sample with
respect to the magnetic field, the two-dimensional nature of charge transport
is clearly established. Small oscillations of the agnetoresistance with altered
periodicity are observed when plotted versus inverse magnetic field. We
attribute this effect to Rashba spin-orbit coupling which remains consistent
with large negative magnetoresistance when the field is parallel to the sample
plane. A large inconsistency between the carrier density extracted from
Shubnikov-de Haas analysis and from the Hall effect is explained by the
contribution to transport of at least two bands with different mobility.


title: Some Infinitary Paradoxes and Undecidable Sentences in Peano Arithmetic

abstract:
  According to Chaitin, G\"odel once told him "it doesn't matter which paradox
you use [to prove the First Incompleteness Theorem]". In this paper I will
present a few infinitary paradoxes and show how to "translate" them to some
undecidable sentences in Peano arithmetic, like what G\"odel did to the Liar
paradox. The results partly verify G\"odel's claim.


title: Service Intelligence Oriented Distributed Data Stream Integration

abstract:
  Software as a service (SaaS) has recently enjoyed much attention as it makes
the use of software more convenient and cost-effective. At the same time, the
arising of users' expectation for high quality service such as real-time
information or functionality provisioning brings about new challenges: to
satisfy such (near) real-time requirements, real-time monitoring and effective
processing of streaming data is necessary. However, due to the composition
structure and multi-instance property of services, service data streams are
often distributed, hard to synchronize and aggregate. We tackles these
challenges by (1) proposing systematic associate strategies for relating
distributed data; (2) introducing a new small window array mechanism for
aggregating distributed data; (3) setting window parameters based on the
cumulative distribution function (CDF) method; and (4) modeling streaming
operators with queuing models for performance evaluation and prediction.
Experiments show that our approach has good accuracy, completeness and
acceptable performance measurement in processing distributed service data
streams.


title:
GenPerm: A Unified Method for Detecting Non-overlapping and Overlapping
  Communities

abstract:
  Detection of non-overlapping and overlapping communities are essentially the
same problem. However, current algorithms focus either on finding overlapping
or non-overlapping communities. We present a generalized framework that can
identify both non-overlapping and overlapping communities, without any prior
input about the network or its community distribution. To do so, we introduce a
vertex-based metric, GenPerm, that quantifies by how much a vertex belongs to
each of its constituent communities. Our community detection algorithm is based
on maximizing the GenPerm over all the vertices in the network. We demonstrate,
through experiments over synthetic and real-world networks, that GenPerm is
more effective than other metrics in evaluating community structure. Further,
we show that due to its vertex-centric property, GenPerm can be used to unfold
several inferences beyond community detection, such as core-periphery analysis
and message spreading. Our algorithm for maximizing GenPerm outperforms six
state-of-the-art algorithms in accurately predicting the ground-truth labels.
Finally, we discuss the problem of resolution limit in overlapping communities
and demonstrate that maximizing GenPerm can mitigate this problem.


title: Gate tuning of electronic phase transitions in two-dimensional NbSe$_2$

abstract:
  Recent experimental advances in atomically thin transition metal
dichalcogenide (TMD) metals have unveiled a range of interesting phenomena
including the coexistence of charge-density-wave (CDW) order and
superconductivity down to the monolayer limit. The atomic thickness of
two-dimensional (2D) TMD metals also opens up the possibility for control of
these electronic phase transitions by electrostatic gating. Here we demonstrate
reversible tuning of superconductivity and CDW order in model 2D TMD metal
NbSe$_2$ by an ionic liquid gate. A variation up to ~ 50% in the
superconducting transition temperature has been observed, accompanied by a
correlated evolution of the CDW order. We find that the doping dependence of
the superconducting and CDW phase transition in 2D NbSe$_2$ can be understood
by a varying electron-phonon coupling strength induced by the gate-modulated
carrier density and the electronic density of states near the Fermi surface.


title: The Binary Black Hole Model for Mrk 231 Bites the Dust

abstract:
  Mrk 231 is a nearby quasar with an unusually red near-UV-to-optical
continuum, generally explained as heavy reddening by dust (e.g., Leighly et al.
2014). Yan et al. 2015 proposed that Mrk~231 is a milli-parsec black-hole
binary with little intrinsic reddening. We show that if the observed FUV
continuum is intrinsic, as assumed by Yan et al. 2015, it fails by a factor of
about 100 in powering the observed strength of the near-infrared emission
lines, and the thermal near and mid-infrared continuum. In contrast, the line
and continuum strengths are typical for a reddened AGN spectral energy
distribution. We find that the HeI*/Pbeta ratio is sensitive to the spectral
energy distribution for a one-zone model. If this sensitivity is maintained in
general broad-line region models, then this ratio may prove a useful diagnostic
for heavily reddened quasars. Analysis of archival HST STIS and FOC data
revealed evidence that the far-UV continuum emission is resolved on size scales
of ~40 parsecs. The lack of broad absorption lines in the far-UV continuum
might be explained if it were not coincident with the central engine. One
possibility is that it is the central engine continuum reflected from the
receding wind on the far side of the quasar.


title:
Modeling long GRBs using a single shock with relativistic radiation
  hydrodynamics

abstract:
  We explore the possibility that a single relativistic shock, where the gas
dynamics is coupled with radiation, can fit the light curves of long GRBs. For
this we numerically solve the one dimensional relativistic radiation
hydrodynamics equations with a single initial shock. We calculate light curves
due to the evolution of this shock in terms of the velocity of the shock, the
opacity of the gas, mass density and density of radiated energy. We explore how
the variation of each of these parameters provides different features in the
light curves. As examples we include the fitting of two long GRBs.


title: Resource Allocation with Population Dynamics

abstract:
  Many analyses of resource-allocation problems employ simplistic models of the
population. Using the example of a resource-allocation problem of Marecek et
al. [arXiv:1406.7639], we introduce rather a general behavioural model, where
the evolution of a heterogeneous population of agents is governed by a Markov
chain. Still, we are able to show that the distribution of agents across
resources converges in distribution, for suitable means of information
provision, under certain assumptions. The model and proof techniques may have
wider applicability.


title: Arithmetically-free group-gradings of Lie algebras

abstract:
  A Lie algebra L is known to be nilpotent if it admits a grading by (Zp, +)
with support X not containing 0. It is also known that the class of L can be
bounded by some explicit function of |X|. We generalise this and other
classical results to gradings of Lie algebras by arbitrary groups with
arithmetically-free support. We then apply these results to automorphisms of
groups satisfying an identity.


title: Contact 5-manifolds and smooth structures on Stein 4-manifolds

abstract:
  We show that, under a certain condition, contact 5-manifolds can `coarsely'
distinguish smooth structures on compact Stein 4-manifolds via contact open
books. We also give a simple sufficient condition for an infinite family of
Stein 4-manifolds to have an infinite subfamily of pairwise non-diffeomorphic
Stein 4-manifolds. The proofs rely on the adjunction inequality. We remark that
there are various examples of infinitely many pairwise exotic Stein 4-manifolds
whose smooth structures can be distinguished by these results.


title: The Szlenk power type and tensor products of Banach spaces

abstract:
  We prove a formula for the Szlenk power type of the injective tensor product
of Banach spaces with Szlenk index at most $\omega$. We also show that the
Szlenk power type as well as summability of the Szlenk index are separably
determined, and we extend some of our recent results concerning direct sums.


title: An algorithm for 3-SAT problems

abstract:
  This paper presents an algorithm for 3-SAT problems. First, logical formulas
are transformed into elementary algebraic formulas. Second, complex
trigonometric functions are assigned to the variables in the elementary
algebraic formulas, and the sums of the formulas are calculated. The algorithm
outputs the number of satisfying assignments. The computational complexity of
the algorithm is probably polynomial.


title:
The Matrix Generalized Inverse Gaussian Distribution: Properties and
  Applications

abstract:
  While the Matrix Generalized Inverse Gaussian ($\mathcal{MGIG}$) distribution
arises naturally in some settings as a distribution over symmetric positive
semi-definite matrices, certain key properties of the distribution and
effective ways of sampling from the distribution have not been carefully
studied. In this paper, we show that the $\mathcal{MGIG}$ is unimodal, and the
mode can be obtained by solving an Algebraic Riccati Equation (ARE) equation
[7]. Based on the property, we propose an importance sampling method for the
$\mathcal{MGIG}$ where the mode of the proposal distribution matches that of
the target. The proposed sampling method is more efficient than existing
approaches [32, 33], which use proposal distributions that may have the mode
far from the $\mathcal{MGIG}$'s mode. Further, we illustrate that the the
posterior distribution in latent factor models, such as probabilistic matrix
factorization (PMF) [25], when marginalized over one latent factor has the
$\mathcal{MGIG}$ distribution. The characterization leads to a novel Collapsed
Monte Carlo (CMC) inference algorithm for such latent factor models. We
illustrate that CMC has a lower log loss or perplexity than MCMC, and needs
fewer samples.


title:
Approximation forte pour les espaces homog\`enes de groupes semisimples
  sur le corps des fonctions d'une courbe alg\'ebrique complexe

abstract:
  Let K be the function field of a curve over the complex field. Let X be a
homogeneous space of a semisimple linear algebraic group. Strong approximation
holds for X outside any finite nonempty set of places of K. Strong
approximation fails for tori over K.


title: On the congruence subgroup property for GGS-groups

abstract:
  We show that all GGS-groups with non-constant defining vector satisfy the
congruence subgroup property. This provides, for every odd prime $p$, many
examples of finitely generated, residually finite, non-torsion groups whose
profinite completion is a pro-$p$ group, and among them we find torsion-free
groups. This answers a question of Barnea. On the other hand, we prove that the
GGS-group with constant defining vector has an infinite congruence kernel and
is not a branch group.


title:
Bordered Floer homology for manifolds with torus boundary via immersed
  curves

abstract:
  This paper gives a geometric interpretation of bordered Heegaard Floer
homology for manifolds with torus boundary. If $M$ is such a manifold, we show
that the type D structure $\widehat{\mathit{CFD}}$ may be viewed as a set of
immersed curves decorated with local systems in $\partial M$. These
curves-with-decoration are invariants of the underlying three-manifold up to
regular homotopy of the curves and isomorphism of the local systems. Given two
such manifolds and a homeomorphism $h$ between the boundary tori, the Heegaard
Floer homology of the closed manifold obtained by gluing with $h$ is obtained
from the Lagrangian intersection Floer homology of the curve-sets. This
machinery has several applications: We establish that the dimension of
$\widehat{\mathit{HF}}$ decreases under a certain class of degree one maps
(pinches) and we establish that the existence of an essential separating torus
gives rise to a lower bound on the dimension of $\widehat{\mathit{HF}}$. In
particular, it follows that a prime rational homology sphere $Y$ with
$\widehat{\mathit{HF}}(Y)<5$ must be geometric. Other results include a new
proof of Eftekhary's theorem that L-space homology spheres are atoroidal; a
complete characterisation of toroidal L-spaces in terms of gluing data; and a
proof of a conjecture of Hom, Lidman, and Vafaee on satellite L-space knots.


title:
Calculation of displacement correlation tensor indicating vortical
  cooperative motion in two-dimensional colloidal liquids

abstract:
  As an indicator of cooperative motion in a system of Brownian particles that
models two-dimensional colloidal liquids, displacement correlation tensor is
calculated analytically and compared with numerical results. The key idea for
the analytical calculation is to relate the displacement correlation tensor,
which is a kind of four-point space-time correlation, to the Lagrangian
two-time correlation of the deformation gradient tensor. Tensorial treatment of
the statistical quantities, including the displacement correlation itself,
allows capturing the vortical structure of the cooperative motion. The
calculated displacement correlation also implies a negative longtime tail in
the velocity autocorrelation, which is a manifestation of the cage effect. Both
the longitudinal and transverse components of the displacement correlation are
found to be expressible in terms of a similarity variable, suggesting that the
cages are nested to form a self-similar structure in the space-time.


title: Backward-Forward Search for Manipulation Planning

abstract:
  In this paper we address planning problems in high-dimensional hybrid
configuration spaces, with a particular focus on manipulation planning problems
involving many objects. We present the hybrid backward-forward (HBF) planning
algorithm that uses a backward identification of constraints to direct the
sampling of the infinite action space in a forward search from the initial
state towards a goal configuration. The resulting planner is probabilistically
complete and can effectively construct long manipulation plans requiring both
prehensile and nonprehensile actions in cluttered environments.


title: The interaction region of high energy protons

abstract:
  The spatial view of the interaction region of colliding high energy protons
(in terms of impact parameter) is considered. It is shown that the region of
inelastic collisions has a very peculiar shape. It saturates for central
collisions at an energy of 7 TeV. We speculate on the further evolution with
energy, which is contrasted to the "black disk" picture.


title: Ready for Rain? A View from SPEC Research on the Future of Cloud Metrics

abstract:
  In the past decade, cloud computing has emerged from a pursuit for a
service-driven information and communication technology (ICT), into a
signifcant fraction of the ICT market. Responding to the growth of the market,
many alternative cloud services and their underlying systems are currently
vying for the attention of cloud users and providers. Thus, benchmarking them
is needed, to enable cloud users to make an informed choice, and to enable
system DevOps to tune, design, and evaluate their systems. This requires
focusing on old and new system properties, possibly leading to the re-design of
classic benchmarking metrics, such as expressing performance as throughput and
latency (response time), and the design of new, cloud-specififc metrics.
Addressing this requirement, in this work we focus on four system properties:
(i) elasticity of the cloud service, to accommodate large variations in the
amount of service requested, (ii) performance isolation between the tenants of
shared cloud systems, (iii) availability of cloud services and systems, and the
(iv) operational risk of running a production system in a cloud
environment.Focusing on key metrics, for each of these properties we review the
state-of-the-art, then select or propose new metrics together with measurement
approaches. We see the presented metrics as a foundation towards upcoming,
industry-standard, cloud benchmarks.
  Keywords: Cloud Computing; Metrics; Measurement; Benchmarking; Elasticity;
Isolation; Performance; Service Level Objective; Availability; Operational
Risk.


title: Optimal Assumptions for Synthesis

abstract:
  Controller synthesis is the process of constructing a correct system
automatically from its specification. This often requires assumptions about the
behaviour of the environment. It is difficult for the designer to identify the
assumptions that ensures the existence of a correct controller, and doing so
manually can lead to assumptions that are stronger than necessary. As a
consequence the generated controllers are suboptimal in terms of generality and
robustness. In this work, given a specification, we identify the weakest
assumptions that ensures the existence of a controller. We also consider two
important classes of assumptions: the ones that can be ensured by the
environment and assumptions that speaks only about inputs of the systems. We
show that optimal assumptions correspond to strongly winning strategies,
admissible strategies and remorsefree strategies respectively. Based on this
correspondence, we propose an algorithm for computing optimal assumptions that
can be ensured by the environment.


title:
Ab initio determination of spin Hamiltonians with anisotropic exchange
  interactions: the case of the pyrochlore ferromagnet Lu$_2$V$_2$O$_7$

abstract:
  We present a general framework for deriving effective spin Hamiltonians of
correlated magnetic systems based on a combination of relativistic ab initio
density functional theory calculations (DFT), exact diagonalization of a
generalized Hubbard Hamiltonian on finite clusters and spin projections onto
the low-energy subspace. A key motivation is to determine anisotropic bilinear
exchange couplings in materials of interest. As an example, we apply this
method to the pyrochlore Lu$_2$V$_2$O$_7$ where the vanadium ions form a
lattice of corner-sharing spin-1/2 tetrahedra. In this compound, anisotropic
Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interactions (DMI) play an essential role in inducing a
magnon Hall effect. We obtain quantitative estimates of the nearest-neighbor
Heisenberg exchange, the DMI, and the symmetric part of the anisotropic
exchange tensor. Finally, we compare our results with experimental ones on the
Lu$_2$V$_2$O$_7$ compound.


title:
The naive approach for constructing the derived category of a
  $d$-abelian category fails

abstract:
  Let $k$ be a field. In this short note we give an example of a $2$-abelian
$k$-category, realized as a $2$-cluster-tilting subcategory of the category
$\operatorname{mod}\,A$ of finite dimensional (right) $A$-modules over a finite
dimensional $k$-algebra $A$, for which the naive idea for constructing its
"bounded derived category" as $2$-cluster-tilting subcategory of the bounded
derived category of $\operatorname{mod}\,A$ cannot work.


title: Q-enhanced racetrack micro-resonators

abstract:
  A $Q$-enhancement strategy for racetrack microresonators is put forward. The
design is based on the modification of the resonator geometry in order to
mitigate the two main sources of radiation loss in the presence of curved
waveguides: the discontinuities at the junctions between straight waveguides
and the bent sections, and the continuous loss at the curved waveguide sectors.
At the same time, the modifications of the geometry do not affect the
versatility of coupling of racetrack resonators in integrated optical circuits,
which is their main advantage over ring microresonators. The proposal is
applied to the design of high-$Q$ racetrack resonators for the silicon nitride
CMOS-compatible platform having bent radii amenable for large-scale photonic
integration. Numerical calculations show over $100\%$ improvement of the $Q$
factor in $\text{Si}_3\text{N}_4/\text{SiO}_2$ resonators.


title: A precise measurement of the $B^0$ meson oscillation frequency

abstract:
  The oscillation frequency, $\Delta m_d$, of $B^0$ mesons is measured using
semileptonic decays with a $D^-$ or $D^{*-}$ meson in the final state, in a
data sample of $pp$ collisions collected by the LHCb detector corresponding to
an integrated luminosity of 3.0$\mbox{fb}^{-1}$. A combination of the two decay
modes gives $\Delta m_d = (505.0 \pm 2.1 \pm 1.0) \rm \,ns^{-1}$, where the
first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic. This is the most
precise single measurement of this parameter. It is compatible with the current
world average and has similar precision.


title:
Memory Effect in Upper Bound of Heat Flux Induced by Quantum
  Fluctuations

abstract:
  Thermodynamic behaviors in a quantum Brownian motion coupled to a classical
heat bath is studied. We then define a heat operator by generalizing the
stochastic energetics and show the energy balance (first law) and the upper
bound of the expectation value of the heat operator (second law). We further
find that this upper bound depends on the memory effect induced by quantum
fluctuations and hence the maximum extractable work can be qualitatively
modified in quantum thermodynamics.


title: Novel size effects on magneto-optics in the spherical quantum dots

abstract:
  We embark on investigating the magneto-optical absorption in {\em spherical}
quantum dots {\em completely} confined by a harmonic potential and exposed to
an applied magnetic field in the symmetric gauge. This is done within the
framework of Bohm-Pines' RPA that enables us to derive and discuss the full
Dyson equation that takes proper account of the Coulomb interactions.
Intensifying the confinement or magnetic field and reducing the dot-size yields
a blue-shift in the absorption peaks. However, the size effects are seen to be
predominant in this role. The magnetic field tends to maximize the localization
of the particle, but leaves the peak position of the radial distribution
intact. The intra-Landau level transitions are forbidden.


title:
Lattice Boltzmann Method Simulation of 3-D Melting Using Double MRT
  Model with Interfacial Tracking Method

abstract:
  Three-dimensional melting problems are investigated numerically with Lattice
Boltzmann method (LBM). Regarding algorithm's accuracy and stability,
Multiple-Relaxation-Time (MRT) models are employed to simplify the collision
term in LBM. Temperature and velocity fields are solved with double
distribution functions, respectively. 3-D melting problems are solved with
double MRT models for the first time in this article. The key point for the
numerical simulation of a melting problem is the methods to obtain the location
of the melting front and this article uses interfacial tracking method. The
interfacial tracking method combines advantages of both deforming and fixed
grid approaches. The location of the melting front was obtained by calculating
the energy balance at the solid-liquid interface. Various 3-D conduction
controlled melting problems are solved firstly to verify the numerical method.
Liquid fraction tendency and temperature distribution obtained from numerical
methods agree with the analytical results well. The proposed double MRT model
with interfacial tracking method is valid to solve 3-D melting problems.
Different 3-D convection controlled melting problems are then solved with the
proposed numerical method. Various locations of the heat surface have different
melting front moving velocities, due to the natural convection effects.
Rayleigh number's effects to the 3-D melting process is discussed.


title: Gravity On-shell Diagrams

abstract:
  We study on-shell diagrams for gravity theories with any number of
supersymmetries and find a compact Grassmannian formula in terms of edge
variables of the graphs. Unlike in gauge theory where the analogous form
involves only $\dlog$-factors, in gravity there is a non-trivial numerator as
well as higher degree poles in the edge variables. Based on the structure of
the Grassmannian formula for $\N=8$ supergravity we conjecture that gravity
loop amplitudes also possess similar properties. In particular, we find that
there are only logarithmic singularities on cuts with finite loop momentum,
poles at infinity are present and loop amplitudes show special behavior on
certain collinear cuts. We demonstrate on 1-loop and 2-loop examples that the
behavior on collinear cuts is a highly non-trivial property which requires
cancellations between all terms contributing to the amplitude.


title:
Optimal Experimental Designs for Estimating Henry's Law Constants via
  the Method of Phase Ratio Variation

abstract:
  When measuring Henry's Law constants ($k_H$) using the phase ratio method via
headspace gas chromatography (GC), the value of $k_H$ of the compound under
investigation is calculated from the ratio of the slope to the intercept of a
linear regression of the the inverse GC response versus the ratio of gas to
liquid volumes of a series of vials drawn from the same parent solution. Thus,
an experimenter will collect measurements consisting of the independent
variable (the gas/liquid volume ratio) and dependent variable (the inverse GC
peak area). There is a choice of values of the independent variable during
measurement. A review of the literature found that the common approach is a
simple uniformly spacing of the liquid volumes. We present an optimal
experimental design which estimates $k_H$ with minimum error and provides
multiple means for building confidence intervals for such estimates. We
illustrate efficiency improvements of our new design with an example measuring
the $k_H$ for napthalene in aqueous solution as well as simulations on previous
studies. The designs can be easily computed using our open source software
optDesignSlopeInt, an R package on CRAN. We also discuss applicability of this
method to other fields.


title:
Magneto-optical absorption in semiconducting spherical quantum dots:
  Influence of the dot-size, confining potential, and magnetic field

abstract:
  Here we embark on a thorough investigation of the magneto-optical absorption
in semiconducting {\em spherical} quantum dots characterized by a confining
harmonic potential and an applied magnetic field in the symmetric gauge. This
is done within the framework of Bohm-Pines' random-phase approximation that
enables us to derive and discuss the full Dyson equation that takes proper
account of the Coulomb interactions. As an application of our theoretical
strategy, we compute various single-particle and many-particle phenomena such
as the Fock-Darwin spectrum; Fermi energy; magneto-optical transitions;
probability distribution; and the magneto-optical absorption in the quantum
dots. It is observed that the role of an applied magnetic field on the
absorption spectrum is comparable to that of a confining potential. Increasing
(decreasing) the strength of the magnetic field or the confining potential is
found to be analogous to shrinking (expanding) the size of the quantum dots:
resulting into a blue (red) shift in the absorption spectrum. The Fermi energy
diminishes with both increasing magnetic-field and dot-size; and exhibits
saw-tooth-like oscillations at large values of field or dot-size. Unlike
laterally confined quantum dots, both (upper and lower) magneto-optical
transitions survive even in the extreme instances. However, the intra-Landau
level transitions are seen to be forbidden. The spherical quantum dots have an
edge over the strictly two-dimensional quantum dots in that the additional
(magnetic) quantum number makes the physics richer (but complex). A deeper
grasp of the Coulomb blockade, quantum coherence, and entanglement can lead to
a better insight into promising applications involving lasers, detectors,
storage devices, and quantum computing.


title:
Joint alignment of multiple protein-protein interaction networks via
  convex optimization

abstract:
  Motivation: High-throughput experimental techniques have been producing more
and more protein-protein interaction (PPI) data. PPI network alignment greatly
benefits the understanding of evolutionary relationship among species, helps
identify conserved sub-networks and provides extra information for functional
annotations. Although a few methods have been developed for multiple PPI
network alignment, the alignment quality is still far away from perfect and
thus, new network alignment methods are needed. Result: In this paper, we
present a novel method, denoted as ConvexAlign, for joint alignment of multiple
PPI networks by convex optimization of a scoring function composed of sequence
similarity, topological score and interaction conservation score. In contrast
to existing methods that generate multiple alignments in a greedy or
progressive manner, our convex method optimizes alignments globally and
enforces consistency among all pairwise alignments, resulting in much better
alignment quality. Tested on both synthetic and real data, our experimental
results show that ConvexAlign outperforms several popular methods in producing
functionally coherent alignments. ConvexAlign even has a larger advantage over
the others in aligning real PPI networks. ConvexAlign also finds a few
conserved complexes among 5 species which cannot be detected by the other
methods.


title:
Homogenization of layered materials with rigid components in single-slip
  finite crystal plasticity

abstract:
  We determine the effective behavior of a class of composites in finite-strain
crystal plasticity, based on a variational model for materials made of fine
parallel layers of two types. While one component is completely rigid in the
sense that it admits only local rotations, the other one is softer featuring a
single active slip system with linear self-hardening. As a main result, we
obtain explicit homogenization formulas by means of {\Gamma}-convergence. Due
to the anisotropic nature of the problem, the findings depend critically on the
orientation of the slip direction relative to the layers, leading to three
qualitatively different regimes that involve macroscopic shearing and blocking
effects. The technical difficulties in the proofs are rooted in the intrinsic
rigidity of the model, which translates into a non-standard variational problem
constraint by non-convex partial differential inclusions. The proof of the
lower bound requires a careful analysis of the admissible microstructures and a
new asymptotic rigidity result, whereas the construction of recovery sequences
relies on nested laminates.


title: D branes in background fluxes and Nielsen-Olesen instabilities

abstract:
  In quantum field theory, charged particles with spin $\geq 1$ may become
tachyonic in the present of magnetic fluxes above some critical field,
signaling an instability of the vacuum. The phenomenon is generic, in
particular, similar instabilities are known to exist in open and closed string
theory, where a spinning string state can become tachyonic above a critical
field. In compactifications involving RR fluxes $F_{p+2}$, the quantum states
which could become tachyonic by the same Nielsen-Olesen mechanism are Dp
branes. By constructing an appropriate background with RR magnetic flux that
takes into account back-reaction, we identify the possible tachyonic Dp brane
states and compute the formula for the energy spectrum in a sector. More
generally, we argue that in any background RR magnetic flux, there are high
spin Dp quantum states which become very light at critical fields.


title:
From perturbative calculations of the QCD static potential towards
  four-loop pole-running heavy quarks masses relation

abstract:
  The summary of the available semi-analytical results for the three-loop
corrections to the QCD static potential and for the $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^4)$
contributions to the ratio of the running and pole heavy quark masses are
presented. The procedure of the determination of the dependence of the
four-loop contribution to the pole-running heavy quarks mass ratio on the
number of quarks flavours, based on application of the least squares method is
described. The necessity of clarifying the reason of discrepancy between the
numerical uncertainties of the $\alpha_s^4$ coefficients in the mass ratio,
obtained by this mathematical method by the direct numerical calculations is
emphasised.


title:
Quantum correlated cluster mean-field theory applied to the transverse
  Ising model

abstract:
  Mean-field theory (MFT) is one of the main available tools for analytical
calculations entailed in investigations regarding many-body systems. Recently,
there have been an urge of interest in ameliorating this kind of method, mainly
with the aim of incorporating geometric and correlation properties of these
systems. The correlated cluster MFT (CCMFT) is an improvement that succeeded
quite well in doing that for classical spin systems. Nevertheless, even the
CCMFT presents some deficiencies when applied to quantum systems. In this
article, we address this issue by proposing the quantum CCMFT (QCCMFT), which,
in contrast to its former approach, uses general quantum states in its
self-consistent mean-field equations. We apply the introduced QCCMFT to the
transverse Ising model in honeycomb, square, and simple cubic lattices and
obtain fairly good results both for the Curie temperature of thermal phase
transition and for the critical field of quantum phase transition. Actually,
our results match those obtained via exact solutions, series expansions or
Monte Carlo simulations.


title:
Gravity at the horizon: on relativistic effects, CMB-LSS correlations
  and ultra-large scales in Horndeski's theory

abstract:
  We address the impact of consistent modifications of gravity on the largest
observable scales, focusing on relativistic effects in galaxy number counts and
the cross-correlation between the matter large scale structure (LSS)
distribution and the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Our analysis applies to
a very broad class of general scalar-tensor theories encoded in the Horndeski
Lagrangian and is fully consistent on linear scales, retaining the full
dynamics of the scalar field and not assuming quasi-static evolution. As
particular examples we consider self-accelerating Covariant Galileons,
Brans-Dicke theory and parameterizations based on the effective field theory of
dark energy, using the \hiclass\, code to address the impact of these models on
relativistic corrections to LSS observables. We find that especially effects
which involve integrals along the line of sight (lensing convergence, time
delay and the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect -- ISW) can be considerably
modified, and even lead to $\mathcal{O}(1000\%)$ deviations from General
Relativity in the case of the ISW effect for Galileon models, for which
standard probes such as the growth function only vary by $\mathcal{O}(10\%)$.
These effects become dominant when correlating galaxy number counts at
different redshifts and can lead to $\sim 50\%$ deviations in the total signal
that might be observable by future LSS surveys. Because of their integrated
nature, these deep-redshift cross-correlations are sensitive to modifications
of gravity even when probing eras much before dark energy domination. We
further isolate the ISW effect using the cross-correlation between LSS and CMB
temperature anisotropies and use current data to further constrain Horndeski
models (abridged).


title:
Accumulative magnetic switching of ultra-high-density recording media by
  circularly polarized light

abstract:
  Manipulation of the magnetization by external energies other than magnetic
field, such as spin-polarized current1-4, electric voltage5,6 and circularly
polarized light7-11 gives a paradigm shift in magnetic nanodevices.
Magnetization control of ferromagnetic materials only by circularly polarized
light has received increasing attention both as a fundamental probe of the
interactions of light and magnetism but also for future high-density magnetic
recording technologies. Here we show that for granular FePt films, designed for
ultrahigh-density recording, the optical magnetic switching by circularly
polarized light is an accumulative effect from multiple optical pulses. We
further show that deterministic switching of high anisotropy materials by the
combination of circularly polarized light and modest external magnetic fields,
thus revealing a pathway towards technological implementation.


title:
From Pixels to Sentiment: Fine-tuning CNNs for Visual Sentiment
  Prediction

abstract:
  Visual multimedia have become an inseparable part of our digital social
lives, and they often capture moments tied with deep affections. Automated
visual sentiment analysis tools can provide a means of extracting the rich
feelings and latent dispositions embedded in these media. In this work, we
explore how Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), a now de facto computational
machine learning tool particularly in the area of Computer Vision, can be
specifically applied to the task of visual sentiment prediction. We accomplish
this through fine-tuning experiments using a state-of-the-art CNN and via
rigorous architecture analysis, we present several modifications that lead to
accuracy improvements over prior art on a dataset of images from a popular
social media platform. We additionally present visualizations of local patterns
that the network learned to associate with image sentiment for insight into how
visual positivity (or negativity) is perceived by the model.


title:
Why a magnetized quantum wire can act as an optical amplifier: A short
  survey

abstract:
  This article reviews the fundamental issues associated with the
magnetoplasmon excitations investigated in a semiconducting quantum wire
characterized by a harmonic confining potential and subjected to an applied
(perpendicular) magnetic field. We embark on the charge-density excitations in
a two-subband model within the framework of Bohm-Pines's random-phase
approximation. The problem involves two length scales: ${\it
l}_0=\sqrt{\hbar/m^*\omega_0}$ and ${\it l}_c=\sqrt{\hbar/m^*\omega_c}$, which
characterize the strengths of the confinement and the magnetic field ($B$).
Essentially, we focus on the device aspects of the intersubband collective
(magnetoroton) excitation, which observes a negative group velocity between
maxon and roton. Consequently, it leads to tachyon-like (superluminal) behavior
without one's having to introduce the negative energies. Existence of the
negative group velocity is a clear manifestation of a medium with population
inversion brought about due to a metastable state caused by the magnetic field
that satisfies the condition $B> B_{th}$; $B_{th}$ being the threshold value
below which the magnetoroton does not exist. The interest in negative group
velocity is based on anomalous dispersion in a medium with inverted population,
so that gain instead of absorption occurs at the frequencies of interest. A
medium with an inverted population has the remarkable ability of amplifying a
small optical signal of definite wavelength, i.e., it can serve as an {\em
active} laser medium. An extensive scrutiny of the gain coefficient suggests an
interesting and important application: the electronic device designed on the
basis of such magnetoroton modes can act as an optical amplifier. Examining the
magnetic-field dependence of the life-time of magnetorotons leads us to infer
that relatively smaller magnetic fields are optimal.


title: Gromov-Witten Theory of Toric Birational Transformations

abstract:
  We investigate the effect of a general toric wall crossing on genus zero
Gromov-Witten theory. Given two complete toric orbifolds $X_+$ and $X_-$
related by wall crossing under variation of GIT, we prove that their respective
$I$-functions are related by linear transformation and asymptotic expansion. We
use this comparison to deduce a similar result for birational complete
intersections in $X_+$ and $X_-$. This extends the work of the previous authors
in Acosta-Shoemaker to the case of complete intersections in toric varieties,
and generalizes some of the results of Coates-Iritani-Jiang on the crepant
transformation conjecture to the setting of non-zero discrepancy.


title: Structured Matrix Recovery via the Generalized Dantzig Selector

abstract:
  In recent years, structured matrix recovery problems have gained considerable
attention for its real world applications, such as recommender systems and
computer vision. Much of the existing work has focused on matrices with
low-rank structure, and limited progress has been made matrices with other
types of structure. In this paper we present non-asymptotic analysis for
estimation of generally structured matrices via the generalized Dantzig
selector under generic sub-Gaussian measurements. We show that the estimation
error can always be succinctly expressed in terms of a few geometric measures
of suitable sets which only depend on the structure of the underlying true
matrix. In addition, we derive the general bounds on these geometric measures
for structures characterized by unitarily invariant norms, which is a large
family covering most matrix norms of practical interest. Examples are provided
to illustrate the utility of our theoretical development.


title: Temporal asymptotics for fractional parabolic Anderson model

abstract:
  In this paper, we consider fractional parabolic equation of the form $
\frac{\partial u}{\partial t}=-(-\Delta)^{\frac{\alpha}{2}}u+u\dot W(t,x)$,
where $-(-\Delta)^{\frac{\alpha}{2}}$ with $\alpha\in(0,2]$ is a fractional
Laplacian and $\dot W$ is a Gaussian noise colored in space and time. The
precise moment Lyapunov exponents for the Stratonovich solution and the
Skorohod solution are obtained by using a variational inequality and a
Feynman-Kac type large deviation result for space-time Hamiltonians driven by
$\alpha$-stable process. As a byproduct, we obtain the critical values for
$\theta$ and $\eta$ such that $\mathbb{E}\exp\left(\theta\left(\int_0^1
\int_0^1 |r-s|^{-\beta_0}\gamma(X_r-X_s)drds\right)^\eta\right)$ is finite,
where $X$ is $d$-dimensional symmetric $\alpha$-stable process and $\gamma(x)$
is $|x|^{-\beta}$ or $\prod_{j=1}^d|x_j|^{-\beta_j}$.


title: Tuning quantum measurements to control chaos

abstract:
  Environment-induced decoherence has long been recognised as being of crucial
importance in the study of chaos in quantum systems. In particular, the exact
form and strength of the system-environment interaction play a major role in
the quantum-to-classical transition of chaotic systems. In this work we focus
on the effect of varying monitoring strategies, i.e. for a given decoherence
model and a fixed environmental coupling, there is still freedom on how to
monitor a quantum system. We show here that there is a region between the deep
quantum regime and the classical limit where the choice of the monitoring
parameter allows one to control the complex behaviour of the system, leading to
either the emergence or suppression of chaos. Our work shows that this is a
result from the interplay between quantum interference effects induced by the
nonlinear dynamics and the effectiveness of the decoherence for different
measurement schemes.


title:
Front propagation versus bulk relaxation in the annealing dynamics of a
  kinetically constrained model of ultrastable glasses

abstract:
  Glasses prepared by physical vapour deposition have been shown to be
remarkably more stable than those prepared by standard cooling protocols, with
properties that appear to be similar to systems aged for extremely long times.
When subjected to a rapid rise in temperature, ultrastable glasses anneal
towards the liquid in a qualitatively different manner than ordinary glasses,
with the seeming competition of different timescales and lengthscales. We
numerically reproduce the phenomenology of ultrastable glass annealing with a
kinetically constrained model, a three dimensional East model with soft
constraints, in a setting where the bulk is in an ultrastable configuration and
a free surface is permanently excited. Annealing towards the liquid state is
given by the competition between the ballistic propagation of a front from the
free surface and a much slower nucleation-like relaxation in the bulk. The
crossover between these mechanisms also explains the change in behaviour with
film thickness seen experimentally.


title: Some consequences of the Firoozbakht's conjecture

abstract:
  In this paper we present the statement of the Firoozbakht's conjecture, some
of its consequences if it is proved and we show a consequence of Zhang's
theorem concerning the Firoozbakht's conjecture.


title:
On dynamical net-charge fluctuations within a hadron resonance gas
  approach

abstract:
  The dynamical net-charge fluctuations (${\nu}_{dyn}$) in different particle
ratios $K/{\pi}$, $K/p$, and $p/{\pi}$ are calculated from the hadron resonance
gas (HRG) model and compared with STAR central Au+Au collisions at
$\sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7-200~$GeV and NA49 central Pb+Pb collisions at
$\sqrt{s_{NN}}=6.3-17.3~$GeV. The three charged-particle ratios ($K/{\pi}$,
$K/p$, and $p/{\pi}$) are determined as total and average of opposite and
average of same charges. We find an excellent agreement between the HRG
calculations and the experimental measurements, especially from STAR beam
energy scan (BES) program, while the strange particles in the NA49 experiment
at lower Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) energies are not reproduced by the HRG
approach. We conclude that the utilized HRG version seems to take into
consideration various types of correlations including strong interactions
through the heavy resonances and their decays especially at BES energies.


title: GPU-FV: Realtime Fisher Vector and Its Applications in Video Monitoring

abstract:
  Fisher vector has been widely used in many multimedia retrieval and visual
recognition applications with good performance. However, the computation
complexity prevents its usage in real-time video monitoring. In this work, we
proposed and implemented GPU-FV, a fast Fisher vector extraction method with
the help of modern GPUs. The challenge of implementing Fisher vector on GPUs
lies in the data dependency in feature extraction and expensive memory access
in Fisher vector computing. To handle these challenges, we carefully designed
GPU-FV in a way that utilizes the computing power of GPU as much as possible,
and applied optimizations such as loop tiling to boost the performance. GPU-FV
is about 12 times faster than the CPU version, and 50\% faster than a
non-optimized GPU implementation. For standard video input (320*240), GPU-FV
can process each frame within 34ms on a model GPU. Our experiments show that
GPU-FV obtains a similar recognition accuracy as traditional FV on VOC 2007 and
Caltech 256 image sets. We also applied GPU-FV for realtime video monitoring
tasks and found that GPU-FV outperforms a number of previous works. Especially,
when the number of training examples are small, GPU-FV outperforms the recent
popular deep CNN features borrowed from ImageNet. The code can be downloaded
from the following link https://bitbucket.org/mawenjing/gpu-fv.


title:
Noisy 1-Bit Compressed Sensing Embeddings Enjoy a Restricted Isometry
  Property

abstract:
  We investigate the sign-linear embeddings of 1-bit compressed sensing given
by Gaussian measurements. One can give short arguments concerning a Restricted
Isometry Property of such maps using Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of sparse
hemispheres. This approach has a natural extension to the presence of additive
white noise prior to quantization. Noisy one-bit mappings are shown to satisfy
an RIP when the metric on the sphere is given by the noise.


title: Higher Nakayama algebras I: Construction

abstract:
  We introduce higher dimensional analogues of the Nakayama algebras from the
viewpoint of Iyama's higher Auslander--Reiten theory. More precisely, for each
Nakayama algebra $A$ and each positive integer $d$, we construct a finite
dimensional algebra $A^{(d)}$ having a distinguished $d$-cluster-tilting
$A^{(d)}$-module whose endomorphism algebra is a higher dimensional analogue of
the Auslander algebra of $A$. We also construct higher dimensional analogues of
the mesh category of type $\mathbb{ZA}_\infty$ and the tubes.


title: Invariants for Turaev genus one links

abstract:
  The Turaev genus defines a natural filtration on knots where Turaev genus
zero knots are precisely the alternating knots. We show that the signature of a
Turaev genus one knot is determined by the number of components in its all-A
Kauffman state, the number of positive crossings, and its determinant. We also
show that either the leading or trailing coefficient of the Jones polynomial of
a Turaev genus one link (or an almost alternating link) has absolute value one.


title: K-homology and Fredholm operators I: Dirac Operators

abstract:
  This is an expository paper which gives a proof of the Atiyah-Singer index
theorem for Dirac operators, presenting the theorem as a computation of the
K-homology of a point. This paper and its follow up ("K-homology and index
theory II: Elliptic Operators") was written to clear up basic points about
index theory that are generally accepted as valid, but for which no proof has
been published. Some of these points are needed for the solution of the
Heisenberg-elliptic index problem in our paper "K-homology and index theory on
contact manifolds" Acta. Math. 2014.


title:
Averaged universe confronted with cosmological observations: A fully
  covariant approach

abstract:
  One of the outstanding problems in general relativistic cosmology is that of
the averaging. That is, how the lumpy universe that we observe at small scales
averages out to a smooth Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model. The
root of the problem is that averaging does not commute with the Einstein
equations that govern the dynamics of the model. This leads to the well-know
question of backreaction in cosmology. In this work, we approach the problem
using the covariant framework of Macroscopic Gravity (MG). We use its
cosmological solution with a flat FLRW macroscopic background where the result
of averaging cosmic inhomogeneities has been encapsulated into a backreaction
density parameter denoted $\Omega_\mathcal{A}$. We constrain this averaged
universe using available cosmological data sets of expansion and growth
including, for the first time, a full CMB analysis from Planck temperature
anisotropy and polarization data, the supernovae data from Union 2.1, the
galaxy power spectrum from WiggleZ, the weak lensing tomography shear-shear
cross correlations from the CFHTLenS survey and the baryonic acoustic
oscillation data from 6Df, SDSS DR7 and BOSS DR9. We find that $-0.0155 \le
\Omega_\mathcal{A} \le 0$ (at the 68\% CL) thus providing a tight upper-bound
on the backreaction term. We also find that the term is strongly correlated
with cosmological parameters such $\Omega_\Lambda$, $\sigma_8$ and $H_0$. While
small, a backreaction density parameter of a few percent should be kept in
consideration along with other systematics for precision cosmology.


title: On Parallel Transport in Wasserstein Space

abstract:
  In this short note, we would like to give a construction of parallel
transport for tangent cones lying in the interior of a geodesic in Wasserstein
space. We give a complete proof for the linear part of the tangent space, and
show that a construction for the full tangent cones follows from some natural
lemmas on Wasserstein space. It can easily be shown that our construction is
equivalent to those used in the previous literature on this subject.


title: Counting Everyday Objects in Everyday Scenes

abstract:
  We are interested in counting the number of instances of object classes in
natural, everyday images. Previous counting approaches tackle the problem in
restricted domains such as counting pedestrians in surveillance videos. Counts
can also be estimated from outputs of other vision tasks like object detection.
In this work, we build dedicated models for counting designed to tackle the
large variance in counts, appearances, and scales of objects found in natural
scenes. Our approach is inspired by the phenomenon of subitizing - the ability
of humans to make quick assessments of counts given a perceptual signal, for
small count values. Given a natural scene, we employ a divide and conquer
strategy while incorporating context across the scene to adapt the subitizing
idea to counting. Our approach offers consistent improvements over numerous
baseline approaches for counting on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and COCO datasets.
Subsequently, we study how counting can be used to improve object detection. We
then show a proof of concept application of our counting methods to the task of
Visual Question Answering, by studying the `how many?' questions in the VQA and
COCO-QA datasets.


title:
An Unbiased Data Collection and Content Exploitation/Exploration
  Strategy for Personalization

abstract:
  One of missions for personalization systems and recommender systems is to
show content items according to users' personal interests. In order to achieve
such goal, these systems are learning user interests over time and trying to
present content items tailoring to user profiles. Recommending items according
to users' preferences has been investigated extensively in the past few years,
mainly thanks for the popularity of Netflix competition. In a real setting,
users may be attracted by a subset of those items and interact with them, only
leaving partial feedbacks to the system to learn in the next cycle, which leads
to significant biases into systems and hence results in a situation where user
engagement metrics cannot be improved over time. The problem is not just for
one component of the system. The data collected from users is usually used in
many different tasks, including learning ranking functions, building user
profiles and constructing content classifiers. Once the data is biased, all
these downstream use cases would be impacted as well. Therefore, it would be
beneficial to gather unbiased data through user interactions. Traditionally,
unbiased data collection is done through showing items uniformly sampling from
the content pool. However, this simple scheme is not feasible as it risks user
engagement metrics and it takes long time to gather user feedbacks. In this
paper, we introduce a user-friendly unbiased data collection framework, by
utilizing methods developed in the exploitation and exploration literature. We
discuss how the framework is different from normal multi-armed bandit problems
and why such method is needed. We layout a novel Thompson sampling for
Bernoulli ranked-list to effectively balance user experiences and data
collection. The proposed method is validated from a real bucket test and we
show strong results comparing to old algorithms


title:
Millimeter Transient Point Sources in the SPTpol 100 Square Degree
  Survey

abstract:
  The millimeter transient sky is largely unexplored, with measurements limited
to follow-up of objects detected at other wavelengths. High-angular-resolution
telescopes designed for measurement of the cosmic microwave background offer
the possibility to discover new, unknown transient sources in this band,
particularly the afterglows of unobserved gamma-ray bursts. Here we use the
10-meter millimeter-wave South Pole Telescope, designed for the primary purpose
of observing the cosmic microwave background at arcminute and larger angular
scales, to conduct a search for such objects. During the 2012-2013 season, the
telescope was used to continuously observe a 100 square degree patch of sky
centered at RA 23h30m and declination -55 degrees using the
polarization-sensitive SPTpol camera in two bands centered at 95 and 150 GHz.
These 6000 hours of observations provided continuous monitoring for day- to
month-scale millimeter-wave transient sources at the 10 mJy level. One
candidate object was observed with properties broadly consistent with a
gamma-ray burst afterglow, but at a statistical significance too low (p=0.01)
to confirm detection.


title:
Shannon Capacity of Signal Transduction for Multiple Independent
  Receptors

abstract:
  Cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) is considered a model system for signal
transduction, the mechanism by which cells exchange chemical messages. Our
previous work calculated the Shannon capacity of a single cAMP receptor;
however, a typical cell may have thousands of receptors operating in parallel.
In this paper, we calculate the capacity of a cAMP signal transduction system
with an arbitrary number of independent, indistinguishable receptors. By
leveraging prior results on feedback capacity for a single receptor, we show
(somewhat unexpectedly) that the capacity is achieved by an IID input
distribution, and that the capacity for n receptors is n times the capacity for
a single receptor.


title:
Asymptotics of the counting function of $k$-th power-free elements in an
  arithmetic semigroup

abstract:
  For any $k>1$, we find the asymptotics of the counting function of $k$-th
power-free elements in an additive arithmetic semigroup with exponential growth
of the abstract prime counting function. This paper continues the authors'
earlier research dealing with the case of infinite $k$.


title:
Classifying CP transformations according to their texture zeros: theory
  and implications

abstract:
  We provide a classification of generalized CP symmetries preserved by the
neutrino mass matrix according to the number of zero entries in the associated
transformation matrix. We determine the corresponding constrained form of the
lepton mixing matrix, characterized by correlations between the mixing angles
and the CP violating phases. We compare with the corresponding restrictions
from current neutrino oscillation global fits and show that, in some cases, the
Dirac CP phase characterizing oscillations is highly constrained. Implications
for current and upcoming long baseline neutrino oscillation experiments T2K,
NO$\nu$A and DUNE, as well as neutrinoless double beta decay experiments are
discussed. We also study the cosmological implications of such schemes for
leptogenesis.


title: Directed Energy Missions for Planetary Defense

abstract:
  Directed energy for planetary defense is now a viable option and is superior
in many ways to other proposed technologies, being able to defend the Earth
against all known threats. This paper presents basic ideas behind a directed
energy planetary defense system that utilizes laser ablation of an asteroid to
impart a deflecting force on the target. A conceptual philosophy called
DE-STAR, which stands for Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and
exploRation, is an orbiting stand-off system, which has been described in other
papers. This paper describes a smaller, stand-on system known as DE-STARLITE as
a reduced-scale version of DE-STAR. Both share the same basic heritage of a
directed energy array that heats the surface of the target to the point of high
surface vapor pressure that causes significant mass ejection thus forming an
ejection plume of material from the target that acts as a rocket to deflect the
object. This is generally classified as laser ablation. DE-STARLITE uses
conventional propellant for launch to LEO and then ion engines to propel the
spacecraft from LEO to the near-Earth asteroid (NEA). During laser ablation,
the asteroid itself provides the propellant source material; thus a very modest
spacecraft can deflect an asteroid much larger than would be possible with a
system of similar mission mass using ion beam deflection (IBD) or a gravity
tractor. DE- STARLITE is capable of deflecting an Apophis-class (325 m
diameter) asteroid with a 1- to 15-year targeting time (laser on time)
depending on the system design. The mission fits within the rough mission
parameters of the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) program in terms of mass and
size. DE-STARLITE also has much greater capability for planetary defense than
current proposals and is readily scalable to match the threat. It can deflect
all known threats with sufficient warning.


title: Metrics for Community Analysis: A Survey

abstract:
  Detecting and analyzing dense groups or communities from social and
information networks has attracted immense attention over last one decade due
to its enormous applicability in different domains. Community detection is an
ill-defined problem, as the nature of the communities is not known in advance.
The problem has turned out to be even complicated due to the fact that
communities emerge in the network in various forms - disjoint, overlapping,
hierarchical etc. Various heuristics have been proposed depending upon the
application in hand. All these heuristics have been materialized in the form of
new metrics, which in most cases are used as optimization functions for
detecting the community structure, or provide an indication of the goodness of
detected communities during evaluation. There arises a need for an organized
and detailed survey of the metrics proposed with respect to community detection
and evaluation. In this survey, we present a comprehensive and structured
overview of the start-of-the-art metrics used for the detection and the
evaluation of community structure. We also conduct experiments on synthetic and
real-world networks to present a comparative analysis of these metrics in
measuring the goodness of the underlying community structure.


title:
Full Flow: Optical Flow Estimation By Global Optimization over Regular
  Grids

abstract:
  We present a global optimization approach to optical flow estimation. The
approach optimizes a classical optical flow objective over the full space of
mappings between discrete grids. No descriptor matching is used. The highly
regular structure of the space of mappings enables optimizations that reduce
the computational complexity of the algorithm's inner loop from quadratic to
linear and support efficient matching of tens of thousands of nodes to tens of
thousands of displacements. We show that one-shot global optimization of a
classical Horn-Schunck-type objective over regular grids at a single resolution
is sufficient to initialize continuous interpolation and achieve
state-of-the-art performance on challenging modern benchmarks.


title:
On Bulk Singularity Structures and all order $\alpha'$ Contact Terms of
  BPS String Amplitudes

abstract:
  The entire form of the amplitude of three SYM ( involving two transverse
scalar fields, a gauge field) and a potential $C_{n-1}$ Ramond-Ramond (RR) form
field is found out. We first derive $<V_{C^{-2}} V_{A^{0}} V_{\phi ^{0}}
V_{\phi ^{0}}>$ and then start constructing an infinite number of $t,s$ channel
bulk singularity structures by means of all order $\alpha'$ corrections to
pull-back of brane in an Effective Field Theory (EFT). Due to presence of the
complete form of S-matrix, several new contact interactions as well as new
couplings are explored. It is also shown that these couplings can be verified
at the level of EFT by either the combinations of Myers terms, pull-back,
Taylor expanded of scalar fields or the mixed combination of the couplings of
this paper as well as employed Bianchi identities. For the first time, we also
derive the algebraic and the complete form of the integrations for some
arbitrary combinations of Mandelstam variables and for the most general case
$\int d^2z |1-z|^{a} |z|^{b} (z - \bar{z})^{c} (z + \bar{z})^{3}$ on upper half
plane as well.


title:
Horn Fragments of the Halpern-Shoham Interval Temporal Logic (Technical
  Report)

abstract:
  We investigate the satisfiability problem for Horn fragments of the
Halpern-Shoham interval temporal logic depending on the type (box or diamond)
of the interval modal operators, the type of the underlying linear order
(discrete or dense), and the type of semantics for the interval relations
(reflexive or irreflexive). For example, we show that satisfiability of Horn
formulas with diamonds is undecidable for any type of linear orders and
semantics. On the contrary, satisfiability of Horn formulas with boxes is
tractable over both discrete and dense orders under the reflexive semantics and
over dense orders under the irreflexive semantics, but becomes undecidable over
discrete orders under the irreflexive semantics. Satisfiability of binary Horn
formulas with both boxes and diamonds is always undecidable under the
irreflexive semantics.


title: On primordial equation of state transitions

abstract:
  We revisit the physics of transitions from a general equation of state
parameter to the final stage of slow-roll inflation. We show that it is
unlikely for the modes comprising the cosmic microwave background to contain
imprints from a pre-inflationary equation of state transition and still be
consistent with observations. We accomplish this by considering observational
consistency bounds on the amplitude of excitations resulting from such a
transition. As a result, the physics which initially led to inflation likely
cannot be probed with observations of the cosmic microwave background.
Furthermore, we show that it is unlikely that equation of state transitions may
explain the observed low multipole power suppression anomaly.


title:
Fast Object Localization Using a CNN Feature Map Based Multi-Scale
  Search

abstract:
  Object localization is an important task in computer vision but requires a
large amount of computational power due mainly to an exhaustive multiscale
search on the input image. In this paper, we describe a near real-time
multiscale search on a deep CNN feature map that does not use region proposals.
The proposed approach effectively exploits local semantic information preserved
in the feature map of the outermost convolutional layer. A multi-scale search
is performed on the feature map by processing all the sub-regions of different
sizes using separate expert units of fully connected layers. Each expert unit
receives as input local semantic features only from the corresponding
sub-regions of a specific geometric shape. Therefore, it contains more nearly
optimal parameters tailored to the corresponding shape. This multi-scale and
multi-aspect ratio scanning strategy can effectively localize a potential
object of an arbitrary size. The proposed approach is fast and able to localize
objects of interest with a frame rate of 4 fps while providing improved
detection performance over the state-of-the art on the PASCAL VOC 12 and MSCOCO
data sets.


title: DTM: Deformable Template Matching

abstract:
  A novel template matching algorithm that can incorporate the concept of
deformable parts, is presented in this paper. Unlike the deformable part model
(DPM) employed in object recognition, the proposed template-matching approach
called Deformable Template Matching (DTM) does not require a training step.
Instead, deformation is achieved by a set of predefined basic rules (e.g. the
left sub-patch cannot pass across the right patch). Experimental evaluation of
this new method using the PASCAL VOC 07 dataset demonstrated substantial
performance improvement over conventional template matching algorithms.
Additionally, to confirm the applicability of DTM, the concept is applied to
the generation of a rotation-invariant SIFT descriptor. Experimental evaluation
employing deformable matching of SIFT features shows an increased number of
matching features compared to a conventional SIFT matching.


title: Going Deeper with Contextual CNN for Hyperspectral Image Classification

abstract:
  In this paper, we describe a novel deep convolutional neural network (CNN)
that is deeper and wider than other existing deep networks for hyperspectral
image classification. Unlike current state-of-the-art approaches in CNN-based
hyperspectral image classification, the proposed network, called contextual
deep CNN, can optimally explore local contextual interactions by jointly
exploiting local spatio-spectral relationships of neighboring individual pixel
vectors. The joint exploitation of the spatio-spectral information is achieved
by a multi-scale convolutional filter bank used as an initial component of the
proposed CNN pipeline. The initial spatial and spectral feature maps obtained
from the multi-scale filter bank are then combined together to form a joint
spatio-spectral feature map. The joint feature map representing rich spectral
and spatial properties of the hyperspectral image is then fed through a fully
convolutional network that eventually predicts the corresponding label of each
pixel vector. The proposed approach is tested on three benchmark datasets: the
Indian Pines dataset, the Salinas dataset and the University of Pavia dataset.
Performance comparison shows enhanced classification performance of the
proposed approach over the current state-of-the-art on the three datasets.


title: The conormal torus is a complete knot invariant

abstract:
  We use microlocal sheaf theory to show that if two knots have Legendrian
isotopic conormal tori, then the knots are isotopic or mirror images.


title:
Numerical test for hyperbolicity of chaotic dynamics in time-delay
  systems

abstract:
  We develop a numerical test of hyperbolicity of chaotic dynamics in
time-delay systems. The test is based on the angle criterion and includes
computation of angle distributions between expanding, contracting and neutral
manifolds of trajectories on the attractor. Three examples are tested. For two
of them previously predicted hyperbolicity is confirmed. The third one provides
an example of a time-delay system with nonhyperbolic chaos.


title: The Topology of African Exports: emerging patterns on spanning trees

abstract:
  This paper is a contribution to interweaving two lines of research that have
progressed in separate ways: network analyses of international trade and the
literature on African trade and development. Gathering empirical data on
African countries has important limitations and so does the space occupied by
African countries in the analyses of trade networks. Here, these limitations
are dealt with by the definition of two independent bipartite networks: a
destination share network and\ a\ commodity share network. These networks -
together with their corresponding minimal spanning trees - allow to uncover
some ordering emerging from African exports in the broader context of
international trade. The emerging patterns help to understand important
characteristics of African exports and its binding relations to other economic,
geographic and organizational concerns as the recent literature on African
trade, development and growth has shown.


title:
Magnetization distribution and domain wall dynamics in nanotube with
  surface anisotropy

abstract:
  The period of magnetization oscillations that occur near the surface of a
nanotube or nanowire under the influence of surface magnetic anisotropy is
determined by means of numerical simulation as a function of nanowire geometry
and material parameters. The hopping mode is observed for stationary movement
of a head-to-head domain wall along nanowire axis in applied magnetic field.
The average speed of the domain wall in the hopping mode is found to be several
times less than the stationary velocity of the wall in the absence of surface
anisotropy.


title:
A systematic approach for designing zero-DGD coupled multi-core optical
  fibers

abstract:
  An analytical method is presented for designing N-coupled multi-core fibers
with zero differential group delay. This approach effectively reduces the
problem to a system of N-1 algebraic equations involving the associated
coupling coefficients and propagation constants as obtained from coupled mode
theory. Once the parameters of one of the cores are specified, the roots of the
resulting N-1 equations can then be used to determine the characteristics of
the remaining waveguide elements. Using this technique, a number of pertinent
geometrical configurations are investigated in order to minimize intermodal
dispersion.


title:
EPW: Electron-phonon coupling, transport and superconducting properties
  using maximally localized Wannier functions

abstract:
  The EPW (Electron-Phonon coupling using Wannier functions) software is a
Fortran90 code that uses density-functional perturbation theory and maximally
localized Wannier functions for computing electron-phonon couplings and related
properties in solids accurately and efficiently. The EPW v4 program can be used
to compute electron and phonon self-energies, linewidths, electron-phonon
scattering rates, electron-phonon coupling strengths, transport spectral
functions, electronic velocities, resistivity, anisotropic superconducting gaps
and spectral functions within the Migdal-Eliashberg theory. The code now
supports spin-orbit coupling, time-reversal symmetry in non-centrosymmetric
crystals, polar materials, and $\mathbf{k}$ and $\mathbf{q}$-point
parallelization. Considerable effort was dedicated to optimization and
parallelization, achieving almost a ten times speedup with respect to previous
releases. A computer test farm was implemented to ensure stability and
portability of the code on the most popular compilers and architectures. Since
April 2016, version 4 of the EPW code is fully integrated in and distributed
with the Quantum ESPRESSO package, and can be downloaded through QE-forge at
http://qe-forge.org/gf/project/q-e.


title: Spatiotemporal Articulated Models for Dynamic SLAM

abstract:
  We propose an online spatiotemporal articulation model estimation framework
that estimates both articulated structure as well as a temporal prediction
model solely using passive observations. The resulting model can predict future
mo- tions of an articulated object with high confidence because of the spatial
and temporal structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the predictive
model by incorporating it within a standard simultaneous localization and
mapping (SLAM) pipeline for mapping and robot localization in previously
unexplored dynamic environments. Our method is able to localize the robot and
map a dynamic scene by explaining the observed motion in the world. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for both simulated and
real-world dynamic environments.


title: First performance of the gems + gmos system. Part1. Imaging

abstract:
  During the commissioning of the Gemini MCAO System (GeMS), we had the
opportunity to obtain data with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS),
the most utilised instrument at Gemini South Observatory, in March and May
2012. Several globular clusters were observed in imaging mode that allowed us
to study the performance of this new and untested combination. GMOS is a
visible instrument, hence pushing MCAO toward the visible.We report here on the
results with the GMOS instruments, derive photometric performance in term of
Full Width Half Maximum (FWHM) and throughput. In most of the cases, we
obtained an improvement factor of at least 2 against the natural seeing. This
result also depends on the Natural Guide Star constellation selected for the
observations and we then study the impact of the guide star selection on the
FWHM performance.We also derive a first astrometric analysis showing that the
GeMS+GMOS system provide an absolute astrometric precision better than 8mas and
a relative astrometric precision lower than 50 mas.


title:
Systematic spatial and stoichiometric screening towards understanding
  the surface of ultrasmall oxygenated silicon nanocrystal

abstract:
  In most of the realistic ab initio and model calculations which have appeared
on the emission of light from Si nanocrystals, the role of surface oxygen has
been usually ignored, underestimated or completely ruled out. We investigate
theoretically, by density functional theory (DFT/B3LYP) possible modes of
oxygen bonding in hydrogen terminated silicon quantum dots using as a
representative case of the Si29 nanocrystal. We have considered Bridge-bonded
oxygen (BBO), Doubly-bonded oxygen (DBO), hydroxyl (OH) and Mix of these
oxidizing agents. Due to stoichiometry, all comparisons performed are unbiased
with respect to composition whereas spatial distribution of oxygen species
pointed out drastic change in electronic and cohesive characteristics of
nanocrytals. From an overall perspective of this study, it is shown that bridge
bonded oxygenated nanocrystals accompanied by Mix have higher binding energies
and large electronic gap compared to nanocrystals with doubly bonded oxygen
atoms. In addition, it is observed that the presence of OH along with BBO, DBO
and mixed configurations further lowers electronic gaps and binding energies
and trends. It is also demonstrated that oxidizing constituent besides their
spatial distribution significantly alters binding energy and highest occupied
molecular orbital (HOMO) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) gap
(HOMO-LUMO gap up to 1.48 eV) within same composition.


title: On the weakly competitive case in a two-species chemotaxis model

abstract:
  In this article we investigate a parabolic-parabolic-elliptic two-species
chemotaxis system with weak competition and show global asymptotic stability of
the coexistence steady state under a smallness condition on the chemotactic
strengths, which seems more natural than the condition previously known.
  For the proof we rely on the method of eventual comparison, which thereby is
shown to be a useful tool even in the presence of chemotactic terms.


title:
The $\pi\pi\to\pi\gamma^\star$ amplitude and the resonant
  $\rho\to\pi\gamma^\star$ transition from lattice QCD

abstract:
  We present a determination of the $P$-wave $\pi\pi\to\pi\gamma^\star$
transition amplitude from lattice quantum chromodynamics. Matrix elements of
the vector current in a finite-volume are extracted from three-point
correlation functions, and from these we determine the infinite-volume
amplitude using a generalization of the Lellouch-L\"uscher formalism. We
determine the amplitude for a range of discrete values of the $\pi\pi$ energy
and virtuality of the photon, and observe the expected dynamical enhancement
due to the $\rho$ resonance. Describing the energy dependence of the amplitude,
we are able to analytically continue into the complex energy plane and from the
residue at the $\rho$ pole extract the $\rho\to \pi \gamma^\star$ transition
form factor. This calculation, at $m_\pi\approx 400$ MeV, is the first to
determine the form factor of an unstable hadron within a first principles
approach to QCD.


title: Depolarization shift of the superradiant phase transition

abstract:
  We investigate the possibility of a Dicke-type superradiant phase transition
of an atomic gas with an extended model which takes into account the
short-range depolarizing interactions between atoms approaching each other as
close as the atomic size scale, which interaction appears in a regularized
electric-dipole picture of the QED of atoms. By using a mean field model, we
find that a critical density does indeed exist, though the atom-atom contact
interaction shifts it to a higher value than it can be obtained from the bare
Dicke-model. We argue that the system, at the critical density, transitions to
the condensed rather than the "superradiant" phase.


title: A Computational Model of YAP/TAZ Mechanosensing

abstract:
  In cell proliferation, stem cell differentiation, chemoresistance and tissue
organization, the ubiquitous role of YAP/TAZ continues to impact our
fundamental understanding in numerous physiological and disease systems.
YAP/TAZ is an important signaling nexus integrating diverse mechanical and
biochemical signals, such as ECM stiffness, adhesion ligand density, or
cell-cell contacts, and thus strongly influences cell fate. Recent studies show
that YAP/TAZ mechanical sensing is dependent on RhoA-regulated stress fibers.
However, current understanding of YAP/TAZ still remains limited due to the
unknown interaction between the canonical Hippo pathway and cell tension. To
identify the roles of key signaling molecules in mechanical signal sensing and
transduction, we present a novel computational model of the YAP/TAZ signaling
pathway. This model converts ECM mechanical properties to biochemical signals
via adhesion, and integrates intracellular signaling cascades associated with
cytoskeleton dynamics. Adhesion molecules, such as FAK, are predicted to rescue
YAP/TAZ activity in soft environments via the RhoA pathway. We found that
changes of molecule concentrations result in different pattern of YAP/TAZ
stiffness response. We also investigate the sensitivity of YAP/TAZ activity to
ECM stiffness. In addition, the model shows that the unresolved synergistic
effect of YAP/TAZ activity between the mechanosensing and the Hippo pathways
can be explained by the interaction of LIMK and LATS. Overall, our model
provides a novel platform for studying YAP/TAZ activity in the context of
integrating different signaling pathways. This platform can be used to gain new
fundamental insights into roles of key molecular and mechanical regulators on
development, tissue engineering or tumor progression.


title: Consistency relations for sharp inflationary non-Gaussian features

abstract:
  If cosmic inflation suffered tiny time-dependent deviations from the
slow-roll regime, these would induce the existence of small scale-dependent
features imprinted in the primordial spectra, with their shapes and sizes
revealing information about the physics that produced them. Small sharp
features could be suppressed at the level of the two-point correlation
function, making them undetectable in the power spectrum, but could be
amplified at the level of the three-point correlation function, offering us a
window of opportunity to uncover them in the non-Gaussian bispectrum. In this
article, we show that sharp features may be analyzed using only data coming
from the three point correlation function parametrizing primordial
non-Gaussianity. More precisely, we show that if features appear in a
particular non-Gaussian triangle configuration (e.g. equilateral, folded,
squeezed), these must reappear in every other configuration according to a
specific relation allowing us to correlate features across the non-Gaussian
bispectrum. As a result, we offer a method to study scale-dependent features
generated during inflation that depends only on data coming from measurements
of non-Gaussianity, allowing us to omit data from the power spectrum.


title:
In-medium covariant propagator of baryons under a strong magnetic field:
  effect of the intrinsic magnetic moments

abstract:
  We obtain the covariant propagator at finite temperature for interacting
baryons immersed in a strong magnetic field. The effect of the intrinsic
magnetic moments on the Green function are fully taken into account. We make an
expansion in terms of eigenfunctions of a Dirac field, which leads us to a
compact form of its propagator. We present some simple applications of these
propagators, where the statistical averages of nuclear currents and energy
density are evaluated.


title: K-homology and Fredholm Operators II: Elliptic Operators

abstract:
  This is an expository paper which gives a proof of the Atiyah-Singer index
theorem for elliptic operators. Specifcally, we compute the geometric K-cycle
that corresponds to the analytic K-cycle determined by the operator. This paper
and its companion ("K-homology and index theory II: Dirac Operators") was
written to clear up basic points about index theory that are generally accepted
as valid, but for which no proof has been published. Some of these points are
needed for the solution of the Heisenberg-elliptic index problem in our paper
"K-homology and index theory on contact manifolds" Acta. Math. 2014.


title:
Observation of the exciton Mott transition in the photoluminescence of
  coupled quantum wells

abstract:
  Indirect excitons in coupled quantum wells have long radiative lifetimes and
form a cold quasi-two-dimensional population suitable for studying collective
quantum effects. Here we report the observation of the exciton Mott transition
from an insulating (excitons) to a conducting (ionized electron-hole pairs)
phase, which occurs gradually as a function of carrier density and temperature.
The transition is inferred from spectral and time-resolved photoluminescence
measurements around a carrier density of $2\times10^{10} \mathrm{cm}^{-2}$ and
temperatures of $12-16 \mathrm{K}$. An externally applied electric field is
employed to tune the dynamics of the transition via the quantum-confined Stark
effect. Our results provide evidence of a gradual nature of the exciton Mott
transition.


title: Varieties with $\mathbb P$-units

abstract:
  We study the class of compact K\"ahler manifolds with trivial canonical
bundle and the property that the cohomology of the trivial line bundle is
generated by one element. If the square of the generator is zero, we get the
class of strict Calabi--Yau manifolds. If the generator is of degree 2, we get
the class of compact hyperk\"ahler manifolds. We provide some examples and
structure results for the cases where the generator is of higher nilpotency
index and degree. In particular, we show that varieties of this type are
closely related to higher-dimensional Enriques varieties.