1,558 research outputs found
The Boston University Photonics Center annual report 2014-2015
This repository item contains an annual report that summarizes activities of the Boston University Photonics Center in the 2014-2015 academic year. The report provides quantitative and descriptive information regarding photonics programs in education, interdisciplinary research, business innovation, and technology development. The Boston University Photonics Center (BUPC) is an interdisciplinary hub for education, research, scholarship, innovation, and technology development associated with practical uses of light.This has been a good year for the Photonics Center. In the following pages, you will see that the centerās faculty received prodigious honors and awards, generated more than 100 notable scholarly publications in the leading journals in our field, and attracted $18.6M in new research grants/contracts. Faculty and staff also expanded their efforts in education and training, and were awarded two new National Science Foundationā sponsored sites for Research Experiences for Undergraduates and for Teachers. As a community, we hosted a compelling series of distinguished invited speakers, and emphasized the theme of Advanced Materials by Design for the 21st Century at our annual symposium. We continued to support the National Photonics Initiative, and are a part of a New Yorkābased consortium that won the competition for a new photonics- themed node in the National Network of Manufacturing Institutes. Highlights of our research achievements for the year include an ambitious new DoD-sponsored grant for Multi-Scale Multi-Disciplinary Modeling of Electronic Materials led by Professor Enrico Bellotti, continued support of our NIH-sponsored Center for Innovation in Point of Care Technologies for the Future of Cancer Care led by Professor Catherine Klapperich, a new award for Personalized Chemotherapy Through Rapid Monitoring with Wearable Optics led by Assistant Professor Darren Roblyer, and a new award from DARPA to conduct research on Calligraphy to Build Tunable Optical Metamaterials led by Professor Dave Bishop. We were also honored to receive an award from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center to develop a biophotonics laboratory in our Business Innovation Center
The Boston University Photonics Center annual report 2013-2014
This repository item contains an annual report that summarizes activities of the Boston University Photonics Center in the 2013-2014 academic year. The report provides quantitative and descriptive information regarding photonics programs in education, interdisciplinary research, business innovation, and technology development. The Boston University Photonics Center (BUPC) is an interdisciplinary hub for education, research, scholarship, innovation, and technology development associated with practical uses of light.This annual report summarizes activities of the Boston University Photonics Center in the 2013ā2014 academic year.This has been a good year for the Photonics Center. In the following pages, you will see that the centerās faculty received prodigious honors and awards, generated more than 100 notable scholarly publications in the leading journals in our field, and attracted 20M in research funding for the University, are indicative of the breadth of Photonics Center research interests: from fundamental modeling of optoelectronic materials to practical development of cancer diagnostics, from exciting new discoveries in optogenetics for understanding brain function to the achievement of world-record resolution in semiconductor circuit microscopy. Our community welcomed an auspicious cohort of new faculty members, including a newly hired assistant professor and a newly hired professor (and Chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department). The Industry/University Cooperative Research Centerāthe centerpiece of our translational biophotonics programācontinues to focus on advancing the health care and medical device industries, and has entered its fourth year of operation with a strong record of achievement and with the support of an enthusiastic industrial membership base
Socially Beneficial Metaverse: Framework, Technologies, Applications, and Challenges
In recent years, the maturation of emerging technologies such as Virtual
Reality, Digital twins, and Blockchain has accelerated the realization of the
metaverse. As a virtual world independent of the real world, the metaverse will
provide users with a variety of virtual activities that bring great convenience
to society. In addition, the metaverse can facilitate digital twins, which
offers transformative possibilities for the industry. Thus, the metaverse has
attracted the attention of the industry, and a huge amount of capital is about
to be invested. However, the development of the metaverse is still in its
infancy and little research has been undertaken so far. We describe the
development of the metaverse. Next, we introduce the architecture of the
socially beneficial metaverse (SB-Metaverse) and we focus on the technologies
that support the operation of SB-Metaverse. In addition, we also present the
applications of SB-Metaverse. Finally, we discuss several challenges faced by
SB-Metaverse which must be addressed in the future.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figures, 3 table
A Comprehensive Empirical Investigation on Failure Clustering in Parallel Debugging
The clustering technique has attracted a lot of attention as a promising
strategy for parallel debugging in multi-fault scenarios, this heuristic
approach (i.e., failure indexing or fault isolation) enables developers to
perform multiple debugging tasks simultaneously through dividing failed test
cases into several disjoint groups. When using statement ranking representation
to model failures for better clustering, several factors influence clustering
effectiveness, including the risk evaluation formula (REF), the number of
faults (NOF), the fault type (FT), and the number of successful test cases
paired with one individual failed test case (NSP1F). In this paper, we present
the first comprehensive empirical study of how these four factors influence
clustering effectiveness. We conduct extensive controlled experiments on 1060
faulty versions of 228 simulated faults and 141 real faults, and the results
reveal that: 1) GP19 is highly competitive across all REFs, 2) clustering
effectiveness decreases as NOF increases, 3) higher clustering effectiveness is
easier to achieve when a program contains only predicate faults, and 4)
clustering effectiveness remains when the scale of NSP1F is reduced to 20%
Recommended from our members
Health Insurance Exchanges: Health Insurance āNavigatorsā and In-Person Assistance
The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, P.L. 111-148) allows certain individuals and small businesses to buy health insurance through state exchanges, beginning on October 1, 2013. The exchanges are not themselves insurers, but rather are special marketplaces where insurance firms may sell health policies that meet set, federal guidelines. As of September 2013, 16 states and the District of Columbia had secured Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) approval to create their own exchanges, 7 to enter into partnership exchanges, 26 to have federally facilitated exchanges, and 1 to have a state-based Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP)/federally facilitated individual exchange. An estimated 24 million individuals are expected to secure coverage through the exchanges by 2022.
The ACA requires exchanges to perform outreach to help consumers and small businesses make informed decisions about their insurance options, including the creation of ānavigatorā programs. Navigators are to carry out public education activities; provide information to prospective enrollees about insurance options and federal assistance; and examine enrolleesā eligibility for other federal or state health care programs, such as Medicaid. Navigators may assist consumers in comparing insurance plans, but may not determine their eligibility for subsidies or enroll them in plansāfunctions that are left to the exchanges. A variety of organizations may become navigators, including labor unions, trade associations, chambers of commerce, and other entities. Navigators may not be health insurers or take compensation from insurers for selling health policies. Navigators will be required to have 20-30 hours of training on consumer privacy, exchanged-based insurance offerings, and other issues. HHS in August 2013 allocated $67 million in 12-month grants for navigators at federally facilitated and partnership exchanges. In addition, HHS has determined that state-based exchanges may use ACA exchange establishment funds to create parallel, in-person, or non-navigator, assistance programs that perform the same function as navigators. Exchanges must also certify ācertified application counselorsā to help with outreach and enrollment, though no new ACA funds are available for such programs.
Consumers and small businesses may continue to use insurance brokers and agents, including web-based brokers, to compare and buy coverage, both on and off the exchanges. Brokers and agents are licensed by the states, and are generally paid on a commission basis by insurance companies. While brokers and agents may choose to become navigators, they may not accept compensation from health insurance companies in that role. Consumers may also purchase policies directly from health insurers. Outside non-profit groups and businesses, such as insurers, are launching their own separate efforts to educate consumers about the ACA and the process of applying for qualified health plans (QHP) and other programs.
Some lawmakers, agents, and brokers have raised questions about the navigator and other assistance programs. Issues include whether navigators will have sufficient training and whether HHS regulations provide sufficiently stringent consumer and privacy safeguards. A number of states have passed legislation to further regulate navigators, including requiring navigators to be licensed and to be liable for financial losses due to their advice. HHS has determined that the ACA gives states authority to set additional standards, so long as they do not prevent implementation of Title I of the law, which includes the exchanges and navigator program. This report describes exchange outreach programs, the role of brokers, agents and insurers, and emerging issues regarding consumer outreach assistance
ALGO: Synthesizing Algorithmic Programs with LLM-Generated Oracle Verifiers
Large language models (LLMs) excel at implementing code from functionality
descriptions but struggle with algorithmic problems that require not only
implementation but also identification of the suitable algorithm. Moreover,
LLM-generated programs lack guaranteed correctness and require human
verification. To address these challenges, we propose ALGO, a framework that
synthesizes Algorithmic programs with LLM-Generated Oracles to guide the
generation and verify their correctness. ALGO first generates a reference
oracle by prompting an LLM to exhaustively enumerate all the combinations of
relevant variables. This oracle is then utilized to guide an arbitrary search
strategy in exploring the algorithm space and to verify the synthesized
algorithms. Our study shows that the LLM-generated oracles are correct for 88%
of the cases. With the oracles as verifiers, ALGO can be integrated with any
existing code generation model in a model-agnostic manner to enhance its
performance. Experiments show that when equipped with ALGO, we achieve an 8x
better one-submission pass rate over the Codex model and a 2.6x better
one-submission pass rate over CodeT, the current state-of-the-art model on
CodeContests. We can also get 1.3x better pass rate over the ChatGPT Code
Interpreter on unseen problems. The problem set we used for testing, the
prompts we used, the verifier and solution programs, and the test cases
generated by ALGO are available at https://github.com/zkx06111/ALGO.Comment: NeurIPS 202
Database machines in support of very large databases
Software database management systems were developed in response to the needs of early data processing applications. Database machine research developed as a result of certain performance deficiencies of these software systems. This thesis discusses the history of database machines designed to improve the performance of database processing and focuses primarily on the Teradata DBC/1012, the only successfully marketed database machine that supports very large databases today. Also reviewed is the response of IBM to the performance needs of its database customers; this response has been in terms of improvements in both software and hardware support for database processing. In conclusion, an analysis is made of the future of database machines, in particular the DBC/1012, in light of recent IBM enhancements and its immense customer base
- ā¦