37,354 research outputs found
Probing anisotropies of gravitational-wave backgrounds with a space-based interferometer: geometric properties of antenna patterns and their angular power
We discuss the sensitivity to anisotropies of stochastic gravitational-wave
backgrounds (GWBs) observed via space-based interferometer. In addition to the
unresolved galactic binaries as the most promising GWB source of the planned
Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), the extragalactic sources for GWBs
might be detected in the future space missions. The anisotropies of the GWBs
thus play a crucial role to discriminate various components of the GWBs. We
study general features of antenna pattern sensitivity to the anisotropies of
GWBs beyond the low-frequency approximation. We show that the sensitivity of
space-based interferometer to GWBs is severely restricted by the data
combinations and the symmetries of the detector configuration. The spherical
harmonic analysis of the antenna pattern functions reveals that the angular
power of the detector response increases with frequency and the detectable
multipole moments with effective sensitivity h_{eff} \sim 10^{-20} Hz^{-1/2}
may reach 8-10 at mHz in the case of the single
LISA detector. However, the cross correlation of optimal interferometric
variables is blind to the monopole (\ell=0) intensity anisotropy, and also to
the dipole (\ell=1) in some case, irrespective of the frequency band. Besides,
all the self-correlated signals are shown to be blind to the odd multipole
moments (\ell=odd), independently of the frequency band.Comment: RevTex4, 22 pages, 6 figures (low resolution), typos correcte
On Quantifying Qualitative Geospatial Data: A Probabilistic Approach
Living in the era of data deluge, we have witnessed a web content explosion,
largely due to the massive availability of User-Generated Content (UGC). In
this work, we specifically consider the problem of geospatial information
extraction and representation, where one can exploit diverse sources of
information (such as image and audio data, text data, etc), going beyond
traditional volunteered geographic information. Our ambition is to include
available narrative information in an effort to better explain geospatial
relationships: with spatial reasoning being a basic form of human cognition,
narratives expressing such experiences typically contain qualitative spatial
data, i.e., spatial objects and spatial relationships.
To this end, we formulate a quantitative approach for the representation of
qualitative spatial relations extracted from UGC in the form of texts. The
proposed method quantifies such relations based on multiple text observations.
Such observations provide distance and orientation features which are utilized
by a greedy Expectation Maximization-based (EM) algorithm to infer a
probability distribution over predefined spatial relationships; the latter
represent the quantified relationships under user-defined probabilistic
assumptions. We evaluate the applicability and quality of the proposed approach
using real UGC data originating from an actual travel blog text corpus. To
verify the quality of the result, we generate grid-based maps visualizing the
spatial extent of the various relations
A Model of Movement Coordinates in Motor Cortex: Posture-Dependent Changes in the Gain and Direction of Single Cell Tuning Curves
Central to the problem of elucidating the cortical mechanisms that mediate movement behavior is an investigation of the coordinate systems by which movement variables are encoded in the firing rates of individual motor cortical neurons. In the last decade, neurophysiologists have probed how the preferred direction of an individual motor cortical cell (as determined by a center-out task) will change with posture because such changes are useful for inferring underlying cordinates. However, while the importance of shifts in preferred direction is well-known and widely accepted, posture-dependent changes in the depth of modulation of a cell's tuning curve, i.e. gain changes, have not been similarly identified as a means of coordinate inference. This paper develops a vector field framework which, by viewing the preferred direction and the gain of a cell's tuning curve as dual components of a unitary response vector, can compute how each aspect of cell response covaries with posture as a function of the coordinate system in which a given cell is hypothesized to encode its movement information. This integrated approach leads to a model of motor cortical cell activity that codifies the following four observations: 1) cell activity correlates with hand movement direction, 2) cell activity correlates with hand movement speed, 3) preferred directions vary with posture, and 4) the modulation depth of tuning curves varies with posture. Finally, the model suggests general methods for testing coordinate hypotheses at the single cell level and example protocols arc simulated for three possible coordinate systems: Cartesian spatial, shoulder-centered, and joint angle.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (N00014-92-J-4015); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409); National Science Foundation (IRI-90-00530, IRI-97-20333); Office of Naval Research (N00014-91-J-4100, N00014-92-J-1309, N00014-94-l-0940, N00014-95-1-0657)
A computational model of the referential semantics of projective prepositions
In this paper we present a framework for interpreting locative expressions containing the prepositions in front of and behind. These prepositions have different semantics in the viewer-centred and intrinsic frames of reference (Vandeloise, 1991). We define a model of their semantics in each frame of reference. The basis of these models is a novel parameterized continuum function that creates a 3-D spatial template. In the intrinsic frame of reference the origin used by the continuum function is assumed to be known a priori and object occlusion does not impact on the applicability rating of a point in the spatial template. In the viewer-centred frame the location of the spatial template’s origin is dependent on the user’s perception of the landmark at the time of the utterance and object
occlusion is integrated into the model. Where there is an ambiguity with respect to the intended frame of reference, we define an algorithm for merging the spatial templates from the competing frames of reference, based on psycholinguistic observations in (Carlson-Radvansky, 1997)
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