title:
KELT-16b: A highly irradiated, ultra-short period hot Jupiter nearing
  tidal disruption

abstract:
  We announce the discovery of KELT-16b, a highly irradiated, ultra-short
period hot Jupiter transiting the relatively bright ($V = 11.7$) star TYC
2688-1839-1. A global analysis of the system shows KELT-16 to be an F7V star
with $T_\textrm{eff} = 6236\pm54$ K, $\log{g_\star} = 4.253_{-0.036}^{+0.031}$,
[Fe/H] = -0.002$_{-0.085}^{+0.086}$, $M_\star = 1.211_{-0.046}^{+0.043}
M_\odot$, and $R_\star = 1.360_{-0.053}^{+0.064} R_\odot$. The planet is a
relatively high mass inflated gas giant with $M_\textrm{P} =
2.75_{-0.15}^{+0.16} M_\textrm{J}$, $R_\textrm{P} = 1.415_{-0.067}^{+0.084}
R_\textrm{J}$, density $\rho_\textrm{P} = 1.20\pm0.18$ g cm$^{-3}$, surface
gravity $\log{g_\textrm{P}} = 3.530_{-0.049}^{+0.042}$, and $T_\textrm{eq} =
2453_{-47}^{+55}$ K. The best-fitting linear ephemeris is $T_\textrm{C} =
2457247.24791\pm0.00019$ BJD$_{tdb}$ and $P = 0.9689951 \pm 0.0000024$ d.
KELT-16b joins WASP-18b, -19b, -43b, -103b, and HATS-18b as the only giant
transiting planets with $P < 1$ day. Its ultra-short period and high
irradiation make it a benchmark target for atmospheric studies by HST, Spitzer,
and eventually JWST. For example, as a hotter, higher mass analog of WASP-43b,
KELT-16b may feature an atmospheric temperature-pressure inversion and
day-to-night temperature swing extreme enough for TiO to rain out at the
terminator. KELT-16b could also join WASP-43b in extending tests of the
observed mass-metallicity relation of the Solar System gas giants to higher
masses. KELT-16b currently orbits at a mere $\sim$ 1.7 Roche radii from its
host star, and could be tidally disrupted in as little as a few $\times 10^{5}$
years (for a stellar tidal quality factor of $Q_*' = 10^5$). Finally, the
likely existence of a widely separated bound stellar companion in the KELT-16
system makes it possible that Kozai-Lidov oscillations played a role in driving
KELT-16b inward to its current precarious orbit.


title:
Recursion-Free Online Multiple Incremental/Decremental Analysis Based on
  Ridge Support Vector Learning

abstract:
  This study presents a rapid multiple incremental and decremental mechanism
based on Weight-Error Curves (WECs) for support-vector analysis. Recursion-free
computation is proposed for predicting the Lagrangian multipliers of new
samples. This study examines Ridge Support Vector Models, subsequently devising
a recursion-free function derived from WECs. With the proposed function, all
the new Lagrangian multipliers can be computed at once without using any
gradual step sizes. Moreover, such a function relaxes a constraint, where the
increment of new multiple Lagrangian multipliers should be the same in the
previous work, thereby easily satisfying the requirement of KKT conditions. The
proposed mechanism no longer requires typical bookkeeping strategies, which
compute the step size by checking all the training samples in each incremental
round.


title: A Catalog of Kepler Habitable Zone Exoplanet Candidates

abstract:
  The NASA Kepler mission has discovered thousands of new planetary candidates,
many of which have been confirmed through follow-up observations. A primary
goal of the mission is to determine the occurrance rate of terrestrial-size
planets within the Habitable Zone (HZ) of their host stars. Here we provide a
list of HZ exoplanet candidates from the Kepler Data Release 24 Q1-Q17 data
vetting process. This work was undertaken as part of the Kepler Habitable Zone
Working Group. We use a variety of criteria regarding HZ boundaries and
planetary sizes to produce complete lists of HZ candidates, including a catalog
of 104 candidates within the optimistic HZ and 20 candidates with radii less
than two Earth radii within the conservative HZ. We cross-match our HZ
candidates with the Data Release 25 stellar properties and confirmed planet
properties to provide robust stellar parameters and candidate dispositions. We
also include false positive probabilities recently calculated by Morton et al.
(2016) for each of the candidates within our catalogs to aid in their
validation. Finally, we performed dynamical analysis simulations for
multi-planet systems that contain candidates with radii less than two Earth
radii as a step toward validation of those systems.


title:
Efficient Multiple Incremental Computation for Kernel Ridge Regression
  with Bayesian Uncertainty Modeling

abstract:
  This study presents an efficient incremental/decremental approach for big
streams based on Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR), a frequently used data analysis
in cloud centers. To avoid reanalyzing the whole dataset whenever sensors
receive new training data, typical incremental KRR used a single-instance
mechanism for updating an existing system. However, this inevitably increased
redundant computational time, not to mention applicability to big streams. To
this end, the proposed mechanism supports incremental/decremental processing
for both single and multiple samples (i.e., batch processing). A large scale of
data can be divided into batches, processed by a machine, without sacrificing
the accuracy. Moreover, incremental/decremental analyses in empirical and
intrinsic space are also proposed in this study to handle different types of
data either with a large number of samples or high feature dimensions, whereas
typical methods focused only on one type. At the end of this study, we further
the proposed mechanism to statistical Kernelized Bayesian Regression, so that
uncertainty modeling with incremental/decremental computation becomes
applicable. Experimental results showed that computational time was
significantly reduced, better than the original nonincremental design and the
typical single incremental method. Furthermore, the accuracy of the proposed
method remained the same as the baselines. This implied that the system
enhanced efficiency without sacrificing the accuracy. These findings proved
that the proposed method was appropriate for variable streaming data analysis,
thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.


title:
A semi-Lagrangian algorithm in policy space for hybrid optimal control
  problems

abstract:
  The mathematical framework of hybrid system is a recent and general tool to
treat control systems involving control action of heterogeneous nature. In this
paper, we construct and test a semi-Lagrangian numerical scheme for solving the
Dynamic Programming equation of an infinite horizon optimal control problem for
hybrid systems. In order to speed up convergence, we also propose an
acceleration technique based on policy iteration. Finally, we validate the
approach via some numerical tests in low dimension.


title: Null Models and Community Detection in Multi-Layer Networks

abstract:
  Multi-layer networks are networks on a set of entities (nodes) with multiple
types of relations (edges) among them where each type of relation/interaction
is represented as a network layer. As with single layer networks, community
detection is an important task in multi-layer networks. A large group of
popular community detection methods in networks are based on optimizing a
quality function known as the modularity score, which is a measure of presence
of modules or communities in networks. Hence a first step in community
detection is defining a suitable modularity score that is appropriate for the
network in question. Here we introduce several multi-layer network modularity
measures under different null models of the network, motivated by empirical
observations in networks from a diverse field of applications. In particular we
define the multi-layer configuration model, the multi-layer expected degree
model and their various modifications as null models for multi-layer networks
to derive different modularities. The proposed modularities are grouped into
two categories. The first category, which is based on degree corrected
multi-layer stochastic block model, has the multi-layer expected degree model
as their null model. The second category, which is based on multi-layer
extensions of Newman-Girvan modularity, has the multi-layer configuration model
as their null model. These measures are then optimized to detect the optimal
community assignment of nodes. We compare the effectiveness of the measures in
community detection in simulated networks and then apply them to four real
networks.


title: Oracle Inequalities for High-dimensional Prediction

abstract:
  The abundance of high-dimensional data in the modern sciences has generated
tremendous interest in penalized estimators such as the lasso, scaled lasso,
square-root lasso, elastic net, and many others. In this paper, we establish a
general oracle inequality for prediction in high-dimensional linear regression
with such methods. Since the proof relies only on convexity and continuity
arguments, the result holds irrespective of the design matrix and applies to a
wide range of penalized estimators. Overall, the bound demonstrates that
generic estimators can provide consistent prediction with any design matrix.
From a practical point of view, the bound can help to identify the potential of
specific estimators, and they can help to get a sense of the prediction
accuracy in a given application.


title: Combinatorial Design of Textured Mechanical Metamaterials

abstract:
  The structural complexity of metamaterials is limitless, although in
practice, most designs comprise periodic architectures which lead to materials
with spatially homogeneous features. More advanced tasks, arising in e.g. soft
robotics, prosthetics and wearable tech, involve spatially textured mechanical
functionality which require aperiodic architectures. However, a na\"ive
implementation of such structural complexity invariably leads to frustration,
which prevents coherent operation and impedes functionality. Here we introduce
a combinatorial strategy for the design of aperiodic yet frustration-free
mechanical metamaterials, whom we show to exhibit spatially textured
functionalities. We implement this strategy using cubic building blocks -
voxels - which deform anisotropically, a local stacking rule which allows
cooperative shape changes by guaranteeing that deformed building blocks fit as
in a 3D jigsaw puzzle, and 3D printing. We show that, first, these aperiodic
metamaterials exhibit long-range holographic order, where the 2D pixelated
surface texture dictates the 3D interior voxel arrangement. Second, they act as
programmable shape shifters, morphing into spatially complex but predictable
and designable shapes when uniaxially compressed. Third, their mechanical
response to compression by a textured surface reveals their ability to perform
sensing and pattern analysis. Combinatorial design thus opens a new avenue
towards mechanical metamaterials with unusual order and machine-like
functionalities.


title:
Electrostatics in dissipative particle dynamics using Ewald sums with
  point charges

abstract:
  A proper treatment of electrostatic interactions is crucial for the accurate
calculation of forces in computer simulations. Electrostatic interactions are
typically modeled using Ewald based methods, which have become one of the
cornerstones upon which many other methods for the numerical computation of
electrostatic interactions are based. However, their use with charge
distributions rather than point charges requires the inclusion of ansatz for
the solutions of the Poisson equation, since there is no exact solution known
for smeared out charges. The interest for incorporating electrostatic
interactions at the scales of length and time that are relevant for the study
the physics of soft condensed matter has increased considerably. Using
mesoscale simulation techniques, such as dissipative particle dynamics (DPD),
allows us to reach longer time scales in numerical simulations, without
abandoning the particulate description of the problem. The main problem with
incorporating electrostatics into DPD simulations is that DPD particles are
soft and those particles with opposite charge can form artificial clusters of
ions. Here we show that one can incorporate the electrostatic interactions
through Ewald sums with point charges in DPD if larger values of coarse
graining degree are used, where DPD is truly mesoscopic. Using point charges
with larger excluded volume interactions the artificial formation of ionic
pairs with point charges can be avoided, and one obtains correct predictions.
We establish ranges of parameters useful for detecting boundaries where
artificial formation of ionic pairs occurs. Lastly, using point charges we
predict the scaling properties of polyelectrolytes in solvents of varying
quality and obtain predictions that are in agreement with calculations that use
other methods, and with recent experimental results.


title: Learning Transferable Policies for Monocular Reactive MAV Control

abstract:
  The ability to transfer knowledge gained in previous tasks into new contexts
is one of the most important mechanisms of human learning. Despite this,
adapting autonomous behavior to be reused in partially similar settings is
still an open problem in current robotics research. In this paper, we take a
small step in this direction and propose a generic framework for learning
transferable motion policies. Our goal is to solve a learning problem in a
target domain by utilizing the training data in a different but related source
domain. We present this in the context of an autonomous MAV flight using
monocular reactive control, and demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed
approach through extensive real-world flight experiments in outdoor cluttered
environments.


title:
Stationary Gap Distributions for Infinite Systems of Competing Brownian
  Particles

abstract:
  Consider the infinite Atlas model: a semi-infinite collection of particles
driven by independent standard Brownian motions with zero drifts, except for
the bottom-ranked particle which receives unit drift. We derive a continuum
one-parameter family of product-of-exponentials stationary gap distributions,
with exponentially growing density at infinity. This result shows that there
are infinitely many stationary gap distributions for the Atlas model, and hence
resolves a conjecture of Pal and Pitman (2008) in the negative. This result is
further generalized for infinite systems of competing Brownian particles with
generic rank-based drifts.


title:
Sparsity Oriented Importance Learning for High-dimensional Linear
  Regression

abstract:
  With now well-recognized non-negligible model selection uncertainty, data
analysts should no longer be satisfied with the output of a single final model
from a model selection process, regardless of its sophistication. To improve
reliability and reproducibility in model choice, one constructive approach is
to make good use of a sound variable importance measure. Although interesting
importance measures are available and increasingly used in data analysis,
little theoretical justification has been done. In this paper, we propose a new
variable importance measure, sparsity oriented importance learning (SOIL), for
high-dimensional regression from a sparse linear modeling perspective by taking
into account the variable selection uncertainty via the use of a sensible model
weighting. The SOIL method is theoretically shown to have the
inclusion/exclusion property: When the model weights are properly around the
true model, the SOIL importance can well separate the variables in the true
model from the rest. In particular, even if the signal is weak, SOIL rarely
gives variables not in the true model significantly higher important values
than those in the true model. Extensive simulations in several illustrative
settings and real data examples with guided simulations show desirable
properties of the SOIL importance in contrast to other importance measures.


title:
Bed-Load Transport Rate Based on the Entrainment Probabilities of
  Sediment Grains by Rolling and Lifting

abstract:
  A function for the bed-load sediment transport rate is derived. This is
achieved from the first principle by using the entrainment probabilities of the
sediment grains by rolling and lifting, and by introducing two travel lengths,
respectively, for the first time. The predictions from the new bed-load
function agree well with the experimental results over the entire experimental
range and show significant improvement over the commonly used formula for
bed-load transport rate. The new function shows that, in terms of contributing
to the bed-load transport rate, the total entrainment probability of the
sediment grains is a weighted summation of those by the lifted and rolling
grains, rather than a simple addition of the two. The function has also been
used to predict the total entrainment probability, saltation length and the bed
layer thickness at high bed-load transport rate. These predictions all agree
well with the experimental results. It is found that, on average, the travel
length for the rolling sand grains is about one order of magnitude less than
that for the lifted ones.


title: Kerr-Newman black holes with scalar hair

abstract:
  We construct electrically charged Kerr black holes (BHs) with scalar hair.
Firstly, we take an uncharged scalar field, interacting with the
electromagnetic field only indirectly, via the background metric. The
corresponding family of solutions, dubbed Kerr-Newman BHs with ungauged scalar
hair, reduces to (a sub-family of) Kerr-Newman BHs in the limit of vanishing
scalar hair and to uncharged rotating boson stars in the limit of vanishing
horizon. It adds one extra parameter to the uncharged solutions: the total
electric charge. This leading electromagnetic multipole moment is unaffected by
the scalar hair and can be computed by using Gauss's law on any closed
2-surface surrounding (a spatial section of) the event horizon. By contrast,
the first sub-leading electromagnetic multipole -- the magnetic dipole moment
--, gets suppressed by the scalar hair, such that the gyromagnetic ratio is
always smaller than the Kerr-Newman value ($g=2$). Secondly, we consider a
gauged scalar field and obtain a family of Kerr-Newman BHs with gauged scalar
hair. The electrically charged scalar field now stores a part of the total
electric charge, which can only be computed by applying Gauss' law at spatial
infinity and introduces a new solitonic limit -- electrically charged rotating
boson stars. In both cases, we analyse some physical properties of the
solutions.


title: The Maslov index for Lagrangian pairs on $\mathbb{R}^{2n}$

abstract:
  We discuss a definition of the Maslov index for Lagrangian pairs on
$\mathbb{R}^{2n}$ based on spectral flow, and develop many of its salient
properties. We provide two applications to illustrate how our approach leads to
a straightforward analysis of the relationship between the Maslov index and the
Morse index for Sch\"odinger operators on $[0,1]$ and $\mathbb{R}$.


title: Improving Study Skills using Program Integrating Reflection Seminars

abstract:
  If students have a broad spectrum of study skills, learning will likely be
positively affected, since they can adapt the way they learn in different
situations. Such study skills can be learned in for example learning-to-learn
courses. Several studies of such courses have been done over the years, but few
of these have been carried out in longitudinal naturalistic settings, where the
effect has been evaluated over several years in non-experimental settings. In
this paper we present a novel approach for learning study skills, as a part of
a course running over three years. The course starts with a learning-to-learn
module, followed by 11 follow-ups that includes, among other things, peer
discussions about learning strategies with the aim of promoting self-regulated
learning. This evaluation shows which study skills the computer science
students were most interested in trying, how successful they were in continuing
to use the study skills and which effects the students believed the study
skills had after trying them. No significant change was found in how satisfied
the students were with their overall study technique immediately after the
initial module, but in the long term 78% of the students believed the course
had promoted their ability to analyze and adapt their study habits.


title:
Defining Spatial Security Outage Probability for Exposure Region Based
  Beamforming

abstract:
  With increasing number of antennae in base stations, there is considerable
interest in using beamfomining to improve physical layer security, by creating
an `exposure region' that enhances the received signal quality for a legitimate
user and reduces the possibility of leaking information to a randomly located
passive eavesdropper. The paper formalises this concept by proposing a novel
definition for the security level of such a legitimate transmission, called the
`Spatial Secrecy Outage Probability' (SSOP). By performing a theoretical and
numerical analysis, it is shown how the antenna array parameters can affect the
SSOP and its analytic upper bound. Whilst this approach may be applied to any
array type and any fading channel model, it is shown here how the security
performance of a uniform linear array varies in a Rician fading channel by
examining the analytic SSOP upper bound.


title:
Optimal Placement of Dynamic Var Sources by Using Empirical
  Controllability Covariance

abstract:
  In this paper, the empirical controllability covariance (ECC), which is
calculated around the considered operating condition of a power system, is
applied to quantify the degree of controllability of system voltages under
specific dynamic var source locations. An optimal dynamic var source placement
method addressing fault-induced delayed voltage recovery (FIDVR) issues is
further formulated as an optimization problem that maximizes the determinant of
ECC. The optimization problem is effectively solved by the NOMAD solver, which
implements the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search algorithm. The proposed method is
tested on an NPCC 140-bus system and the results show that the proposed method
with fault specified ECC can solve the FIDVR issue caused by the most severe
contingency with fewer dynamic var sources than the Voltage Sensitivity Index
(VSI) based method. The proposed method with fault unspecified ECC does not
depend on the settings of the contingency and can address more FIDVR issues
than VSI method when placing the same number of SVCs under different fault
durations. It is also shown that the proposed method can help mitigate voltage
collapse.


title:
A survey of sparse matrix-vector multiplication performance on large
  matrices

abstract:
  We contribute a third-party survey of sparse matrix-vector (SpMV) product
performance on industrial-strength, large matrices using: (1) The SpMV
implementations in Intel MKL, the Trilinos project (Tpetra subpackage), the
CUSPARSE library, and the CUSP library, each running on modern architectures.
(2) NVIDIA GPUs and Intel multi-core CPUs (supported by each software package).
(3) The CSR, BSR, COO, HYB, and ELL matrix formats (supported by each software
package).


title: The atomistic representation of first strain-gradient elastic tensors

abstract:
  We derive the atomistic representations of the elastic tensors appearing in
the linearized theory of first strain-gradient elasticity for an arbitrary
multi-lattice. In addition to the classical (2nd-Piola) stress and elastic
moduli tensors, these include the rank-three double-stress tensor, the
rank-five tensor of mixed elastic moduli, and the rank-six tensor of
strain-gradient elastic moduli. The atomistic representations are closed-form
analytical expressions in terms of the first and second derivatives of the
interatomic potential with respect to interatomic distances, and dyadic
products of relative atomic positions. Moreover, all expressions are local, in
the sense that they depend only on the atomic neighborhood of a lattice site.
Our results emanate from the condition of energetic equivalence between
continuum and atomistic representations of a crystal, when the kinematics of
the latter is governed by the Cauchy-Born rule. Using the derived expressions,
we prove that the odd-order tensors vanish if the lattice basis admits
central-symmetry. The analytical expressions are implemented as a KIM compliant
algorithm to compute the strain gradient elastic tensors for various materials.
Numerical results are presented to compare representative interatomic
potentials used in the literature for cubic crystals, including simple lattices
and multi-lattices. We observe that central potentials exhibit generalized
Cauchy relations for the rank-six tensor of strain-gradient elastic moduli. In
addition, this tensor is found to be indefinite for many potentials. We discuss
the relationship between indefiniteness and material stability. Finally, the
atomistic representations are specialized to central potentials in simple
lattices. These expressions are used with analytical potentials to study the
sensitivity of the elastic tensors to the choice of the cutoff radius.


title: The Light and Heavy Higgs Interpretation of the MSSM

abstract:
  We perform a parameter scan of the phenomenological Minimal Supersymmetric
Standard Model (pMSSM) with eight parameters taking into account the
experimental Higgs boson results from Run I of the LHC and further low-energy
observables. We investigate various MSSM interpretations of the Higgs signal at
125 GeV. First, we consider the case where the light CP-even Higgs boson of the
MSSM is identified with the discovered Higgs boson. In this case it can
impersonate the SM Higgs-like signal either in the decoupling limit, or in the
limit of alignment without decoupling. In the latter case, the other states in
the Higgs sector can also be light, offering good prospects for upcoming LHC
searches and for searches at future colliders. Second, we demonstrate that the
heavy CP-even Higgs boson is still a viable candidate to explain the Higgs
signal - albeit only in a highly constrained parameter region, that will be
probed by LHC searches for the CP-odd Higgs boson and the charged Higgs boson
in the near future. As a guidance for such searches we provide new benchmark
scenarios that can be employed to maximize the sensitivity of the experimental
analysis to this interpretation.


title: On piecewise continuous mappings of metrizable spaces

abstract:
  Let $f \colon X \rightarrow Y$ be a resolvable-measurable mapping of a
metrizable space $X$ to a regular space $Y$. Then $f$ is piecewise continuous.
Additionally, for a metrizable completely Baire space $X$, it is proved that
$f$ is resolvable-measurable if and only if it is piecewise continuous.


title: Spatial sub-Rayleigh imaging analysis via speckle laser illumination

abstract:
  It is commonly accepted that optical sub-Rayleigh imaging has potential
application in many fields. In this Letter, by confining the divergence of the
optical field, as well as the size of the illumination source, we show that the
first-order averaged intensity measurement via speckle laser illumina- tion can
make an actual breakthrough on the Rayleigh limit. For a high-order algorithm,
it has been reported that the autocorrelation function can be utilized to
achieve the sub-Rayleigh feature. However, we find that this sub- Rayleigh
feature for the high-order algorithm is limited only to binary objects, and the
image will be distorted when a gray object is placed. This property encourages
us to find the physics behind the high-order correlation imaging algo- rithm.
We address these explanations in this Letter and find that for different types
of high-order algorithm, there is always a seat in the right place from the
cross-correlation function.


title: Interactive Image Segmentation Using Constrained Dominant Sets

abstract:
  We propose a new approach to interactive image segmentation based on some
properties of a family of quadratic optimization problems related to dominant
sets, a well-known graph-theoretic notion of a cluster which generalizes the
concept of a maximal clique to edge-weighted graphs. In particular, we show
that by properly controlling a regularization parameter which determines the
structure and the scale of the underlying problem, we are in a position to
extract groups of dominant-set clusters which are constrained to contain
user-selected elements. The resulting algorithm can deal naturally with any
type of input modality, including scribbles, sloppy contours, and bounding
boxes, and is able to robustly handle noisy annotations on the part of the
user. Experiments on standard benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our
approach as compared to state-of-the-art algorithms on a variety of natural
images under several input conditions.


title:
Simplified Dark Matter Models with Charged Mediators: Prospects for
  Direct Detection

abstract:
  We consider direct detection prospects for a class of simplified models of
fermionic dark matter (DM) coupled to left and right-handed Standard Model
fermions via two charged scalar mediators with arbitrary mixing angle $\alpha$.
DM interactions with the nucleus are mediated by higher electromagnetic
moments, which, for Majorana DM, is the anapole moment. After giving a full
analytic calculation of the anapole moment, including its $\alpha$ dependence,
and matching with limits in the literature, we compute the DM-nucleon
scattering cross-section and show the LUX and future LZ constraints on the
parameter space of these models. We then compare these results with constraints
coming from $Fermi$-LAT continuum and line searches. Results in the
supersymmetric limit of these simplified models are provided in all cases. We
find that future direct detection experiments will be able to probe most of the
parameter space of these models for $\mathcal{O}(100-200)$ GeV DM and lightest
mediator mass $\lesssim \mathcal{O}(5\%)$ larger than the DM mass. The direct
detection prospects dwindle for larger DM mass and larger mass gap between the
DM and the lightest mediator mass, although appreciable regions are still
probed for $\mathcal{O}(200)$ GeV DM and lightest mediator mass $\lesssim
\mathcal{O}(20\%)$ larger than the DM mass. The direct detection bounds are
also attenuated near certain "blind spots" in the parameter space, where the
anapole moment is severely suppressed due to cancellation of different terms.
We carefully study these blind spots and the associated $Fermi$-LAT signals in
these regions.


title: Contrasting Freezeouts in Large Versus Small Systems

abstract:
  We study the data on mean hadron yields and contrast the chemical freezeout
conditions in p+p, p+Pb and Pb+Pb at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) energies.
We study several schemes for freezeout that mainly differ in the way
strangeness is treated: i. strangeness freezes out along with the non-strange
hadrons in complete equilibrium (1CFO), ii. strangeness freezes out along with
non-strange hadrons with an additional parameter $\gamma_S$ accounting for
non-equilibrium production of strangeness (1CFO+$\gamma_S$), and iii.
strangeness freezes out earlier than non-strange hadrons and in thermal
equilibrium (2CFO). A comparison of the chisquares of the fits indicate a
dependence of the freezeout scheme on the system size. The minimum bias p+p and
different centralities of p+Pb and peripheral Pb+Pb data prefer 1CFO$+\gamma_S$
with $\gamma_S$ approaching unity as we go from p+p to central p+Pb and
peripheral Pb+Pb. On the other hand, the mid-central to central Pb+Pb data
prefer 2CFO over 1CFO+$\gamma_S$. Such system size dependence of freezeout
scheme could be an indication of the additional interaction in Pb+Pb over p+Pb
and p+p.


title: Monotone Mixed Finite Difference Scheme for Monge-Amp\`ere Equation

abstract:
  In this paper, we propose a monotone mixed finite difference scheme for
solving the two-dimensional Monge-Amp\`ere equation. In order to accomplish
this, we convert the Monge-Amp\`ere equation to an equivalent
Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation. Based on the HJB formulation, we apply
the standard 7-point stencil discretization, which is second order accurate, to
the grid points wherever monotonicity holds, and apply semi-Lagrangian wide
stencil discretization elsewhere to ensure monotonicity on the entire
computational domain. By dividing the admissible control set into six regions
and optimizing the sub-problem in each region, the computational cost of the
optimization problem at each grid point is reduced from $O(M^2)$ to $O(1)$ when
the standard 7-point stencil discretization is applied and to $O(M)$ otherwise,
where the discretized control set is $M \times M$. We prove that our numerical
scheme satisfies consistency, stability, monotonicity and strong comparison
principle, and hence is convergent to the viscosity solution of the
Monge-Amp\`ere equation. In the numerical results, second order convergence
rate is achieved when the standard 7-point stencil discretization is applied
monotonically on the entire computation domain, and up to order one convergence
is achieved otherwise. The proposed mixed scheme yields a smaller
discretization error and a faster convergence rate compared to the pure
semi-Lagrangian wide stencil scheme.


title:
Three-state interactions determine the second-order nonlinear optical
  response

abstract:
  Using the sum-rules, the sum-over-states expression for the diagonal term of
first hyperpolarizability can be expressed as the sum of three-state
interaction terms. We study the behavior of a generic three-state term to show
that is possible to tune the contribution of resonant terms by tuning the
spectrum of the molecule. When extrapolated to the off-resonance regime, the
three-state interaction terms are shown to behave in a similar manner as the
three-level model used to derive the fundamental limits. We finally show that
most results derived using the three-level ansatz are general, and apply to
molecules where more than three levels contribute to the second-order nonlinear
response or/and far from optimization.

categories: physics.optics cond-mat.mes-hall physics.chem-ph quant-ph


title: Mining and modeling character networks

abstract:
  We investigate social networks of characters found in cultural works such as
novels and films. These character networks exhibit many of the properties of
complex networks such as skewed degree distribution and community structure,
but may be of relatively small order with a high multiplicity of edges.
Building on recent work of beveridge, we consider graph extraction,
visualization, and network statistics for three novels: Twilight by Stephanie
Meyer, Steven King's The Stand, and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet
of Fire. Coupling with 800 character networks from films found in the
http://moviegalaxies.com/ database, we compare the data sets to simulations
from various stochastic complex networks models including random graphs with
given expected degrees (also known as the Chung-Lu model), the configuration
model, and the preferential attachment model. Using machine learning techniques
based on motif (or small subgraph) counts, we determine that the Chung-Lu model
best fits character networks and we conjecture why this may be the case.


title: Multi-task Prediction of Disease Onsets from Longitudinal Lab Tests

abstract:
  Disparate areas of machine learning have benefited from models that can take
raw data with little preprocessing as input and learn rich representations of
that raw data in order to perform well on a given prediction task. We evaluate
this approach in healthcare by using longitudinal measurements of lab tests,
one of the more raw signals of a patient's health state widely available in
clinical data, to predict disease onsets. In particular, we train a Long
Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network and two novel convolutional
neural networks for multi-task prediction of disease onset for 133 conditions
based on 18 common lab tests measured over time in a cohort of 298K patients
derived from 8 years of administrative claims data. We compare the neural
networks to a logistic regression with several hand-engineered, clinically
relevant features. We find that the representation-based learning approaches
significantly outperform this baseline. We believe that our work suggests a new
avenue for patient risk stratification based solely on lab results.


title: Correlation inequalities for Schr\"odinger operators

abstract:
  This paper analyzes Sch\"odinger operators from viewpoint of correlation
inequalities. We construct Griffiths inequalities for the ground state
expectations by applying operator-theoretic correlation inequalities. As an
example of such an application, we analyze the momentum distribution, i.e., the
Fourier transform of the ground state density.


title: Strong symplectic fillability of contact torus bundles

abstract:
  In this paper, we study strong symplectic fillability and Stein fillability
of some tight contact structures on negative parabolic and negative hyperbolic
torus bundles over the circle. For the universally tight contact structure with
twisting $\pi$ in $S^1$-direction on a negative parabolic torus bundle, we
completely determine its strong symplectic fillability and Stein fillability.
For the universally tight contact structure with twisting $\pi$ in
$S^1$-direction on a negative hyperbolic torus bundle, we give a necessary
condition for it being strongly symplectically fillable. For the virtually
overtwisted tight contact structure on the negative parabolic torus bundle with
monodromy $-T^n$ ($n<0$), we prove that it is Stein fillable. By the way, we
give a partial answer to a conjecture of Golla and Lisca.


title:
Exploratory Spectroscopy of Magnetic Cataclysmic Variables Candidates
  and Other Variable Objects

abstract:
  The increasing number of synoptic surveys made by small robotic telescopes,
such as the photometric Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS), represents
a unique opportunity for the discovery of variable sources and improves the
statistical samples of such classes of objects. Our goal is the discovery of
magnetic Cataclysmic Variables (mCVs). These are rare objects, which probe
interesting accretion scenarios controlled by the white dwarf magnetic field.
In particular, improved statistics of mCVs would help to address open questions
on their formation and evolution. We performed an optical spectroscopy survey
to search for signatures of magnetic accretion in 45 variable objects selected
mostly from the CRTS. In this sample we found 32 CVs, 22 being mCV candidates
from which 13 are previously unreported as such. If the proposed
classifications are confirmed, it would represent an increase of 4% in the
number of known polars and 12% in the number of known IPs. A fraction of our
initial sample was classified as extragalactic sources or other types of
variable stars by the inspection of the identification spectra. Despite the
inherent complexity in identifying a source as a mCV, variability-based
selection followed by spectroscopic snapshot observations has proved to be an
efficient strategy for their discoveries, being a relatively inexpensive
approach in terms of telescope time.


title:
Spreading speeds and transition fronts of lattice KPP equations in time
  heterogeneous media

abstract:
  The current paper is devoted to the study of spreading speeds and transition
fronts of lattice KPP equations in time heterogeneous media. We first prove the
existence, uniqueness, and stability of spatially homogeneous entire positive
solutions. Next, we establish lower and upper bounds of the (generalized)
spreading speed intervals. Then, by constructing appropriate sub-solutions and
super-solutions, we show the existence and continuity of transition fronts with
given front position functions. Also, we prove the existence of some kind of
critical front.


title: Efficient Energy Distribution in a Smart Grid using Multi-Player Games

abstract:
  Algorithms and models based on game theory have nowadays become prominent
techniques for the design of digital controllers for critical systems. Indeed,
such techniques enable automatic synthesis: given a model of the environment
and a property that the controller must enforce, those techniques automatically
produce a correct controller, when it exists. In the present paper, we consider
a class of concurrent, weighted, multi-player games that are well-suited to
model and study the interactions of several agents who are competing for some
measurable resources like energy. We prove that a subclass of those games
always admit a Nash equilibrium, i.e. a situation in which all players play in
such a way that they have no incentive to deviate. Moreover, the strategies
yielding those Nash equilibria have a special structure: when one of the agents
deviate from the equilibrium, all the others form a coalition that will enforce
a retaliation mechanism that punishes the deviant agent. We apply those results
to a real-life case study in which several smart houses that produce their own
energy with solar panels, and can share this energy among them in micro-grid,
must distribute the use of this energy along the day in order to avoid
consuming electricity that must be bought from the global grid. We demonstrate
that our theory allows one to synthesise an efficient controller for these
houses: using penalties to be paid in the utility bill as an incentive, we
force the houses to follow a pre-computed schedule that maximises the
proportion of the locally produced energy that is consumed.


title: Playing Games in the Baire Space

abstract:
  We solve a generalized version of Church's Synthesis Problem where a play is
given by a sequence of natural numbers rather than a sequence of bits; so a
play is an element of the Baire space rather than of the Cantor space. Two
players Input and Output choose natural numbers in alternation to generate a
play. We present a natural model of automata ("N-memory automata") equipped
with the parity acceptance condition, and we introduce also the corresponding
model of "N-memory transducers". We show that solvability of games specified by
N-memory automata (i.e., existence of a winning strategy for player Output) is
decidable, and that in this case an N-memory transducer can be constructed that
implements a winning strategy for player Output.


title: Two-Buffer Simulation Games

abstract:
  We consider simulation games played between Spoiler and Duplicator on two
Buchi automata in which the choices made by Spoiler can be buffered by
Duplicator in two different buffers before she executes them on her structure.
Previous work on such games using a single buffer has shown that they are
useful to approximate language inclusion problems. We study the decidability
and complexity and show that games with two buffers can be used to approximate
corresponding problems on finite transducers, i.e. the inclusion problem for
rational relations over infinite words.


title:
A Web-based Tool for Identifying Strategic Intervention Points in
  Complex Systems

abstract:
  Steering a complex system towards a desired outcome is a challenging task.
The lack of clarity on the system's exact architecture and the often scarce
scientific data upon which to base the operationalisation of the dynamic rules
that underpin the interactions between participant entities are two
contributing factors. We describe an analytical approach that builds on Fuzzy
Cognitive Mapping (FCM) to address the latter and represent the system as a
complex network. We apply results from network controllability to address the
former and determine minimal control configurations - subsets of factors, or
system levers, which comprise points for strategic intervention in steering the
system. We have implemented the combination of these techniques in an
analytical tool that runs in the browser, and generates all minimal control
configurations of a complex network. We demonstrate our approach by reporting
on our experience of working alongside industrial, local-government, and NGO
stakeholders in the Humber region, UK. Our results are applied to the
decision-making process involved in the transition of the region to a bio-based
economy.


title: Parametric, Probabilistic, Timed Resource Discovery System

abstract:
  This paper presents a fully distributed resource discovery and reservation
system. Verification of such a system is important to ensure the execution of
distributed applications on a set of resources in appropriate conditions. A
semi-formal model for his system is presented using probabilistic timed
automata. This model is timed, parametric and probabilistic, making it a
challenge to the parameter synthesis community.


title:
Weighted Branching Simulation Distance for Parametric Weighted Kripke
  Structures

abstract:
  This paper concerns branching simulation for weighted Kripke structures with
parametric weights. Concretely, we consider a weighted extension of branching
simulation where a single transitions can be matched by a sequence of
transitions while preserving the branching behavior. We relax this notion to
allow for a small degree of deviation in the matching of weights, inducing a
directed distance on states. The distance between two states can be used
directly to relate properties of the states within a sub-fragment of weighted
CTL. The problem of relating systems thus changes to minimizing the distance
which, in the general parametric case, corresponds to finding suitable
parameter valuations such that one system can approximately simulate another.
Although the distance considers a potentially infinite set of transition
sequences we demonstrate that there exists an upper bound on the length of
relevant sequences, thereby establishing the computability of the distance.


title:
Rate Reduction for State-labelled Markov Chains with Upper Time-bounded
  CSL Requirements

abstract:
  This paper presents algorithms for identifying and reducing a dedicated set
of controllable transition rates of a state-labelled continuous-time Markov
chain model. The purpose of the reduction is to make states to satisfy a given
requirement, specified as a CSL upper time-bounded Until formula. We
distinguish two different cases, depending on the type of probability bound. A
natural partitioning of the state space allows us to develop possible
solutions, leading to simple algorithms for both cases.


title: An axiomatic approach to Maxwell's equations

abstract:
  This paper suggests an axiomatic approach to Maxwell's equations. The basis
of this approach is a theorem formulated for two sets of functions localized in
space and time. If each set satisfies a continuity equation then the theorem
provides an integral representation for each function. A corollary of this
theorem yields Maxwell's equations with magnetic monopoles. It is pointed out
that the causality principle and the conservation of electric and magnetic
charges are the most fundamental physical axioms underlying these equations.
Another application of the corollary yields Maxwell's equations in material
media. The theorem is also formulated in the Minkowski space-time and applied
to obtain the covariant form of Maxwell's equations with magnetic monopoles and
the covariant form of Maxwell's equations in material media. The approach makes
use of the infinite-space Green function of the wave equation and is therefore
suitable for an advanced course in electrodynamics.


title:
The Transactional Interpretation and its Evolution into the 21st
  Century: An Overview

abstract:
  This essay provides a historical, philosophical, and critical overview of the
development of the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (TI). It
is separated into two parts. Part I presents the history and development of TI
from 1986 up to 2016 (the time of writing). Part II lays out current areas of
divergence among researchers in TI.


title: Time-Domain N-continuous GFDM

abstract:
  Generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) has been a candidate
multicarrier scheme in the 5th generation cellular networks for its flexibility
of transmitter filter in time and frequency. However, for the circularly shaped
transmitter filter, GFDM provides limited performance gain of sidelobe
suppression. In this paper, we propose a scheme, called time-domain
N-continuous GFDM (TD-NC-GFDM), to reduce the discontinuities caused by the
GFDM transmitter filter and achieve promising sidelobe suppression gain. Based
on time-domain N-continuous orthogonal frequency devision multiplexing
(TD-NC-OFDM), TD-NC-GFDM signal can be obtained by superposing a smooth signal
in the time domain. The smooth signal is linearly combined by basis signals in
a new basis set related to GFDM transmitter waveform. To eliminate the
interference caused by the smooth signal, two solutions are proposed. Firstly,
a signal recovery algorithm for reception is adopted at the cost of high
complexity. Thus, secondly, to simplify the TD-NC-GFDM receiver, a
low-interference TD-NC-GFDM is proposed by redesigning the basis signals. A
soft truncation of the basis signals in TD-NC-GFDM is given to design the basis
signals in the low-interference TD-NC-GFDM. Then, the smooth signal is aligned
with the beginning of the GFDM symbol and is added in the front part of the
GFDM symbol. Moreover, for a big number of GFDM subsymbols, theoretical
analysis proves that the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) in TD-NC-GFDM is
much higher than that in TD-NC-OFDM. Simulation results shows that TD-NC-GFDM
can obtain significant sidelobe suppression performance as well as the
low-interference TD-NC-GFDM, which can achieve the same BER performance as the
original GFDM.


title:
New constraints and discovery potential for Higgs to Higgs cascade
  decays through vectorlike leptons

abstract:
  One of the cleanest signatures of a heavy Higgs boson in models with
vectorlike leptons is $H\to e_4^\pm \ell^\mp \to h\ell^+\ell^-$ which, in two
Higgs doublet model type-II, can even be the dominant decay mode of heavy
Higgses. Among the decay modes of the standard model like Higgs boson, $h$, we
consider $b \bar b$ and $\gamma \gamma$ as representative channels with sizable
and negligible background, respectively. We obtained new model independent
limits on production cross section for this process from recasting existing
experimental searches and interpret them within the two Higgs doublet model. In
addition, we show that these limits can be improved by about two orders of
magnitude with appropriate selection cuts immediately with existing data sets.
We also discuss expected sensitivities with integrated luminosity up to 3
ab$^{-1}$ and present a brief overview of other channels.


title: Simulation Optimization of Risk Measures with Adaptive Risk Levels

abstract:
  Optimizing risk measures such as Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional
Value-at-Risk (CVaR) of a general loss distribution is usually difficult,
because 1) the loss function might lack structural properties such as convexity
or differentiability since it is often generated via black-box simulation of a
stochastic system; 2) evaluation of risk measures often requires rare-event
simulation, which is computationally expensive. In this paper, we study the
extension of the recently proposed gradient-based adaptive stochastic search
(GASS) to the optimization of risk measures VaR and CVaR. Instead of optimizing
VaR or CVaR at the target risk level directly, we incorporate an adaptive
updating scheme on the risk level, by initializing the algorithm at a small
risk level and adaptively increasing it until the target risk level is achieved
while the algorithm converges at the same time. This enables us to adaptively
reduce the number of samples required to estimate the risk measure at each
iteration, and thus improving the overall efficiency of the algorithm.


title: Integration of 2-term representations up to homotopy via 2-functors

abstract:
  Given a representation up to homotopy of a Lie algebroid on a 2-term complex
of vector bundles, we define the corresponding holonomy as a strict 2-functor
from a Weinstein path 2-groupoid to the gauge 2-groupoid of the underlying
2-term complex. We construct a corresponding transformation 2-groupoid and we
prove that the 1-truncation of this 2-groupoid is isomorphic to the Weinstein
groupoid of the VB-algebroid associated to a representation up to homotopy. As
applications, we describe alternative integration schemes for semi-direct
products of Lie 2-algebras and string algebras.


title:
Investigation of NWC-induced electron precipitation and theoretical
  simulation

abstract:
  Enhancement of the electron fluxes in the inner radiation belt, which is
induced by the powerful North West Cape (NWC) very-low-frequency (VLF)
transmitter, have been observed and analyzed by several research groups.
However, all of the previous publications have focused on NWC-induced >100-keV
electrons only, based on observations from the Detection of Electro-Magnetic
Emissions Transmitted from Earthquake Regions (DEMETER) and the Geostationary
Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) satellites. Here, we present flux
enhancements with 30--100-keV electrons related to NWC transmitter for the
first time, which were observed by the GOES satellite at night. Similar to the
100--300-keV precipitated-electron havior, the low energy 30--100-keV electron
precipitation is primarily located east of the transmitter. However, the latter
does not drift eastward to the same extent as the former, possibly because of
the lower electron velocity. The 30--100-keV electrons are distributed in the
L=1.8--2.1 shell range, in contrast to the 100--300-keV electrons which are at
L=1.67--1.9. This is consistent with the perspective that the energy of the
VLF-wave-induced electron flux enhancement decreases with higher L-shell
values. We expand upon the rationality of the simultaneous enhancement of the
30--100- and 100--300-keV electron fluxes through comparison with the cyclotron
resonance theory for the quasi-linear wave-particle interaction. In addition,
we interpret the asymmetry characteristics of NWC electric power distribution
in north and south hemisphere by ray tracing model. Finally, we present
considerable discussion and show that good agreement exists between the
observation of satellites and theory.


title: Lattice Field Theory Study of Magnetic Catalysis in Graphene

abstract:
  We discuss the simulation of the low-energy effective field theory (EFT) for
graphene in the presence of an external magnetic field. Our fully
nonperturbative calculation uses methods of lattice gauge theory to study the
theory using a hybrid Monte Carlo approach. We investigate the phenomenon of
magnetic catalysis in the context of graphene by studying the chiral condensate
which is the order parameter characterizing the spontaneous breaking of chiral
symmetry. In the EFT, the symmetry breaking pattern is given by $U(4) \to U(2)
\times U(2)$. We also comment on the difficulty, in this lattice formalism, of
studying the time-reversal-odd condensate characterizing the ground state in
the presence of a magnetic field. Finally, we study the mass spectrum of the
theory, in particular the Nambu-Goldstone (NG) mode as well as the Dirac
quasiparticle, which is predicted to obtain a dynamical mass.


title: Can Active Learning Experience Be Transferred?

abstract:
  Active learning is an important machine learning problem in reducing the
human labeling effort. Current active learning strategies are designed from
human knowledge, and are applied on each dataset in an immutable manner. In
other words, experience about the usefulness of strategies cannot be updated
and transferred to improve active learning on other datasets. This paper
initiates a pioneering study on whether active learning experience can be
transferred. We first propose a novel active learning model that linearly
aggregates existing strategies. The linear weights can then be used to
represent the active learning experience. We equip the model with the popular
linear upper- confidence-bound (LinUCB) algorithm for contextual bandit to
update the weights. Finally, we extend our model to transfer the experience
across datasets with the technique of biased regularization. Empirical studies
demonstrate that the learned experience not only is competitive with existing
strategies on most single datasets, but also can be transferred across datasets
to improve the performance on future learning tasks.


title: Global Vertices and the Noising Paradox

abstract:
  A theoretical and experimental analysis related to the identification of
vertices of unknown shapes is presented. Shapes are seen as real functions of
their closed boundary. Unlike traditional approaches, which see curvature as
the rate of change of the tangent to the curve, an alternative global
perspective of curvature is examined providing insight into the process of
noise-enabled vertex localization. The analysis leads to a paradox, that
certain vertices can be localized better in the presence of noise. The concept
of noising is thus considered and a relevant global method for localizing
"Global Vertices" is investigated. Theoretical analysis reveals that induced
noise can help localizing certain vertices if combined with global descriptors.
Experiments with noise and a comparison to localized methods validate the
theoretical results.


title:
Improving Zero-Day Malware Testing Methodology Using Statistically
  Significant Time-Lagged Test Samples

abstract:
  Enterprise networks are in constant danger of being breached by
cyber-attackers, but making the decision about what security tools to deploy to
mitigate this risk requires carefully designed evaluation of security products.
One of the most important metrics for a protection product is how well it is
able to stop malware, specifically on "zero"-day malware that has not been seen
by the security community before. However, evaluating zero-day performance is
difficult, because of larger number of previously unseen samples that are
needed to properly measure the true and false positive rate, and the challenges
involved in accurately labeling these samples. This paper addresses these
issues from a statistical and practical perspective. Our contributions include
first showing that the number of benign files needed for proper evaluation is
on the order of a millions, and the number of malware samples needed is on the
order of tens of thousands. We then propose and justify a time-delay method for
easily collecting large number of previously unseen, but labeled, samples. This
enables cheap and accurate evaluation of zero-day true and false positive
rates. Finally, we propose a more fine-grain labeling of the malware/benignware
in order to better model the heterogeneous distribution of files on various
networks.


title: Modelling the Inner Debris Disc of HR 8799

abstract:
  In many ways, the HR 8799 planetary system strongly resembles our own. It
features four giant planets and two debris belts, analogues to the Asteroid and
Edgeworth-Kuiper belts. Here, we present the results of dynamical simulations
of HR 8799's inner debris belt, to study its structure and collisional
environment.
  Our results suggest that HR 8799's inner belt is highly structured, with gaps
between regions of dynamical stability. The belt is likely constrained between
sharp inner and outer edges, located at ~6 and ~8 au, respectively. Its inner
edge coincides with a broad gap cleared by the 4:1 mean-motion resonance with
HR 8799e.
  Within the belt, planetesimals are undergoing a process of collisional
attrition like that observed in the Asteroid belt. However, whilst the mean
collision velocity in the Asteroid belt exceeds 5 km/s, the majority of
collisions within HR 8799's inner belt occur with velocities of order 1.2 km/s,
or less. Despite this, they remain sufficiently energetic to be destructive -
giving a source for the warm dust detected in the system.
  Interior to the inner belt, test particles remain dynamically unstirred,
aside from narrow bands excited by distant high-order resonances with HR 8799e.
This lack of stirring is consistent with earlier thermal modelling of HR 8799's
infrared excess, which predicted little dust inside 6 au. The inner system is
sufficiently stable and unstirred that the formation of telluric planets is
feasible, although such planets would doubtless be subject to a punitive impact
regime, given the intense collisional grinding required in the inner belt to
generate the observed infrared excess.


title:
Percolation transition in the packing of bidispersed particles on curved
  surfaces

abstract:
  We study packings of bidispersed spherical particles on a spherical surface.
The presence of curvature necessitates defects even for monodispersed
particles; bidispersity either leads to a more disordered packing for nearly
equal radii, or a higher fill fraction when the smaller particles are
accomodated in the interstices of the larger spheres. Variation in the packing
fraction is explained by a percolation transition, as chains of defects or
scars previously discovered in the monodispersed case grow and eventually
disconnect the neighbor graph.


title:
Impacts of dark energy on weighing neutrinos: mass hierarchies
  considered

abstract:
  Taking into account the mass splittings between three active neutrinos, we
investigate impacts of dark energy on constraining the total neutrino mass
$\sum m_{\nu}$ by using recent cosmological observations. We consider two
typical dark energy models, namely, the $w$CDM model and the holographic dark
energy (HDE) model, which both have an additional free parameter compared with
the $\Lambda$CDM model. We employ the Planck 2015 data of CMB temperature and
polarization anisotropies, combined with low-redshift measurements on BAO
distance scales, type Ia supernovae, Hubble constant, and Planck lensing.
Compared to the $\Lambda$CDM model, our study shows that the upper limit on
$\sum m_{\nu}$ becomes much looser in the $w$CDM model while much tighter in
the HDE model. In the HDE model, we obtain the $95\%$ CL upper limit $\sum
m_{\nu}<0.105~\textrm{eV}$ for three degenerate neutrinos. This might be the
most stringent constraint on $\sum m_{\nu}$ by far and is almost on the verge
of diagnosing the neutrino mass hierachies in the HDE model. However, the
difference of $\chi^2$ is still not significant enough to distinguish the
neutrino mass hierarchies, even though the minimal $\chi^2$ of the normal
hierarchy is slightly smaller than that of the inverted hierarchy.


title: Adaptivity Gaps for Stochastic Probing: Submodular and XOS Functions

abstract:
  Suppose we are given a submodular function $f$ over a set of elements, and we
want to maximize its value subject to certain constraints. Good approximation
algorithms are known for such problems under both monotone and non-monotone
submodular functions. We consider these problems in a stochastic setting, where
elements are not all active and we can only get value from active elements.
Each element $e$ is active independently with some known probability $p_e$, but
we don't know the element's status \emph{a priori}. We find it out only when we
\emph{probe} the element $e$---probing reveals whether it's active or not,
whereafter we can use this information to decide which other elements to probe.
Eventually, if we have a probed set $S$ and a subset $\text{active}(S)$ of
active elements in $S$, we can pick any $T \subseteq \text{active}(S)$ and get
value $f(T)$. Moreover, the sequence of elements we probe must satisfy a given
\emph{prefix-closed constraint}---e.g., these may be given by a matroid, or an
orienteering constraint, or deadline, or precedence constraint, or an arbitrary
downward-closed constraint---if we can probe some sequence of elements we can
probe any prefix of it. What is a good strategy to probe elements to maximize
the expected value?
  In this paper we study the gap between adaptive and non-adaptive strategies
for $f$ being a submodular or a fractionally subadditive (XOS) function. If
this gap is small, we can focus on finding good non-adaptive strategies
instead, which are easier to find as well as to represent. We show that the
adaptivity gap is a constant for monotone and non-monotone submodular
functions, and logarithmic for XOS functions of small \emph{width}. These
bounds are nearly tight. Our techniques show new ways of arguing about the
optimal adaptive decision tree for stochastic problems.


title:
Compilation of selective pulse network on liquid-state nuclear magnetic
  resonance system

abstract:
  In creating a large-scale quantum information processor, the ability to
construct control pulses for implementing an arbitrary quantum circuit in a
scalable manner is an important requirement. For liquid-state nuclear magnetic
resonance (NMR) quantum computing, a circuit is generally realized through a
sequence of selective soft pulses, in which various control imperfections exist
and are to be corrected. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of
the errors arisen in a selective pulse network by using the zeroth and first
order average Hamiltonian theory. Effective correction rules are derived for
adjusting important pulse parameters such as irradiation frequencies,
rotational angles and transmission phases of the selective pulses to increase
the control fidelity. Simulations show that applying our compilation procedure
for a given circuit is efficient and can greatly reduce the error accumulation.


title:
The Current Status of Prime Focus Instrument of Subaru Prime Focus
  Spectrograph

abstract:
  The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a new optical/near-infrared multi-fiber
spectrograph design for the prime focus of the 8.2m Subaru telescope. PFS will
cover 1.3 degree diameter field with 2394 fibers to complement the imaging
capability of Hyper SuprimeCam (HSC). The prime focus unit of PFS called Prime
Focus Instrument (PFI) provides the interface with the top structure of Subaru
telescope and also accommodates the optical bench in which Cobra fiber
positioners are located. In addition, the acquisition and guiding cameras
(AGCs), the optical fiber positioner system, the cable wrapper, the fiducial
fibers, illuminator, and viewer, the field element, and the telemetry system
are located inside the PFI. The mechanical structure of the PFI was designed
with special care such that its deflections sufficiently match those of the
HSC's Wide Field Corrector (WFC) so the fibers will stay on targets over the
course of the observations within the required accuracy. In this report, the
latest status of PFI development will be given including the performance of PFI
components, the setup and performance of the integration and testing equipment.


title: Metrology Camera System of Prime Focus Spectrograph for Subaru Telescope

abstract:
  The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a new optical/near-infrared multi-fiber
spectrograph designed for the prime focus of the 8.2m Subaru telescope. PFS
will cover a 1.3 degree diameter field with 2394 fibers to complement the
imaging capabilities of Hyper SuprimeCam. To retain high throughput, the final
positioning accuracy between the fibers and observing targets of PFS is
required to be less than 10um. The metrology camera system (MCS) serves as the
optical encoder of the fiber motors for the configuring of fibers. MCS provides
the fiber positions within a 5um error over the 45 cm focal plane. The
information from MCS will be fed into the fiber positioner control system for
the closed loop control. MCS will be located at the Cassegrain focus of Subaru
telescope in order to to cover the whole focal plane with one 50M pixel Canon
CMOS camera. It is a 380mm Schmidt type telescope which generates a uniform
spot size with a 10 micron FWHM across the field for reasonable sampling of
PSF. Carbon fiber tubes are used to provide a stable structure over the
operating conditions without focus adjustments. The CMOS sensor can be read in
0.8s to reduce the overhead for the fiber configuration. The positions of all
fibers can be obtained within 0.5s after the readout of the frame. This enables
the overall fiber configuration to be less than 2 minutes. MCS will be
installed inside a standard Subaru Cassgrain Box. All components that generate
heat are located inside a glycol cooled cabinet to reduce the possible image
motion due to heat. The optics and camera for MCS have been delivered and
tested. The mechanical parts and supporting structure are ready as of spring
2016. The integration of MCS will start in the summer of 2016.


title: Hybrid Quantum-Classical Approach to Quantum Optimal Control

abstract:
  A central challenge in quantum computing is to identify more computational
problems for which utilization of quantum resources can offer significant
speedup. Here, we propose a hybrid quantum-classical scheme to tackle the
quantum optimal control problem. We show that the most computationally
demanding part of gradient-based algorithms, namely computing the fitness
function and its gradient for a control input, can be accomplished by the
process of evolution and measurement on a quantum simulator. By posing queries
to and receiving messages from the quantum simulator, classical computing
devices update the control parameters until an optimal control solution is
found. To demonstrate the quantum-classical scheme in experiment, we use a
nine-spin nuclear magnetic resonance system, on which we have succeeded in
preparing a seven-correlated quantum state without involving classical
computation of the large Hilbert space evolution.


abstract:
  Report on the NSF Workshop on Formal Methods for Security, held 19-20
November 2015.


title: Intrinsic optimization using stochastic nanomagnets

abstract:
  This paper draws attention to a hardware system which can be engineered so
that its intrinsic physics is described by the generalized Ising model and can
encode the solution to many important NP-hard problems as its ground state. The
basic constituents are stochastic nanomagnets which switch randomly between the
$\pm 1$ Ising states and can be monitored continuously with standard
electronics. Their mutual interactions can be short or long range, and their
strengths can be reconfigured as needed to solve specific problems and to
anneal the system at room temperature. The natural laws of statistical
mechanics guide the network of stochastic nanomagnets at GHz speeds through the
collective states with an emphasis on the low energy states that represent
optimal solutions. As proof-of-concept, we present simulation results for
standard NP-complete examples including a 16-city traveling salesman problem
using experimentally benchmarked models for spin-transfer torque driven
stochastic nanomagnets.


title:
Thermodynamic study of gap structure and pair-breaking effect by
  magnetic field in the heavy-fermion superconductor CeCu2Si2

abstract:
  This paper presents the results of specific-heat and magnetization
measurements, in particular their field-orientation dependence, on the first
discovered heavy-fermion superconductor CeCu$_2$Si$_2$ ($T_{\rm c} \sim 0.6$
K). We discuss the superconducting gap structure and the origin of the
anomalous pair-breaking phenomena, leading e.g., to the suppression of the
upper critical field $H_{\rm c2}$, found in the high-field region. The data
show that the anomalous pair breaking becomes prominent below about 0.15 K in
any field direction, but occurs closer to $H_{\rm c2}$ for $H \parallel c$. The
presence of this anomaly is confirmed by the fact that the specific-heat and
magnetization data satisfy standard thermodynamic relations. Concerning the gap
structure, field-angle dependences of the low-temperature specific heat within
the $ab$ and $ac$ planes do not show any evidence for gap nodes. From
microscopic calculations in the framework of a two-band full-gap model, the
power-law-like temperature dependences of $C$ and $1/T_1$, reminiscent of nodal
superconductivity, have been reproduced reasonably. These facts further support
multiband full-gap superconductivity in CeCu$_2$Si$_2$.


title: Observation of Prethermalization in Long-Range Interacting Spin Chains

abstract:
  Statistical mechanics can predict thermal equilibrium states for most
classical systems, but for an isolated quantum system there is no general
understanding on how equilibrium states dynamically emerge from the microscopic
Hamiltonian. For instance, quantum systems that are near-integrable usually
fail to thermalize in an experimentally realistic time scale and, instead,
relax to quasi-stationary prethermal states that can be described by
statistical mechanics when approximately conserved quantities are appropriately
included in a generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE). Here we experimentally study
the relaxation dynamics of a chain of up to 22 spins evolving under a
long-range transverse field Ising Hamiltonian following a sudden quench. For
sufficiently long-ranged interactions the system relaxes to a new type of
prethermal state that retains a strong memory of the initial conditions. In
this case, the prethermal state cannot be described by a GGE, but rather arises
from an emergent double-well potential felt by the spin excitations. This
result shows that prethermalization occurs in a significantly broader context
than previously thought, and reveals new challenges for a generic understanding
of the thermalization of quantum systems, particularly in the presence of
long-range interactions.


title: Robinson forcing and the quasidiagonality problem

abstract:
  We introduce weakenings of two of the more prominent open problems in the
classification of $\mathrm{C}^*$-algebras, namely the quasidiagonality problem
and the UCT problem. We show that the a positive solution of the conjunction of
the two weaker problems implies a positive solution of the original
quasidiagonality problem as well as allows us to give a local, finitary
criteria for the MF problem, which asks whether every stably finite
$\mathrm{C}^*$-algebra is MF.


title: Magnetic Domain Wall Floating on a Spin Superfluid

abstract:
  We theoretically investigate the transfer of angular momentum between a spin
superfluid and a domain wall in an exchange coupled easy-axis and easy-plane
magnetic insulator system. A domain wall in the easy-axis magnet absorbs spin
angular momentum via disrupting the flow of a superfluid spin current in the
easy-plane magnet. Focusing on an open geometry, where the spin current is
injected electrically via a nonequilibrium spin accumulation, we derive
analytical expressions for the resultant superfluid-mediated motion of the
domain wall. The analytical results are supported by micromagnetic simulations.
The proposed phenomenon extends the regime of magnon-driven domain-wall motion
to the case when the magnons are condensed and exhibit superfluidity.
Furthermore, by controlling the pinning of the domain wall, we propose a
realization of a reconfigurable spin transistor. The long-distance
dissipationless character of spin superfluids can thus be exploited for
manipulating soliton-based memory and logic devices.


title: Detection of opinion spam based on anomalous rating deviation

abstract:
  The publication of fake reviews by parties with vested interests has become a
severe problem for consumers who use online product reviews in their decision
making. To counter this problem a number of methods for detecting these fake
reviews, termed opinion spam, have been proposed. However, to date, many of
these methods focus on analysis of review text, making them unsuitable for many
review systems where accom-panying text is optional, or not possible. Moreover,
these approaches are often computationally expensive, requiring extensive
resources to handle text analysis over the scale of data typically involved.
  In this paper, we consider opinion spammers manipulation of average ratings
for products, focusing on dif-ferences between spammer ratings and the majority
opinion of honest reviewers. We propose a lightweight, effective method for
detecting opinion spammers based on these differences. This method uses
binomial regression to identify reviewers having an anomalous proportion of
ratings that deviate from the majority opinion. Experiments on real-world and
synthetic data show that our approach is able to successfully iden-tify opinion
spammers. Comparison with the current state-of-the-art approach, also based
only on ratings, shows that our method is able to achieve similar detection
accuracy while removing the need for assump-tions regarding probabilities of
spam and non-spam reviews and reducing the heavy computation required for
learning.


title: Sub-subleading soft gravitons and large diffeomorphisms

abstract:
  We present strong evidence that the sub-subleading soft theorem in
semi-classical (tree level) gravity discovered by Cachazo and Strominger is
equivalent to the conservation of asymptotic charges associated to a new class
of vector fields not contained within the previous extensions of BMS algebra.
Our analysis crucially relies on analyzing the hitherto established
equivalences between soft theorems and Ward identities from a new perspective.
In this process we naturally (re)discover a class of `magnetic' charges at null
infinity that are associated to the dual of the Weyl tensor.


title: Clinical Tagging with Joint Probabilistic Models

abstract:
  We describe a method for parameter estimation in bipartite probabilistic
graphical models for joint prediction of clinical conditions from the
electronic medical record. The method does not rely on the availability of
gold-standard labels, but rather uses noisy labels, called anchors, for
learning. We provide a likelihood-based objective and a moments-based
initialization that are effective at learning the model parameters. The learned
model is evaluated in a task of assigning a heldout clinical condition to
patients based on retrospective analysis of the records, and outperforms
baselines which do not account for the noisiness in the labels or do not model
the conditions jointly.


title: Green Data Centers: A Survey, Perspectives, and Future Directions

abstract:
  At present, a major concern regarding data centers is their extremely high
energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. However, because of the
over-provisioning of resources, the utilization of existing data centers is, in
fact, remarkably low, leading to considerable energy waste. Therefore, over the
past few years, many research efforts have been devoted to increasing
efficiency for the construction of green data centers. The goal of these
efforts is to efficiently utilize available resources and to reduce energy
consumption and thermal cooling costs. In this paper, we provide a survey of
the state-of-the-art research on green data center techniques, including energy
efficiency, resource management, thermal control and green metrics.
Additionally, we present a detailed comparison of the reviewed proposals. We
further discuss the key challenges for future research and highlight some
future research issues for addressing the problem of building green data
centers.


title: Singularities and internal rotational dynamics of electron beams

abstract:
  We study the internal rotational dynamics of electronic beams in relation to
the phase singularities of their wave functions. Given their complex
singularity structure, Hermite-Gaussian beams and other superpositions of
Laguerre-Gaussian modes are studied here. We show that by inspecting the lowest
non-vanishing terms of the wave function near the singularity it is possible to
infer the structure of the Bohmian streamlines. Conversely, starting from a map
of the electron's Bohmian velocities, we demonstrate that it is possible to
derive the form of the electron's wave function near the singularity. We
outline a procedure that could yield an experimental method to determine the
main parameters of the electron's wave function close to a singularity.


title: Scientific Auditing Firms

abstract:
  The "crisis of reproducibility" has been a significant source of controversy,
heated debate, and calls for reform to institutional science in recent years.
As a long-term solution to address both the present crisis and future
obstacles, I propose the creation of a new form of research organization whose
purpose would be to conduct random audits of the scientific literature. I
suggest that data analytics of a digitized scientific corpus may play a
critical role in allowing broadly educated scientists to identify linchpin
results to investigate in further detail across all disciplines. I argue that a
simple "mock" trial run of a simplified auditing firm consisting of several
researchers over a short time period would provide valuable insight into the
feasibility of this proposal.


title: Exploring the GalMer database: bar properties and non-circular motions

abstract:
  We use Tree-SPH simulations from the GalMer database by Chilingarian et al.
to characterize and quantify the non-circular motions induced by the presence
of bar-like structures on the observed rotation curve of barred galaxies
derived from empirical models of their line-of-sight velocity maps. The GalMer
database consists of SPH simulations of galaxies spanning a wide range of
morphological types and sizes. The aim is to compare the intrinsic velocities
and bar properties from the simulations with those derived from
pseudo-observations. This allows us to estimate the amount of non-circularity
and to test the various methods used to derive the bar properties and rotation
curves. The intrinsic velocities in the simulations are calculated from the
gravitational forces whereas the observed rotation velocities are derived by
applying the ROTCUR and DiskFit algorithms to well-resolved observations of
intermediate-inclination, strongly barred galaxies. Our results confirm that
the tilted ring method implemented in ROTCUR systematically
underestimates/overestimates the rotational velocities by up to 40 percent in
the inner part of the galaxy when the bar is aligned with one of the symmetry
axes for all the models. For the DiskFit analysis, we find that it produces
unrealistic values for all the models used in this work when the bar is within
$\sim$10 degrees of the major or minor axis.


title: Partially dark optical molecule via phase control

abstract:
  We study the tunable photonic distribution in an optical molecule consisting
of two linearly coupled single-mode cavities. With the inter-cavity coupling
and two driving fields, the energy levels of the optical-molecule system form a
closed cyclic energy-level diagram, and the phase difference between the
driving fields serves as a sensitive controller on the dynamics of the system.
Due to the quantum interference effect, we can realize a partially dark optical
molecule, where the steady-state mean photon number in one of the cavities
achieves zero even under the external driving. And the dark cavity can be
changed from one of the cavities to the other by only adjusting the phase
difference. Furthermore, we show that when one of the cavities couples with an
atomic ensemble, it will be dark under the same condition as that without
atoms, but the condition for the other cavity to be dark is modified.


title: Kobayashi compressibility

abstract:
  Kobayashi introduced a uniform notion of compressibility of infinite binary
sequences in terms of relative Turing computations with sub-identity use of the
oracle. Kobayashi compressibility has remained a relatively obscure notion,
with the exception of some work on resource bounded Kolmogorov complexity. The
main goal of this note is to show that it is relevant to a number of topics in
current research on algorithmic randomness. We prove that Kobayashi
compressibility can be used in order to define Martin-Loef randomness, a strong
version of finite randomness and Kurtz randomness, strictly in terms of Turing
reductions. Moreover these randomness notions naturally correspond to Turing
reducibility, weak truth-table reducibility and truth-table reducibility
respectively. Finally we discuss Kobayashi's main result from his 1981
technical report regarding the compressibility of computably enumerable sets,
and provide additional related original results.


title:
A Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Having Independent TE and TM
  Modes in an Anisotropic Waveguide

abstract:
  Whether there exist independent transverse electric (TE) and transverse
magnetic (TM) modes in a metallic waveguide filled with an anisotropic medium
is a fundamental question in electromagnetics waveguide theory, but so far no
definitive answers have been published. This paper establishes a necessary and
sufficient condition for having independent TE and TM modes in a waveguide
filled with a homogeneous lossless anisotropic medium based on both waveguide
theory in electromagnetics and basic knowledge in mathematics. Moreover, for
the independent TE modes, we prove the propagation constants obtained from both
the longitudinal scalar magnetic field stimulation and the transverse vector
electric field stimulation are the same; for the independent TM modes, the
propagation constants obtained from both the longitudinal scalar electric field
stimulation and the transverse vector magnetic field stimulation are the same.
This necessary and sufficient condition is a new theoretical result in
electromagnetic waveguide theory, and is expected to be valuable for the design
of waveguides filled with anisotropic media.


title:
Analysis of Co-spatial UV-optical STIS Spectra of Planetary Nebula NGC
  3242

abstract:
  This project sought to consider two important aspects of the planetary nebula
NGC 3242 using new long-slit HST/STIS spectra. First, we investigated whether
this object is chemically homogeneous by dividing the slit into different
regions spatially and calculating the abundances of each region. The major
result is that the elements of He, C, O, and Ne are chemically homogeneous
within uncertainties across the regions probed, implying that the stellar
outflow was well-mixed. Second, we constrained the stellar properties using
photoionization models computed by CLOUDY and tested the effects of three
different density profiles on these parameters. The three profiles tested were
a constant density profile, a Gaussian density profile, and a Gaussian with a
power law density profile. The temperature and luminosity were not affected
significantly by the choice of density structure. The values for the stellar
temperature and luminosity from our best fit model are 89.7$^{+7.3}_{-4.7}$kK
and log(L/Lsol)=3.36$^{+0.28}_{-0.22}$, respectively. Comparing to evolutionary
models on an HR diagram, this corresponds to an initial and final mass of
0.95$^{+0.35}_{-0.09}$ Msol and 0.56$^{+0.01}_{-0.01}$ Msol, respectively.


title: The blockchain: a new framework for robotic swarm systems

abstract:
  Swarms of robots will revolutionize many industrial applications, from
targeted material delivery to precision farming. However, several of the
heterogeneous characteristics that make them ideal for certain future
applications --- robot autonomy, decentralized control, collective emergent
behavior, etc. --- hinder the evolution of the technology from academic
institutions to real-world problems. Blockchain, an emerging technology
originated in the Bitcoin field, demonstrates that by combining peer-to-peer
networks with cryptographic algorithms a group of agents can reach an agreement
on a particular state of affairs and record that agreement without the need for
a controlling authority. The combination of blockchain with other distributed
systems, such as robotic swarm systems, can provide the necessary capabilities
to make robotic swarm operations more secure, autonomous, flexible and even
profitable. This work explains how blockchain technology can provide innovative
solutions to four emergent issues in the swarm robotics research field. New
security, decision making, behavior differentiation and business models for
swarm robotic systems are described by providing case scenarios and examples.
Finally, limitations and possible future problems that arise from the
combination of these two technologies are described.


title: Can we trust the bootstrap in high-dimension?

abstract:
  We consider the performance of the bootstrap in high-dimensions for the
setting of linear regression, where $p<n$ but $p/n$ is not close to zero. We
consider ordinary least-squares as well as robust regression methods and adopt
a minimalist performance requirement: can the bootstrap give us good confidence
intervals for a single coordinate of $\beta$? (where $\beta$ is the true
regression vector).
  We show through a mix of numerical and theoretical work that the bootstrap is
fraught with problems. Both of the most commonly used methods of bootstrapping
for regression -- residual bootstrap and pairs bootstrap -- give very poor
inference on $\beta$ as the ratio $p/n$ grows. We find that the residuals
bootstrap tend to give anti-conservative estimates (inflated Type I error),
while the pairs bootstrap gives very conservative estimates (severe loss of
power) as the ratio $p/n$ grows. We also show that the jackknife resampling
technique for estimating the variance of $\hat{\beta}$ severely overestimates
the variance in high dimensions.
  We contribute alternative bootstrap procedures based on our theoretical
results that mitigate these problems. However, the corrections depend on
assumptions regarding the underlying data-generation model, suggesting that in
high-dimensions it may be difficult to have universal, robust bootstrapping
techniques.


title: Rational Solutions of Underdetermined Polynomial Equations

abstract:
  In this paper we report on an application of computer algebra in which
mathematical puzzles are generated of a type that had been widely used in
mathematics contests by a large number of participants worldwide.
  The algorithmic aspect of our work provides a method to compute rational
solutions of single polynomial equations that are typically large with $10^2
\ldots 10^5$ terms and that are heavily underdetermined. This functionality was
obtained by adding modules for a new type of splitting of equations to the
existing package CRACK that is normally used to solve polynomial algebraic and
differential systems.


title: Covert Communication in the Presence of an Uninformed Jammer

abstract:
  Recent work has established that when transmitter Alice wishes to communicate
reliably to recipient Bob without detection by warden Willie, with additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels between all parties, communication is
limited to $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})$ bits in $n$ channel uses. However, this
assumes Willie has an accurate statistical characterization of the channel.
When Willie has uncertainty about such and his receiver is limited to a
threshold test on the received power, Alice can transmit covertly with a power
that does not decrease with $n$, thus conveying $\mathcal{O}(n)$ bits covertly
and reliably in $n$ uses of an AWGN channel. Here, we consider covert
communication of $\mathcal{O}(n)$ bits in $n$ channel uses while generalizing
the environment and removing any restrictions on Willie's receiver. We assume
an uninformed "jammer" is present to help Alice, and we consider AWGN and block
fading channels. In some scenarios, Willie's optimal detector is a threshold
test on the received power. When the channel between the jammer and Willie has
multiple fading blocks per codeword, a threshold test on the received power is
not optimal. However, we establish that Alice can remain covert with a transmit
power that does not decrease with $n$ even when Willie employs an optimal
detector.


title:
Quantum correlations of light due to a room temperature mechanical
  oscillator for force metrology

abstract:
  The coupling of laser light to a mechanical oscillator via radiation pressure
leads to the emergence of quantum mechanical correlations between the amplitude
and phase quadrature of the laser beam. These correlations form a generic
non-classical resource which can be employed for quantum-enhanced force
metrology, and give rise to ponderomotive squeezing in the limit of strong
correlations. To date, this resource has only been observed in a handful of
cryogenic cavity optomechanical experiments. Here, we demonstrate the ability
to efficiently resolve optomechanical quantum correlations imprinted on an
optical laser field interacting with a room temperature nanomechanical
oscillator. Direct measurement of the optical field in a detuned homodyne
detector ("variational measurement") at frequencies far from the resonance
frequency of the oscillator reveal quantum correlations at the few percent
level. We demonstrate how the absolute visibility of these correlations can be
used for a quantum-enhanced estimation of the quantum back-action force acting
on the oscillator, and provides for an enhancement in the relative
signal-to-noise ratio for the estimation of an off-resonant external force,
even at room temperature.


title: A Survey of Visual Analysis of Human Motion and Its Applications

abstract:
  This paper summarizes the recent progress in human motion analysis and its
applications. In the beginning, we reviewed the motion capture systems and the
representation model of human's motion data. Next, we sketched the advanced
human motion data processing technologies, including motion data filtering,
temporal alignment, and segmentation. The following parts overview the
state-of-the-art approaches of action recognition and dynamics measuring since
these two are the most active research areas in human motion analysis. The last
part discusses some emerging applications of the human motion analysis in
healthcare, human robot interaction, security surveillance, virtual reality and
animation. The promising research topics of human motion analysis in the future
is also summarized in the last part.


title:
Unified description of the proton, alpha, cluster decays and
  spontaneously fissions half- life

abstract:
  Some time ago the possibility of classical (without Gamow tunneling)
universal description of radioactive nuclei decay was demonstrated. Such
possibility is basis on the classical interpretation of Bohmian Psi-field
reality in Bohmian-Chetaev mechanics and the hypothesis for the presence of
dissipative forces, generated from the Gryzinski translational precession of
the charged particles spin, in Langevin- Kramers diffusion mechanism. In this
paper is present an unified model of proton, alpha decay, cluster radioactivity
and spontaneous fission half-life as explicit function which depends on the
total decay energy and kinetic energy, the number of protons and neutrons of
daughter product, the number of protons and neutrons of mother nuclei and from
a set) unknown digital parameters. The Half- lifes of the 573 nuclei taken from
NuDat database together with the recent experimental data from Oganessian
provide a basis for discovering the explicit form of the Kramers solution of
Langevin type equation in a framework of inverse problem with the help of the
Alexandrov dynamic auto-regularization method (FORTRAN program REGN-Dubna). The
procedure LCH in program REGN permitts to reduce the number of unknown digital
parameters from 137 to 79. The model describes 424 decays quantities with
deviation of order one in years power scale.


title: Picosecond spin Seebeck effect

abstract:
  We report time-resolved magneto-optic Kerr effect measurements of the
longitudinal spin Seebeck effect driven by an interfacial temperature
difference between itinerant electrons and magnons. The measured time-evolution
of spin accumulation induced by laser-excitation indicates transfer of angular
momentum across Au/Y$_3$Fe$_5$O$_{12}$ and Cu/Y$_3$Fe$_5$O$_{12}$ interfaces on
a picosecond time-scale. The product of spin-mixing conductance and interfacial
spin Seebeck coefficient determined is of the order of $10^8$ A m$^{-2}$
K$^{-1}$.


title: Towards a non-archimedean analytic analog of the Bass-Quillen conjecture

abstract:
  We suggest an analog of the Bass-Quillen conjecture for smooth affinoid
algebras over a complete non-archimedean field. We prove this in the rank-1
case, i.e. for the Picard group. For complete discretely valued fields and
regular affinoid algebras that admit a regular model (automatic if the residue
characteristic is zero) we prove a similar statement for the Grothendieck group
of vector bundles.


title:
Identifiable Phenotyping using Constrained Non-Negative Matrix
  Factorization

abstract:
  This work proposes a new algorithm for automated and simultaneous phenotyping
of multiple co-occurring medical conditions, also referred as comorbidities,
using clinical notes from the electronic health records (EHRs). A basic latent
factor estimation technique of non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is
augmented with domain specific constraints to obtain sparse latent factors that
are anchored to a fixed set of chronic conditions. The proposed anchoring
mechanism ensures a one-to-one identifiable and interpretable mapping between
the latent factors and the target comorbidities. Qualitative assessment of the
empirical results by clinical experts suggests that the proposed model learns
clinically interpretable phenotypes while being predictive of 30 day mortality.
The proposed method can be readily adapted to any non-negative EHR data across
various healthcare institutions.


title: A fractionalised "$\mathbb{Z}_2$" classical Heisenberg spin liquid

abstract:
  Quantum spin systems are by now known to exhibit a large number of different
classes of spin liquid phases. By contrast, for \textit{classical} Heisenberg
models, only one kind of fractionalised spin liquid phase, the so-called
Coulomb or $U(1)$ spin liquid, has until recently been identified: this
exhibits algebraic spin correlations and impurity moments, `orphan spins',
whose size is a fraction of that of the underlying microscopic degrees of
freedom. Here, we present two Heisenberg models exhibiting fractionalisation in
combination with exponentially decaying correlations. These can be thought of
as a classical continuous spin version of a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ spin liquid. Our
work suggests a systematic search and classification of classical spin liquids
as a worthwhile endeavour.