Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Shall We Be Foxes Or Hedgehogs: What Is The Best Balance For Research?, Miroslav Svitek, Olga Kosheleva, Shahnaz Shahbazova, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Some researchers have few main ideas that they apply to many different problems -- they are called hedgehogs. Other researchers have many ideas but apply them to fewer problems -- they are called foxes. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. What is the best balance between these two approaches? In this paper, we provide general recommendations about this balance. Specifically, we conclude that the optimal productivity is when the time spent on generating new ideas is equal to the time spent on understanding new applications. So, if for a researcher, understanding a new problem is much easier than generating …

Why Rectified Linear Activation Functions? Why Max-Pooling? A Possible Explanation, Julio C. Urenda, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

At present, the most successful machine learning technique is deep learning, that uses rectified linear activation function (ReLU) s(x) = max(x,0) as a non-linear data processing unit. While this selection was guided by general ideas (which were often imprecise), the selection itself was still largely empirical. This leads to a natural question: are these selections indeed the best or are there even better selections? A possible way to answer this question would be to provide a theoretical explanation of why these selections are -- in some reasonable sense -- the best. This paper provides a possible theoretical explanation for this …

Why Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (Ndvi)?, Francisco Zapata, Eric Smith, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Hoang Phuong

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Plants play a very important role in ecological systems -- they transform CO2 into oxygen. It is therefore very important to be able to estimate the overall amount of live green vegetation in a given area. The most efficient way to provide such a global analysis is to use remote sensing, i.e., multi-spectral photos taken from satellites, drones, planes, etc. At present, one of the most efficient ways to detect, based on remote sensing data, how much live green vegetation an area contains is to compute the value of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). In this paper, we provide …

As Complexity Rises, Meaningful Statements Lose Precision -- But Why?, Miroslav Svitek, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the motivations for Zadeh's development of fuzzy logic -- and one of the explanations for the success of fuzzy techniques -- is the empirical observation that as complexity rises, meaningful statements lose precision. In this paper, we provide a possible explanation for this empirical phenomenon.

How The Pavement's Lifetime Depends On The Stress Level: An Explanation Of The Empirical Formula, Edgar Daniel Rodriguez Velasquez, Vladik Kreinovich, Olga Kosheleva, Hoang Phuong Nguyen

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We show that natural invariance ideas explain the empirical dependence on the pavement's lifetime on the stress level.

What Is A Reasonable Way To Make Predictions?, Leonardo Orea Amador, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Predictions are usually based on what is called laws of nature: many times, we observe the same relation between the states at different moments of time, and we conclude that the same relation will occur in the future. The more times the relation repeats, the more confident we are that the same phenomenon will be re-peated again. This is how Newton's laws and other laws came into being. This is what is called inductive reasoning. However, there are other reasonable approaches. For example, assume that a person speeds and is not caught. This may be repeated two times, three times …

Localized Learning: A Possible Alternative To Current Deep Learning Techniques, Javier Viana, Kelly Cohen, Anca Ralescu, Stephan Ralescu, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

At present, the most efficient deep learning technique is the use of deep neural networks. However, recent empirical results show that in some situations, it is even more efficient to use "localized" learning -- i.e., to divide the domain of inputs into sub-domains, learn the desired dependence separately on each sub-domain, and then "smooth" the resulting dependencies into a single algorithm. In this paper, we provide theoretical explanation for these empirical successes.

How ‘Human’ Should Robots Be?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Hotel guests like interaction with devices that look and sound like them, but they can spark displeasure after service failures, new CUHK study shows

Measuring Esg, Andrew King, Dan Chi Wong, Adrian De Groot Ruiz, Shawn Cole, Michael Tang, Dave Chen

Perspectives@SMU

Quantifying externalities is difficult and imprecise but one “should not fall into the trap of making the perfect the enemy of the good” and not try

2021-2022 Impact Series - Environmental Awareness Student Study Guide, Sabine Dantus

Impact Series Study Guides

Environmental Awareness Impact Series Study Guide: A guide to help you engage with environmental awareness

Measurement Of The Masses And Widths Of The Σc (2455)+ And Σc (2520)+ Baryons, J. Yelton, I. Adachi, J. K. Ahn, H. Aihara, S. Al Said, D. M. Asner, H. Atmacan, V. Aulchenko, T. Aushev, R. Ayad, V. Babu, S. Bahinipati, P. Behera, K. Belous, J. Bennett, M. Bessner, V. Bhardwaj, B. Bhuyan, T. Bilka

Faculty and Student Publications

Using 980 fb-1 of data collected with the Belle detector operating at the KEKB asymmetric-energy e+e- collider, we report the measurements of the masses, and the first measurements of the instrinsic widths, of the ςc(2455)+ and ςc(2520)+ charmed baryons. We find M(ςc(2455)+)-M(Λc+)=166.17±0.05-0.07+0.16 MeV/c2, Γ(ςc(2455)+)=2.3±0.3±0.3 MeV/c2, M(ςc(2520)+)-M(Λc+)=230.9±0.5-0.1+0.5 MeV/c2, and Γ(ςc(2520)+)=17.2-2.1-0.7+2.3+3.1 MeV/c2, where the uncertainties are statistical and systematic, respectively. These measurements can be used to test models of the underlying quark structure of the ςc states.

(Re)Proposal Of Three Cambrian Subsystems And Their Geochronology, Ed Landing, Gerd Geyer, Mark D. Schmitz, Thomas Wotte, Artem Kouchinsky

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Cambrian is anomalous among geological systems as many reports divide it into three divisions of indeterminate rank. This use of “lower”, “middle”, and “upper” has been a convenient way to subdivide the Cambrian despite agreement it consists of four global series. Traditional divisions of the system into regional series (Lower, Middle, Upper) reflected local biotic developments not interprovincially correlatable with any precision. However, use of “lower”, “middle”, and “upper” is unsatisfactory. These adjectives lack standard definition, evoke the regional series, and are misused. Notably, there is an almost 50 year use of three Cambrian subsystems and a 1997 proposal …

A Mélange Of Subduction Ages: Constraints On The Timescale Of Shear Zone Development And Underplating At The Subduction Interface, Catalina Schist (Ca, Usa), K. M. Harvey, S. Walker, P. G. Starr, S. C. Penniston-Dorland, M. J. Kohn, E. F. Baxter

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The presence of mélange at the subduction interface influences numerous geochemical and geophysical processes. However, the relationship between the timescales of mélange development, deformation, and resultant mass transport is poorly understood. Here, we use Sm-Nd garnet geochronology to elucidate the timing of peak metamorphism for five garnet amphibolite tectonic blocks from the amphibolite-facies mélange zone of the Catalina Schist (Santa Catalina Island, CA). Ages range from 108 to 116 Ma and do not appear to correlate with the peak metamorphic temperature recorded by each block (between 640 and 740°C). The lack of correlation between age and peak temperature favors the …

Towards Cnl-Based Verbalization Of Computational Contracts, Inari Listenmaa, Maryam Hanafiah, Regina Cheong, Andreas Kallberg

Centre for Computational Law

We present a CNL, which is a component of L4, a domain-specific programming language for drafting laws and contracts. Along with formal verification, L4’s core functionalities include natural language generation. We present the NLG pipeline and an interactive process for ambiguity resolution.

Mgrre_Pureoilscouttickets_Burmeister_1_21127005010000, Mgrre

Legacy Scout Tickets from Pure Oil Company

No abstract provided.

Coupled Inversion Of Hydraulic And Self-Potential Data From Transient Outflow Experiments To Estimate Soil Petrophysical Properties, Jing Xie, Yian Cui, Qifei Niu

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Hydraulicproperties of soils could play an important role in affecting the partitioning of precipitation in the critical zone. In addition to traditional approaches, in the last two decades, many geophysical methods have been used to aid the hydrologic characterization and measurement of geological materials. In particular, the self-potential (SP) method shows great potential in these hydrogeophysical applications. The objective of this study is to evaluate whether the addition of SP data can improve the estimation of hydraulic properties of soils in an outflow experiment. A stochastic, coupled hydrogeophysical inversion was developed, in which the governing equations were solved using the …

Leveraging The Interdependencies Between Barrier Islands And Backbarrier Saltmarshes To Enhance Resilience To Sea-Level Rise, Christopher J. Hein, Michael S. Fenster, Keryn B. Gedan, Jeff R. Tabar, Emily A. Hein, Todd Demunda

VIMS Articles

Barrier islands and their backbarrier saltmarshes have a reciprocal relationship: aeolian and storm processes transport sediment from the beaches and dunes to create and build marshes along the landward fringe of the island. In turn, these marshes exert a stabilizing influence on the barrier by widening the barrier system and forming a platform onto which the island migrates, consequently slowing landward barrier migration and inhibiting storm breaching. Here, we present a novel framework for applying these natural interdependencies to managing coastal systems and enhancing barrier-island resilience. Further, we detail application of these principles through a case study of the design …

Measurement Of Branching Fractions And Search For Cp Violation In D 0 → Π + Π − Η, D 0 → K + K − Η, And D 0 → Φη At Belle, L. K. Li, A. J. Schwartz, K. Kinoshita, I. Adachi, H. Aihara, S. Al Said, D. M. Asner, H. Atmacan, V. Aulchenko, T. Aushev, R. Ayad, V. Babu, S. Bahinipati, P. Behera, J. Bennett, M. Bessner, T. Bilka, J. Biswal, A. Bobrov

Faculty and Student Publications

We measure the branching fractions and CP asymmetries for the singly Cabibbo-suppressed decays D0 → π+π−η, D0 → K+K−η, and D0 → ϕη, using 980 fb−1 of data from the Belle experiment at the KEKB e+e− collider. We obtainB(D0→π+π−η)=[1.22±0.02(stat)±0.02(syst)±0.03(Bref)]×10−3,B(D0→K+K−η)=[1.80−0.06+0.07(stat)±0.04(syst)±0.05(Bref)]×10−4,B(D0→ϕη)=[1.84±0.09(stat)±0.06(syst)±0.05(Bref)]×10−4, where the third uncertainty (Bref) is from the uncertainty in the branching fraction of the reference mode D0 → K−π+η. The color-suppressed decay D0 → ϕη is observed for the first time, with very high significance. The results for the CP asymmetries areACP(D0π+π−η)=[0.9±1.2(stat)±0.5(syst)]%,ACP(D0→K+K−η)=[−1.4±3.3(stat)±1.1(syst)]%,ACP(D0→ϕη)=[−1.9±4.4(stat)±0.6(syst)]%. The results for D0 → π+π−η are a significant improvement over previous results. The branching fraction and ACP …

Citation Patterns In Chemistry Dissertations At A Mid-Sized University: An Internal Citation Analysis And External Comparison, Lisa M. Rose-Wiles

Library Publications

This study analyzes the references cited in 34 chemistry dissertations and compares the results with an earlier study of citations in American Chemical Society journals. The dissertations cite more references and older references and a greater diversity of sources. They have the same tendency to heavily cite journal articles from a small core of traditional journals. This study underscores the value of comparing internal citation analyses with external citation analyses, and of analyzing the number of citing authors as well as the number of citations. Interlibrary loan and internal usage statistics were also used to inform collection development and library …

Washington - Feat Bridge Based Train Measurements 2012, University Of Puget Sound

Non-Road Vehicle Data

Relevant Publications

Atmospheric Environment Publication (2019)

Estimation Of Conditional Power For Cluster-Randomized Trials With Interval-Censored Endpoints, Kaitlyn Cook, Rui Wang

Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications

Cluster-randomized trials (CRTs) of infectious disease preventions often yield correlated, interval-censored data: dependencies may exist between observations from the same cluster, and event occurrence may be assessed only at intermittent study visits. This data structure must be accounted for when conducting interim monitoring and futility assessment for CRTs. In this article, we propose a flexible framework for conditional power estimation when outcomes are correlated and interval-censored. Under the assumption that the survival times follow a shared frailty model, we first characterize the correspondence between the marginal and cluster-conditional survival functions, and then use this relationship to semiparametrically estimate the cluster-specific …

Plague Exposure In Mammalian Wildlife Across The Western United States, Sarah N. Bevins, Jeffrey C. Chandler, Nicole Barrett, Brandon S. Schmit, Gerald W. Wiscomb, Susan A. Shriner

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Plague is caused by a bacterial pathogen (Yersinia pestis) that can infect a wide range of mammal species, but its presence in wildlife is often underappreciated. Using a large-scale data set (n = 44,857) that details the extent of Y. pestis exposure in wildlife, we document exposure in 18 wildlife species, including coyotes (Canis latrans), bobcats (Lynx rufus), and black bears (Ursus americanus). Evidence of plague activity is widespread, with seropositive animals detected in every western state in the contiguous United States. Pathogen monitoring systems in wildlife that are both large scale …

Exploring The Personality Of Virtual Tutors In Conversational Foreign Language Practice, Johanna Dobbriner, Cathy Ennis, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

Fluid interaction between virtual agents and humans requires the understanding of many issues of conversational pragmatics. One such issue is the interaction between communication strategy and personality. As a step towards developing models of personality driven pragmatics policies, in this paper, we present our initial experiment to explore differences in user interaction with two contrasting avatar personalities. Each user saw a single personality in a video-call setting and gave feedback on the interaction. Our expectations, that a more extroverted outgoing positive personality would be a more successful tutor, were only partially confirmed. While this personality did induce longer conversations in …

Exploiting Group Structures To Infer Social Interactions From Videos, Maksim Bolonkin

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

In this thesis, we consider the task of inferring the social interactions between humans by analyzing multi-modal data. Specifically, we attempt to solve some of the problems in interaction analysis, such as long-term deception detection, political deception detection, and impression prediction. In this work, we emphasize the importance of using knowledge about the group structure of the analyzed interactions. Previous works on the matter mostly neglected this aspect and analyzed a single subject at a time. Using the new Resistance dataset, collected by our collaborators, we approach the problem of long-term deception detection by designing a class of histogram-based features …

Making Space For Unquantifiable Data: Hand-Drawn Data Visualization, Eva Sibinga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project makes space for personal “data” around labor and care, prompting users to consider the concrete and abstract (quantifiable and unquantifiable) forms labor and care take in their lives. The interactive, subjective data visualization uses hand-drawn visual elements to foreground that data about care and human interaction will always be ambiguous and complex, that they may never be satisfactorily or universally quantified, and that they will always be out of reach of perfect categorization.

The project provides an alternative to prescriptive truth-telling with data. Instead of using a dataset to provide data-driven answers and insights to users, the interactive …

Clifford Harmonics, Samuel L. Hosmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1980 Michelsohn defined a differential operator on sections of the complex Clifford bundle over a compact Kähler manifold M. This operator is a differential and its Laplacian agrees with the Laplacian of the Dolbeault operator on forms through a natural identification of differential forms with sections of the Clifford bundle. Relaxing the condition that M be Kähler, we introduce two differential operators on sections of the complex Clifford bundle over a compact almost Hermitian manifold which naturally generalize the one introduced by Michelsohn. We show surprising Kähler- like symmetries of the kernel of the Laplacians of these operators in …

Piecewise Linear Manifold Clustering, Artyom Diky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work studies the application of topological analysis to non-linear manifold clustering. A novel method, that exploits the data clustering structure, allows to generate a topological representation of the point dataset. An analysis of topological construction under different simulated conditions is performed to explore the capabilities and limitations of the method, and demonstrated statistically significant improvements in performance. Furthermore, we introduce a new information-theoretical validation measure for clustering, that exploits geometrical properties of clusters to estimate clustering compressibility, for evaluation of the clustering goodness-of-fit without any prior information about true class assignments. We show how the new validation measure, when …

Linear And Non Linear Properties Of Two-Dimensional Exciton-Polaritons, Mandeep Khatoniar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology has been accelerating at breakneck speed since the first quantum revolution, an era that ushered transistors and lasers in the late 1940s and early 1960s. Both of these technologies relied on a matured understanding of quantum theories and since their inception has propelled innovation and development in various sectors like communications, metrology, and sensing. Optical technologies were thought to be the game changers in terms of logic and computing operations, with the elevator pitch being "computing at speed of light", a fundamental speed limit imposed by this universe’s legal system (a.k.a physics). However, it was soon realized that that …

Spontaneous Fluctuations In A Magnetic Fe/Gd Skyrmion Lattice, M. H. Seaberg, B. Holladay, S. A. Montoya, X. Y. Zheng, J. C.T. Lee, A. H. Reid, J. D. Koralek, L. Shen, V. Esposito, G. Coslovich, P. Walter, S. Zohar, V. Thampy, M. F. Lin, P. Hart, K. Nakahara, R. Streubel, S. D. Kevan, P. Fischer, W. Colocho, A. Lutman, F. J. Decker, E. E. Fullerton, M. Dunne, S. Roy, S. K. Sinha, J. J. Turner

Robert Streubel Papers

Magnetic skyrmions are topological spin textures that exhibit classical or quantum quasiparticle behavior. A substantial amount of research has occurred in this field, both because of their unique electromagnetic properties and potential application for future nonvolatile memory storage applications, as well as fundamental questions on their topology and unique magnetic phases. Here, we investigate the fluctuation properties of a magnetic Fe/Gd skyrmion lattice, using short-pulsed x rays. We first measure spontaneous fluctuations of the skyrmion lattice phase and find an inherent, collective mode showing an underdamped oscillation with a relaxation of a couple of nanoseconds. Further observations track the response …

Statistical Mechanics Of One-Dimensional Quantum Droplets, T. Mithun, Simeon I. Mistakidis, P. Schmelcher, P. G. Kevrekidis

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We Study The Statistical Mechanics And The Dynamical Relaxation Process Of Modulationally Unstable One-Dimensional Quantum Droplets Described By A Modified Gross-Pitaevskii Equation. To Determine The Classical Partition Function Thereof, We Leverage The Semi-Analytical Transfer Integral Operator (TIO) Technique. The Latter Predicts A Distribution Of The Observed Wave-Function Amplitudes And Yields Two-Point Correlation Functions Providing Insights Into The Emergent Dynamics Involving Quantum Droplets. We Compare The Ensuing TIO Results With The Probability Distributions Obtained At Large Times Of The Modulationally Unstable Dynamics As Well As With The Equilibrium Properties Of A Suitably Constructed Langevin Dynamics. We Find That The Instability Leads …