Designing and Deploying Online Field Experiments

Online experiments are widely used to compare specific design alternatives, but they can also be used to produce generalizable knowledge and inform strategic decision making. Doing so often requires sophisticated experimental designs, iterative refinement, and careful logging and analysis. Few tools exist that support these needs. We thus introduce a language for online field experiments called PlanOut. PlanOut separates experimental design from application code, allowing the experimenter to concisely describe experimental designs, whether common "A/B tests" and factorial designs, or more complex designs involving conditional logic or multiple experimental units. These latter designs are often useful for understanding causal mechanisms involved in user behaviors. We demonstrate how experiments from the literature can be implemented in PlanOut, and describe two large field experiments conducted on Facebook with PlanOut. For common scenarios in which experiments are run iteratively and in parallel, we introduce a namespaced management system that encourages sound experimental practice.Comment: Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web, 283-29

Transport-Based Neural Style Transfer for Smoke Simulations

Artistically controlling fluids has always been a challenging task. Optimization techniques rely on approximating simulation states towards target velocity or density field configurations, which are often handcrafted by artists to indirectly control smoke dynamics. Patch synthesis techniques transfer image textures or simulation features to a target flow field. However, these are either limited to adding structural patterns or augmenting coarse flows with turbulent structures, and hence cannot capture the full spectrum of different styles and semantically complex structures. In this paper, we propose the first Transport-based Neural Style Transfer (TNST) algorithm for volumetric smoke data. Our method is able to transfer features from natural images to smoke simulations, enabling general content-aware manipulations ranging from simple patterns to intricate motifs. The proposed algorithm is physically inspired, since it computes the density transport from a source input smoke to a desired target configuration. Our transport-based approach allows direct control over the divergence of the stylization velocity field by optimizing incompressible and irrotational potentials that transport smoke towards stylization. Temporal consistency is ensured by transporting and aligning subsequent stylized velocities, and 3D reconstructions are computed by seamlessly merging stylizations from different camera viewpoints.Comment: ACM Transaction on Graphics (SIGGRAPH ASIA 2019), additional materials: http://www.byungsoo.me/project/neural-flow-styl

Scattering processes and resonances from lattice QCD

The vast majority of hadrons observed in nature are not stable under the strong interaction, rather they are resonances whose existence is deduced from enhancements in the energy dependence of scattering amplitudes. The study of hadron resonances offers a window into the workings of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in the low-energy non-perturbative region, and in addition, many probes of the limits of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model consider processes which feature hadron resonances. From a theoretical standpoint, this is a challenging field: the same dynamics that binds quarks and gluons into hadron resonances also controls their decay into lighter hadrons, so a complete approach to QCD is required. Presently, lattice QCD is the only available tool that provides the required non-perturbative evaluation of hadron observables. In this article, we review progress in the study of few-hadron reactions in which resonances and bound-states appear using lattice QCD techniques. We describe the leading approach which takes advantage of the periodic finite spatial volume used in lattice QCD calculations to extract scattering amplitudes from the discrete spectrum of QCD eigenstates in a box. We explain how from explicit lattice QCD calculations, one can rigorously garner information about a variety of resonance properties, including their masses, widths, decay couplings, and form factors. The challenges which currently limit the field are discussed along with the steps being taken to resolve them

Relational Parametricity and Control

We study the equational theory of Parigot's second-order λμ-calculus in connection with a call-by-name continuation-passing style (CPS) translation into a fragment of the second-order λ-calculus. It is observed that the relational parametricity on the target calculus induces a natural notion of equivalence on the λμ-terms. On the other hand, the unconstrained relational parametricity on the λμ-calculus turns out to be inconsistent with this CPS semantics. Following these facts, we propose to formulate the relational parametricity on the λμ-calculus in a constrained way, which might be called ``focal parametricity''.Comment: 22 pages, for Logical Methods in Computer Scienc