25,837 research outputs found
From 3D Models to 3D Prints: an Overview of the Processing Pipeline
Due to the wide diffusion of 3D printing technologies, geometric algorithms
for Additive Manufacturing are being invented at an impressive speed. Each
single step, in particular along the Process Planning pipeline, can now count
on dozens of methods that prepare the 3D model for fabrication, while analysing
and optimizing geometry and machine instructions for various objectives. This
report provides a classification of this huge state of the art, and elicits the
relation between each single algorithm and a list of desirable objectives
during Process Planning. The objectives themselves are listed and discussed,
along with possible needs for tradeoffs. Additive Manufacturing technologies
are broadly categorized to explicitly relate classes of devices and supported
features. Finally, this report offers an analysis of the state of the art while
discussing open and challenging problems from both an academic and an
industrial perspective.Comment: European Union (EU); Horizon 2020; H2020-FoF-2015; RIA - Research and
Innovation action; Grant agreement N. 68044
Leveraging Continuous Material Averaging for Inverse Electromagnetic Design
Inverse electromagnetic design has emerged as a way of efficiently designing
active and passive electromagnetic devices. This maturing strategy involves
optimizing the shape or topology of a device in order to improve a figure of
merit--a process which is typically performed using some form of steepest
descent algorithm. Naturally, this requires that we compute the gradient of a
figure of merit which describes device performance, potentially with respect to
many design variables. In this paper, we introduce a new strategy based on
smoothing abrupt material interfaces which enables us to efficiently compute
these gradients with high accuracy irrespective of the resolution of the
underlying simulation. This has advantages over previous approaches to shape
and topology optimization in nanophotonics which are either prone to gradient
errors or place important constraints on the shape of the device. As a
demonstration of this new strategy, we optimize a non-adiabatic waveguide taper
between a narrow and wide waveguide. This optimization leads to a non-intuitive
design with a very low insertion loss of only 0.041 dB at 1550 nm.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure
Convergence of Gradient Descent for Low-Rank Matrix Approximation
This paper provides a proof of global convergence of gradient search for low-rank matrix approximation. Such approximations have recently been of interest for large-scale problems, as well as for dictionary learning for sparse signal representations and matrix completion. The proof is based on the interpretation of the problem as an optimization on the Grassmann manifold and Fubiny-Study distance on this space
Polyhedral computational geometry for averaging metric phylogenetic trees
This paper investigates the computational geometry relevant to calculations
of the Frechet mean and variance for probability distributions on the
phylogenetic tree space of Billera, Holmes and Vogtmann, using the theory of
probability measures on spaces of nonpositive curvature developed by Sturm. We
show that the combinatorics of geodesics with a specified fixed endpoint in
tree space are determined by the location of the varying endpoint in a certain
polyhedral subdivision of tree space. The variance function associated to a
finite subset of tree space has a fixed algebraic formula within
each cell of the corresponding subdivision, and is continuously differentiable
in the interior of each orthant of tree space. We use this subdivision to
establish two iterative methods for producing sequences that converge to the
Frechet mean: one based on Sturm's Law of Large Numbers, and another based on
descent algorithms for finding optima of smooth functions on convex polyhedra.
We present properties and biological applications of Frechet means and extend
our main results to more general globally nonpositively curved spaces composed
of Euclidean orthants.Comment: 43 pages, 6 figures; v2: fixed typos, shortened Sections 1 and 5,
added counter example for polyhedrality of vistal subdivision in general
CAT(0) cubical complexes; v1: 43 pages, 5 figure
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