154,408 research outputs found
Bloggers Behavior and Emergent Communities in Blog Space
Interactions between users in cyberspace may lead to phenomena different from
those observed in common social networks. Here we analyse large data sets about
users and Blogs which they write and comment, mapped onto a bipartite graph. In
such enlarged Blog space we trace user activity over time, which results in
robust temporal patterns of user--Blog behavior and the emergence of
communities. With the spectral methods applied to the projection on weighted
user network we detect clusters of users related to their common interests and
habits. Our results suggest that different mechanisms may play the role in the
case of very popular Blogs. Our analysis makes a suitable basis for theoretical
modeling of the evolution of cyber communities and for practical study of the
data, in particular for an efficient search of interesting Blog clusters and
further retrieval of their contents by text analysis
The Mathematics of Dispatchability Revisited
Dispatchability is an important property for the efficient execution of temporal plans where the temporal constraints are represented as a Simple Temporal Network (STN). It has been shown that every STN may be reformulated as a dispatchable STN, and dispatchability ensures that the temporal constraints need only be satisfied locally during execution. Recently it has also been shown that Simple Temporal Networks with Uncertainty, augmented with wait edges, are Dynamically Controllable provided every projection is dispatchable. Thus, the dispatchability property has both theoretical and practical interest. One thing that hampers further work in this area is the underdeveloped theory. The existing definitions are expressed in terms of algorithms, and are less suitable for mathematical proofs. In this paper, we develop a new formal theory of dispatchability in terms of execution sequences. We exploit this to prove a characterization of dispatchability involving the structural properties of the STN graph. This facilitates the potential application of the theory to uncertainty reasoning
Non-invasive detection of animal nerve impulses with an atomic magnetometer operating near quantum limited sensitivity
Magnetic fields generated by human and animal organs, such as the heart,
brain and nervous system carry information useful for biological and medical
purposes. These magnetic fields are most commonly detected using
cryogenically-cooled superconducting magnetometers. Here we present the frst
detection of action potentials from an animal nerve using an optical atomic
magnetometer. Using an optimal design we are able to achieve the sensitivity
dominated by the quantum shot noise of light and quantum projection noise of
atomic spins. Such sensitivity allows us to measure the nerve impulse with a
miniature room-temperature sensor which is a critical advantage for biomedical
applications. Positioning the sensor at a distance of a few millimeters from
the nerve, corresponding to the distance between the skin and nerves in
biological studies, we detect the magnetic field generated by an action
potential of a frog sciatic nerve. From the magnetic field measurements we
determine the activity of the nerve and the temporal shape of the nerve
impulse. This work opens new ways towards implementing optical magnetometers as
practical devices for medical diagnostics.Comment: Main text with figures, and methods and supplementary informatio
Non-invasive detection of animal nerve impulses with an atomic magnetometer operating near quantum limited sensitivity
Magnetic fields generated by human and animal organs, such as the heart,
brain and nervous system carry information useful for biological and medical
purposes. These magnetic fields are most commonly detected using
cryogenically-cooled superconducting magnetometers. Here we present the frst
detection of action potentials from an animal nerve using an optical atomic
magnetometer. Using an optimal design we are able to achieve the sensitivity
dominated by the quantum shot noise of light and quantum projection noise of
atomic spins. Such sensitivity allows us to measure the nerve impulse with a
miniature room-temperature sensor which is a critical advantage for biomedical
applications. Positioning the sensor at a distance of a few millimeters from
the nerve, corresponding to the distance between the skin and nerves in
biological studies, we detect the magnetic field generated by an action
potential of a frog sciatic nerve. From the magnetic field measurements we
determine the activity of the nerve and the temporal shape of the nerve
impulse. This work opens new ways towards implementing optical magnetometers as
practical devices for medical diagnostics.Comment: Main text with figures, and methods and supplementary informatio
Fast Back-Projection for Non-Line of Sight Reconstruction
Recent works have demonstrated non-line of sight (NLOS) reconstruction by
using the time-resolved signal frommultiply scattered light. These works
combine ultrafast imaging systems with computation, which back-projects the
recorded space-time signal to build a probabilistic map of the hidden geometry.
Unfortunately, this computation is slow, becoming a bottleneck as the imaging
technology improves. In this work, we propose a new back-projection technique
for NLOS reconstruction, which is up to a thousand times faster than previous
work, with almost no quality loss. We base on the observation that the hidden
geometry probability map can be built as the intersection of the three-bounce
space-time manifolds defined by the light illuminating the hidden geometry and
the visible point receiving the scattered light from such hidden geometry. This
allows us to pose the reconstruction of the hidden geometry as the voxelization
of these space-time manifolds, which has lower theoretic complexity and is
easily implementable in the GPU. We demonstrate the efficiency and quality of
our technique compared against previous methods in both captured and synthetic
dat
Practical effects in the preparation of cluster states using weak non-linearities
We discuss experimental effects in the implementation of a recent scheme for
performing bus mediated entangling operations between qubits. Here a bus mode,
a strong coherent state, successively undergoes weak Kerr-type non-linear
interactions with qubits. A quadrature measurement on the bus then projects the
qubits into an entangled state. This approach has the benefit that entangling
gates are non-destructive, may be performed non-locally, and there is no need
for efficient single photon detection. In this paper we examine practical
issues affecting its experimental implementation. In particular, we analyze the
effects of post-selection errors, qubit loss, bus loss, mismatched coupling
rates and mode-mismatch. We derive error models for these effects and relate
them to realistic fault-tolerant thresholds, providing insight into realistic
experimental requirements.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
- …