Spectroscopic Analysis in the Virtual Observatory Environment with SPLAT-VO

SPLAT-VO is a powerful graphical tool for displaying, comparing, modifying and analyzing astronomical spectra, as well as searching and retrieving spectra from services around the world using Virtual Observatory (VO) protocols and services. The development of SPLAT-VO started in 1999, as part of the Starlink StarJava initiative, sometime before that of the VO, so initial support for the VO was necessarily added once VO standards and services became available. Further developments were supported by the Joint Astronomy Centre, Hawaii until 2009. Since end of 2011 development of SPLAT-VO has been continued by the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory, and the Astronomical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. From this time several new features have been added, including support for the latest VO protocols, along with new visualization and spectra storing capabilities. This paper presents the history of SPLAT-VO, it's capabilities, recent additions and future plans, as well as a discussion on the motivations and lessons learned up to now.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Computin

Index to Library Trends Volume 38

published or submitted for publicatio

Different Approaches to Proof Systems

The classical approach to proof complexity perceives proof systems as deterministic, uniform, surjective, polynomial-time computable functions that map strings to (propositional) tautologies. This approach has been intensively studied since the late 70’s and a lot of progress has been made. During the last years research was started investigating alternative notions of proof systems. There are interesting results stemming from dropping the uniformity requirement, allowing oracle access, using quantum computations, or employing probabilism. These lead to different notions of proof systems for which we survey recent results in this paper

On the Nature of the Gods, or “Epistemological Polytheism” as History Comprehension Method

The article is devoted to the issue of history comprehension of the ancient societies in the context of their religious identity. Religion is one of the fundamental elements of civilization idea (“ontological project”); it constructs “universe” that is distinguished by the “laws of nature”, specific only for it. To make “communication” with ancient people maximally authentic, the researcher should not only recognize their right to look at the “world” in its own way, but also accept its “laws”, that means – religion as well. Since the latter is almost impossible, the scientist is deprived of the possibility to comprehend another cultural and historical reality as vivid establishment of human spirit; he/she will see only scheme or fable in it. The proposed in this paper method of “epistemological polytheism”, based on thought experiment, gives the possibility to bypass difficulties of perception and to approximate the understanding of meanings that define the ancient people worldview

A note on quantum algorithms and the minimal degree of epsilon-error polynomials for symmetric functions

The degrees of polynomials representing or approximating Boolean functions are a prominent tool in various branches of complexity theory. Sherstov recently characterized the minimal degree deg_{\eps}(f) among all polynomials (over the reals) that approximate a symmetric function f:{0,1}^n-->{0,1} up to worst-case error \eps: deg_{\eps}(f) = ~\Theta(deg_{1/3}(f) + \sqrt{n\log(1/\eps)}). In this note we show how a tighter version (without the log-factors hidden in the ~\Theta-notation), can be derived quite easily using the close connection between polynomials and quantum algorithms.Comment: 7 pages LaTeX. 2nd version: corrected a few small inaccuracie

Ackermannian and Primitive-Recursive Bounds with Dickson's Lemma

Dickson's Lemma is a simple yet powerful tool widely used in termination proofs, especially when dealing with counters or related data structures. However, most computer scientists do not know how to derive complexity upper bounds from such termination proofs, and the existing literature is not very helpful in these matters. We propose a new analysis of the length of bad sequences over (N^k,\leq) and explain how one may derive complexity upper bounds from termination proofs. Our upper bounds improve earlier results and are essentially tight

A Sequent Calculus for Modelling Interferences

A logic calculus is presented that is a conservative extension of linear logic. The motivation beneath this work concerns lazy evaluation, true concurrency and interferences in proof search. The calculus includes two new connectives to deal with multisequent structures and has the cut-elimination property. Extensions are proposed that give first results concerning our objectives