Efficient Acoustic Simulation for Immersive Media and Digital Fabrication

Sound is a crucial part of our life. Well-designed acoustic behaviors can lead to significant improvement in both physical and virtual interactions. In computer graphics, most existing methods focused primarily on improving the accuracy. It remained underexplored on how to develop efficient acoustic simulation algorithms for interactive practical applications. The challenges arise from the dilemma between expensive accurate simulations and fast feedback demanded by intuitive user interaction: traditional physics-based acoustic simulations are computationally expensive; yet, for end users to benefit from the simulations, it is crucial to give prompt feedback during interactions. In this thesis, I investigate how to develop efficient acoustic simulations for real-world applications such as immersive media and digital fabrication. To address the above-mentioned challenges, I leverage precomputation and optimization to significantly improve the speed while preserving the accuracy of complex acoustic phenomena. This work discusses three efforts along this research direction: First, to ease sound designer's workflow, we developed a fast keypoint-based precomputation algorithm to enable interactive acoustic transfer values in virtual sound simulations. Second, for realistic audio editing in 360° videos, we proposed an inverse material optimization based on fast sound simulation and a hybrid ambisonic audio synthesis that exploits the directional isotropy in spatial audios. Third, we devised a modular approach to efficiently simulate and optimize fabrication-ready acoustic filters, achieving orders of magnitudes speedup while maintaining the simulation accuracy. Through this series of projects, I demonstrate a wide range of applications made possible by efficient acoustic simulations

Dynamical Systems in Spiking Neuromorphic Hardware

Dynamical systems are universal computers. They can perceive stimuli, remember, learn from feedback, plan sequences of actions, and coordinate complex behavioural responses. The Neural Engineering Framework (NEF) provides a general recipe to formulate models of such systems as coupled sets of nonlinear differential equations and compile them onto recurrently connected spiking neural networks – akin to a programming language for spiking models of computation. The Nengo software ecosystem supports the NEF and compiles such models onto neuromorphic hardware. In this thesis, we analyze the theory driving the success of the NEF, and expose several core principles underpinning its correctness, scalability, completeness, robustness, and extensibility. We also derive novel theoretical extensions to the framework that enable it to far more effectively leverage a wide variety of dynamics in digital hardware, and to exploit the device-level physics in analog hardware. At the same time, we propose a novel set of spiking algorithms that recruit an optimal nonlinear encoding of time, which we call the Delay Network (DN). Backpropagation across stacked layers of DNs dramatically outperforms stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks—a state-of-the-art deep recurrent architecture—in accuracy and training time, on a continuous-time memory task, and a chaotic time-series prediction benchmark. The basic component of this network is shown to function on state-of-the-art spiking neuromorphic hardware including Braindrop and Loihi. This implementation approaches the energy-efficiency of the human brain in the former case, and the precision of conventional computation in the latter case

Modelling and estimation in lithium-ion batteries: a literature review

Lithium-ion batteries are widely recognised as the leading technology for electrochemical energy storage. Their applications in the automotive industry and integration with renewable energy grids highlight their current significance and anticipate their substantial future impact. However, battery management systems, which are in charge of the monitoring and control of batteries, need to consider several states, like the state of charge and the state of health, which cannot be directly measured. To estimate these indicators, algorithms utilising mathematical models of the battery and basic measurements like voltage, current or temperature are employed. This review focuses on a comprehensive examination of various models, from complex but close to the physicochemical phenomena to computationally simpler but ignorant of the physics; the estimation problem and a formal basis for the development of algorithms; and algorithms used in Li-ion battery monitoring. The objective is to provide a practical guide that elucidates the different models and helps to navigate the different existing estimation techniques, simplifying the process for the development of new Li-ion battery applications.This research received support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under projects MAFALDA (PID2021-126001OB-C31 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ ERDF,EU) and MASHED (TED2021-129927B-I00), and by FI Joan Oró grant (code 2023 FI-1 00827), cofinanced by the European Union.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Modeling a Spheroidal Particle Ensemble and Inversion by Generalized Runge-Kutta Regularizers from Limited Data

Extracting information about the shape or size of non-spherical aerosol particles from limited optical radar data is a well-known inverse ill-posed problem. The purpose of the study is to figure out a robust and stable regularization method including an appropriate parameter choice rule to address the latter problem. First, we briefly review common regularization methods and investigate a new iterative family of generalized Runge–Kutta filter regularizers. Next, we model a spheroidal particle ensemble and test with it different regularization methods experimenting with artificial data pertaining to several atmospheric scenarios. We found that one method of the newly introduced generalized family combined with the L-curve method performs better compared to traditional methods