Quick Search for Rare Events

Rare events can potentially occur in many applications. When manifested as opportunities to be exploited, risks to be ameliorated, or certain features to be extracted, such events become of paramount significance. Due to their sporadic nature, the information-bearing signals associated with rare events often lie in a large set of irrelevant signals and are not easily accessible. This paper provides a statistical framework for detecting such events so that an optimal balance between detection reliability and agility, as two opposing performance measures, is established. The core component of this framework is a sampling procedure that adaptively and quickly focuses the information-gathering resources on the segments of the dataset that bear the information pertinent to the rare events. Particular focus is placed on Gaussian signals with the aim of detecting signals with rare mean and variance values

An Objective Bayesian Analysis of Life's Early Start and Our Late Arrival

Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the selection effect that if the evolution of intelligence is a slow process, then life's early start may simply be a prerequisite to our existence, rather than useful evidence for optimism. In this work, we interpret the chronology of these two events in a Bayesian framework, extending upon previous work by considering that the evolutionary timescale is itself an unknown that needs to be jointly inferred, rather than fiducially set. We further adopt an objective Bayesian approach, such that our results would be agreed upon even by those using wildly different priors for the rates of abiogenesis and evolution - common points of contention for this problem. It is then shown that the earliest microfossil evidence for life indicates that the rate of abiogenesis is at least 2.8 times more likely to be a typically rapid process, rather than a slow one. This modest limiting Bayes factor rises to 8.7 if we accept the more disputed evidence of C13 depleted zircon deposits (Bell et al. 2015). For intelligence evolution, it is found that a rare-intelligence scenario is slightly favored at 3:2 betting odds. Thus, if we re-ran Earth's clock, one should statistically favor life to frequently re-emerge, but intelligence may not be as inevitable

Probing new physics in B→Dℓ+ℓ−B \to D \ell^+ \ell^- decays by using angular asymmetries

We present the fully general, model independent study of a few rare semileptonic $B$ decays that get dominant contributions from $W$-annihilation and $W$-exchange diagrams, in particular $B^0 \to \bar{D}^0 \ell^+\ell^-$, where $\ell = e,\mu$. We consider the most general Lagrangian for the decay, and define three angular asymmetries in the Gottfried-Jackson frame, which are sensitive to new physics. We show how these angular asymmetries can be easily extracted from the distribution of events in the Dalitz plot for $B \to D \ell^+ \ell^-$ decays. Especially a non-zero forward-backward asymmetry within the frame would give the very first hint of possible new physics. These observations are also true for related decay modes, such as $B^+ \to D^+ \ell^+ \ell^-$ and $B^0 \to D^0 \ell^+ \ell^-$. Moreover, these asymmetry signatures are not affected by either $B^0$-$\bar{B}^0$ or $D^0$-$\bar{D}^0$ mixings. Then, this implies that both $B^0 \to \bar{D}^0 \ell^+ \ell^-$ and $B^0 \to D^0 \ell^+ \ell^-$ as well as their CP conjugate modes can all be considered together in our search for signature of new physics. Hence, it would be of great importance to look for and study these decays in the laboratory, LHCb and Belle II in particular.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Research and Development Workstation Environment: the new class of Current Research Information Systems

Against the backdrop of the development of modern technologies in the field of scientific research the new class of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and related intelligent information technologies has arisen. It was called - Research and Development Workstation Environment (RDWE) - the comprehensive problem-oriented information systems for scientific research and development lifecycle support. The given paper describes design and development fundamentals of the RDWE class systems. The RDWE class system's generalized information model is represented in the article as a three-tuple composite web service that include: a set of atomic web services, each of them can be designed and developed as a microservice or a desktop application, that allows them to be used as an independent software separately; a set of functions, the functional filling-up of the Research and Development Workstation Environment; a subset of atomic web services that are required to implement function of composite web service. In accordance with the fundamental information model of the RDWE class the system for supporting research in the field of ontology engineering - the automated building of applied ontology in an arbitrary domain area, scientific and technical creativity - the automated preparation of application documents for patenting inventions in Ukraine was developed. It was called - Personal Research Information System. A distinctive feature of such systems is the possibility of their problematic orientation to various types of scientific activities by combining on a variety of functional services and adding new ones within the cloud integrated environment. The main results of our work are focused on enhancing the effectiveness of the scientist's research and development lifecycle in the arbitrary domain area.Comment: In English, 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, added references in Russian. Published. Prepared for special issue (UkrPROG 2018 conference) of the scientific journal "Problems of programming" (Founder: National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Institute of Software Systems of NAS Ukraine