10,307 research outputs found
Towards Advantages of Parameterized Quantum Pulses
The advantages of quantum pulses over quantum gates have attracted increasing
attention from researchers. Quantum pulses offer benefits such as flexibility,
high fidelity, scalability, and real-time tuning. However, while there are
established workflows and processes to evaluate the performance of quantum
gates, there has been limited research on profiling parameterized pulses and
providing guidance for pulse circuit design. To address this gap, our study
proposes a set of design spaces for parameterized pulses, evaluating these
pulses based on metrics such as expressivity, entanglement capability, and
effective parameter dimension. Using these design spaces, we demonstrate the
advantages of parameterized pulses over gate circuits in the aspect of duration
and performance at the same time thus enabling high-performance quantum
computing. Our proposed design space for parameterized pulse circuits has shown
promising results in quantum chemistry benchmarks.Comment: 11 Figures, 4 Table
Comedians without a Cause: The Politics and Aesthetics of Humour in Dutch Cabaret (1966-2020)
Comedians play an important role in society and public debate. While comedians have been considered important cultural critics for quite some time, comedy has acquired a new social and political significance in recent years, with humour taking centre stage in political and social debates around issues of identity, social justice, and freedom of speech. To understand the shifting meanings and political implications of humour within a Dutch context, this PhD thesis examines the political and aesthetic workings of humour in the highly popular Dutch cabaret genre, focusing on cabaret performances from the 1960s to the present. The central questions of the thesis are: how do comedians use humour to deliver social critique, and how does their humour resonate with political ideologies? These questions are answered by adopting a cultural studies approach to humour, which is used to analyse Dutch cabaret performances, and by studying related materials such as reviews and media interviews with comedians. This thesis shows that, from the 1960s onwards, Dutch comedians have been considered ‘progressive rebels’ – politically engaged, subversive, and carrying a left-wing political agenda – but that this image is in need of correction. While we tend to look for progressive political messages in the work of comedians who present themselves as being anti-establishment rebels – such as Youp van ‘t Hek, Hans Teeuwen, and Theo Maassen – this thesis demonstrates that their transgressive and provocative humour tends to protect social hierarchies and relationships of power. Moreover, it shows that, paradoxically, both the deliberately moderate and nuanced humour of Wim Kan and Claudia de Breij, and the seemingly past-oriented nostalgia of Alex Klaasen, are more radical and progressive than the transgressive humour of van ‘t Hek, Teeuwen and Maassen. Finally, comedians who present absurdist or deconstructionist forms of humour, such as the early student cabarets, Freek de Jonge, and Micha Wertheim, tend to disassociate themselves from an explicit political engagement. By challenging the dominant image of the Dutch comedian as a ‘progressive rebel,’ this thesis contributes to a better understanding of humour in the present cultural moment, in which humour is often either not taken seriously, or one-sidedly celebrated as being merely pleasurable, innocent, or progressively liberating. In so doing, this thesis concludes, the ‘dark’ and more conservative sides of humour tend to get obscured
PowerGAN: A Machine Learning Approach for Power Side-Channel Attack on Compute-in-Memory Accelerators
Analog compute-in-memory (CIM) accelerators are becoming increasingly popular
for deep neural network (DNN) inference due to their energy efficiency and
in-situ vector-matrix multiplication (VMM) capabilities. However, as the use of
DNNs expands, protecting user input privacy has become increasingly important.
In this paper, we identify a security vulnerability wherein an adversary can
reconstruct the user's private input data from a power side-channel attack,
under proper data acquisition and pre-processing, even without knowledge of the
DNN model. We further demonstrate a machine learning-based attack approach
using a generative adversarial network (GAN) to enhance the reconstruction. Our
results show that the attack methodology is effective in reconstructing user
inputs from analog CIM accelerator power leakage, even when at large noise
levels and countermeasures are applied. Specifically, we demonstrate the
efficacy of our approach on the U-Net for brain tumor detection in magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI) medical images, with a noise-level of 20% standard
deviation of the maximum power signal value. Our study highlights a significant
security vulnerability in analog CIM accelerators and proposes an effective
attack methodology using a GAN to breach user privacy
Towards a generic compilation approach for quantum circuits through resynthesis
In this paper, we propose a generic quantum circuit resynthesis approach for
compilation. We use an intermediate representation consisting of Paulistrings
over {Z, I} and {X, I} called a ``mixed ZX-phase polynomial``. From this
universal representation, we generate a completely new circuit such that all
multi-qubit gates (CNOTs) are satisfying a given quantum architecture.
Moreover, we attempt to minimize the amount of generated gates.
The proposed algorithms generate fewer CNOTs than similar previous methods on
different connectivity graphs ranging from 5-20 qubits. In most cases, the CNOT
counts are also lower than Qiskit's. For large circuits, containing >= 100
Paulistrings, our proposed algorithms even generate fewer CNOTs than the TKET
compiler.
Additionally, we give insight into the trade-off between compilation time and
final CNOT count.Comment: 10 pages including references. 2 tables, 1 figur
Educating Sub-Saharan Africa:Assessing Mobile Application Use in a Higher Learning Engineering Programme
In the institution where I teach, insufficient laboratory equipment for engineering education pushed students to learn via mobile phones or devices. Using mobile technologies to learn and practice is not the issue, but the more important question lies in finding out where and how they use mobile tools for learning. Through the lens of Kearney et al.’s (2012) pedagogical model, using authenticity, personalisation, and collaboration as constructs, this case study adopts a mixed-method approach to investigate the mobile learning activities of students and find out their experiences of what works and what does not work. Four questions are borne out of the over-arching research question, ‘How do students studying at a University in Nigeria perceive mobile learning in electrical and electronic engineering education?’ The first three questions are answered from qualitative, interview data analysed using thematic analysis. The fourth question investigates their collaborations on two mobile social networks using social network and message analysis. The study found how students’ mobile learning relates to the real-world practice of engineering and explained ways of adapting and overcoming the mobile tools’ limitations, and the nature of the collaborations that the students adopted, naturally, when they learn in mobile social networks. It found that mobile engineering learning can be possibly located in an offline mobile zone. It also demonstrates that investigating the effectiveness of mobile learning in the mobile social environment is possible by examining users’ interactions. The study shows how mobile learning personalisation that leads to impactful engineering learning can be achieved. The study shows how to manage most interface and technical challenges associated with mobile engineering learning and provides a new guide for educators on where and how mobile learning can be harnessed. And it revealed how engineering education can be successfully implemented through mobile tools
Conscience and Consciousness: British Theatre and Human Rights.
This research project investigates a paradigm of human rights theatre. Through the lens of performance and theatre-making, this thesis explores how we came to represent, speak about, discuss, and own human rights in Britain. My framework of ‘human rights theatre’ proposes three distinctive features: firstly, such works dramatise real-world issues and highlights the role of the state in endangering its citizens; secondly, ethical ruptures are encountered within and without the drama, and finally, these performances characteristically aspire to produce an activist effect on the collective behaviours of the audience.
This thesis interrogates the strategies theatre-makers use to articulate human rights concerns or to animate human rights intent. The selected case-studies for this investigation are ice&fire’s testimonial project, Actors for Human Rights; Badac Theatre; Jonathan Holmes’ work as director of Jericho House; Cardboard Citizens’ youth participation programme, ACT NOW; and Tony Cealy’s Black Men’s Consortium. Deliberately selecting companies and performance events that have received limited critical attention, my methodology constellates case-studies through original interviews, durational observation of creative working methods and proximate descriptions of practice.
The thesis is interested in the experience of coming to ‘consciousness’ through human rights theatre, an awakening to the impacts of rights infringements and rights claiming. I explore consciousness as a processual, procedural, and durational happening in these performance events. I explore the ‘æffect’ of activist art and examine the ways in which makers of human rights theatre aim to amplify both affective and effective qualities in their work. My thesis also considers the articulation of activist purpose and the campaigning intent of the selected theatre-makers and explores how their activism is animated in their productions. Through the rich seam of discussion generated by the identification and exploration of the traits of a distinctive human rights theatre, I affirm the generative value of this typological enquiry
A Synergistic Compilation Workflow for Tackling Crosstalk in Quantum Machines
Near-term quantum systems tend to be noisy. Crosstalk noise has been
recognized as one of several major types of noises in superconducting Noisy
Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Crosstalk arises from the concurrent
execution of two-qubit gates on nearby qubits, such as \texttt{CX}. It might
significantly raise the error rate of gates in comparison to running them
individually. Crosstalk can be mitigated through scheduling or hardware machine
tuning. Prior scientific studies, however, manage crosstalk at a really late
phase in the compilation process, usually after hardware mapping is done. It
may miss great opportunities of optimizing algorithm logic, routing, and
crosstalk at the same time. In this paper, we push the envelope by considering
all these factors simultaneously at the very early compilation stage. We
propose a crosstalk-aware quantum program compilation framework called CQC that
can enhance crosstalk mitigation while achieving satisfactory circuit depth.
Moreover, we identify opportunities for translation from intermediate
representation to the circuit for application-specific crosstalk mitigation,
for instance, the \texttt{CX} ladder construction in variational quantum
eigensolvers (VQE). Evaluations through simulation and on real IBM-Q devices
show that our framework can significantly reduce the error rate by up to
6, with only 60\% circuit depth compared to state-of-the-art gate
scheduling approaches. In particular, for VQE, we demonstrate 49\% circuit
depth reduction with 9.6\% fidelity improvement over prior art on the H4
molecule using IBMQ Guadalupe. Our CQC framework will be released on GitHub
Industry 4.0: product digital twins for remanufacturing decision-making
Currently there is a desire to reduce natural resource consumption and expand circular business principles whilst Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is regarded as the evolutionary and potentially disruptive movement of technology, automation, digitalisation, and data manipulation into the industrial sector. The remanufacturing industry is recognised as being vital to the circular economy (CE) as it extends the in-use life of products, but its synergy with I4.0 has had little attention thus far. This thesis documents the first investigating into I4.0 in remanufacturing for a CE contributing a design and demonstration of a model that optimises remanufacturing planning using data from different instances in a product’s life cycle.
The initial aim of this work was to identify the I4.0 technology that would enhance the stability in remanufacturing with a view to reducing resource consumption. As the project progressed it narrowed to focus on the development of a product digital twin (DT) model to support data-driven decision making for operations planning. The model’s architecture was derived using a bottom-up approach where requirements were extracted from the identified complications in production planning and control that differentiate remanufacturing from manufacturing. Simultaneously, the benefits of enabling visibility of an asset’s through-life health were obtained using a DT as the modus operandi. A product simulator and DT prototype was designed to use Internet of Things (IoT) components, a neural network for remaining life estimations and a search algorithm for operational planning optimisation. The DT was iteratively developed using case studies to validate and examine the real opportunities that exist in deploying a business model that harnesses, and commodifies, early life product data for end-of-life processing optimisation. Findings suggest that using intelligent programming networks and algorithms, a DT can enhance decision-making if it has visibility of the product and access to reliable remanufacturing process information, whilst existing IoT components provide rudimentary “smart” capabilities, but their integration is complex, and the durability of the systems over extended product life cycles needs to be further explored
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