17,176 research outputs found
Trees, not cubes: hypercontractivity, cosiness, and noise stability
Noise sensitivity of functions on the leaves of a binary tree is studied, and
a hypercontractive inequality is obtained. We deduce that the spider walk is
not noise stable.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, LaTeX2
Balancing Global Exploration and Local-connectivity Exploitation with Rapidly-exploring Random disjointed-Trees
Sampling efficiency in a highly constrained environment has long been a major
challenge for sampling-based planners. In this work, we propose
Rapidly-exploring Random disjointed-Trees* (RRdT*), an incremental optimal
multi-query planner. RRdT* uses multiple disjointed-trees to exploit
local-connectivity of spaces via Markov Chain random sampling, which utilises
neighbourhood information derived from previous successful and failed samples.
To balance local exploitation, RRdT* actively explore unseen global spaces when
local-connectivity exploitation is unsuccessful. The active trade-off between
local exploitation and global exploration is formulated as a multi-armed bandit
problem. We argue that the active balancing of global exploration and local
exploitation is the key to improving sample efficient in sampling-based motion
planners. We provide rigorous proofs of completeness and optimal convergence
for this novel approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate experimentally the
effectiveness of RRdT*'s locally exploring trees in granting improved
visibility for planning. Consequently, RRdT* outperforms existing
state-of-the-art incremental planners, especially in highly constrained
environments.Comment: Submitted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA) 201
The Beirut Dozen: traditional domestic garden as spatial and cultural mediator
Traditional domestic gardens in Beirut are associated with the detached house typology that appear in
the second half of the nineteenth century. Inspired by rural origins, the domestic garden nevertheless
evolved by taking on new spatial and cultural dimensions. This study explores these dimensions. The
aim is to investigate the role of the urban domestic garden to determine whether it was intended as an
appendage to the house or conceived and perceived independently. Space syntax analysis is applied
to 12 central-hall, detached houses to investigate garden morphology in relation to house interior
configuration and the public domain beyond.
The findings demonstrate that far from passive backdrop, the domestic garden served as a spatial and
cultural mediator, negotiating private domain and public realm, house and city, tradition and innovation.
Analyzing garden spatial characteristics and house alignment point to the garden's role as a
'refuge', visually screening the house and its residents, and equally as a 'prospect' advantaging insiders
over outsiders
On reverse hypercontractivity
We study the notion of reverse hypercontractivity. We show that reverse
hypercontractive inequalities are implied by standard hypercontractive
inequalities as well as by the modified log-Sobolev inequality. Our proof is
based on a new comparison lemma for Dirichlet forms and an extension of the
Strook-Varapolos inequality.
A consequence of our analysis is that {\em all} simple operators L=Id-\E as
well as their tensors satisfy uniform reverse hypercontractive inequalities.
That is, for all and every positive valued function for we have . This should
be contrasted with the case of hypercontractive inequalities for simple
operators where is known to depend not only on and but also on the
underlying space.
The new reverse hypercontractive inequalities established here imply new
mixing and isoperimetric results for short random walks in product spaces, for
certain card-shufflings, for Glauber dynamics in high-temperatures spin systems
as well as for queueing processes. The inequalities further imply a
quantitative Arrow impossibility theorem for general product distributions and
inverse polynomial bounds in the number of players for the non-interactive
correlation distillation problem with -sided dice.Comment: Final revision. Incorporates referee's comments. The proof of
appendix B has been corrected. A shorter version of this article will appear
in GAF
Lactobacillus ruminis strains cluster according to their mammalian gut source
peer-reviewedBackground
Lactobacillus ruminis is a motile Lactobacillus that is autochthonous to the human gut, and which may also be isolated from other mammals. Detailed characterization of L. ruminis has previously been restricted to strains of human and bovine origin. We therefore sought to expand our bio-bank of strains to identify and characterise isolates of porcine and equine origin by comparative genomics.
Results
We isolated five strains from the faeces of horses and two strains from pigs, and compared their motility, biochemistry and genetic relatedness to six human isolates and three bovine isolates including the type strain 27780T. Multilocus sequence typing analysis based on concatenated sequence data for six individual loci separated the 16 L. ruminis strains into three clades concordant with human, bovine or porcine, and equine sources. Sequencing the genomes of four additional strains of human, bovine, equine and porcine origin revealed a high level of genome synteny, independent of the source animal. Analysis of carbohydrate utilization, stress survival and technological robustness in a combined panel of sixteen L. ruminis isolates identified strains with optimal survival characteristics suitable for future investigation as candidate probiotics. Under laboratory conditions, six human isolates of L. ruminis tested were aflagellate and non-motile, whereas all 10 strains of bovine, equine and porcine origin were motile. Interestingly the equine and porcine strains were hyper-flagellated compared to bovine isolates, and this hyper-flagellate phenotype correlated with the ability to swarm on solid medium containing up to 1.8% agar. Analysis by RNA sequencing and qRT-PCR identified genes for the biosynthesis of flagella, genes for carbohydrate metabolism and genes of unknown function that were differentially expressed in swarming cells of an equine isolate of L. ruminis.
Conclusions
We suggest that Lactobacillus ruminis isolates have potential to be used in the functional food industry. We have also identified a MLST scheme able to distinguish between strains of L. ruminis of different origin. Genes for non-digestible oligosaccharide metabolism were identified with a putative role in swarming behaviour.This work was supported by a Principal Investigator Award (07/IN.1/B1780)
from Science Foundation Ireland to P.W. O’Toole
Risk-Averse Model Predictive Operation Control of Islanded Microgrids
In this paper we present a risk-averse model predictive control (MPC) scheme
for the operation of islanded microgrids with very high share of renewable
energy sources. The proposed scheme mitigates the effect of errors in the
determination of the probability distribution of renewable infeed and load.
This allows to use less complex and less accurate forecasting methods and to
formulate low-dimensional scenario-based optimisation problems which are
suitable for control applications. Additionally, the designer may trade
performance for safety by interpolating between the conventional stochastic and
worst-case MPC formulations. The presented risk-averse MPC problem is
formulated as a mixed-integer quadratically-constrained quadratic problem and
its favourable characteristics are demonstrated in a case study. This includes
a sensitivity analysis that illustrates the robustness to load and renewable
power prediction errors
Mapping parallel programs to heterogeneous CPU/GPU architectures using a Monte Carlo Tree Search
The single core processor, which has dominated for over 30 years, is now obsolete with recent trends increasing towards parallel systems, demanding a huge shift in programming techniques and practices. Moreover, we are rapidly moving towards an age where almost all programming will be targeting parallel systems. Parallel hardware is rapidly evolving, with large heterogeneous systems, typically comprising a mixture of CPUs and GPUs, becoming the mainstream. Additionally, with this increasing heterogeneity comes increasing complexity: not only does the programmer have to worry about where and how to express the parallelism, they must also express an efficient mapping of resources to the available system. This generally requires in-depth expert knowledge that most application programmers do not have. In this paper we describe a new technique that derives, automatically, optimal mappings for an application onto a heterogeneous architecture, using a Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm. Our technique exploits high-level design patterns, targeting a set of well-specified parallel skeletons. We demonstrate that our MCTS on a convolution example obtained speedups that are within 5% of the speedups achieved by a hand-tuned version of the same application.Postprin
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