Control Systems and Robotics Outreach to Middle-school Girls: Approach, Results, and Suggestions

We conducted a three-day outreach camp focused on control systems and robotics for 8th grade girls from economically disadvantaged families. The overall objective of the camp was motivating the young girls to consider pursuing a career in engineering and sciences. The main focus of the camp were hands-on labs using LEGO Mindstorms EV3 kit. Students learned about programming, sensors, motors and put their skills to test by creating a mobile robot that took part in three contests: car racing, line following, and parallel parking. A pre- and post-camp survey indicated that although program did not predominantly change the girls’ excitement towards careers in engineering and sciences, it increased the girls’ knowledge and excitement towards robotics and control systems. Our results indicate that short camps help kindle the interests of young girls, but are not able to sway them to take on engineering/science careers. In the latter case, we hypothesize that long-term STEM-based programs (e.g., a quarter or year-long robotics course) might be more effective.Cockrell School of Engineerin

A new approach to induction and imprimitivity results

In the framework of locally compact quantum groups, we provide an induction procedure for unitary corepresentations as well as coactions on C*-algebras. We prove imprimitivity theorems that unify the existing theorems for actions and coactions of groups. We essentially use von Neumann algebraic techniques.Comment: We added an imprimitivity characterization of induced coactions. Minor typographical corrections as wel

Evaluation of MIRACLE approach results for CLEF 2003

This paper describes MIRACLE (Multilingual Information RetrievAl for the CLEf campaign) approach and results for the mono, bi and multilingual Cross Language Evaluation Forum tasks. The approach is based on the combination of linguistic and statistic techniques to perform indexing and retrieval tasks

Global function approach in structural analysis: Basic approach, numerical results

The structural response to a given environment is described by the differential equations of motion of deformable bodies. Analytic solutions of such problems for a reasonably large class of structural configurations are not within the realm of the possible. Consequently, the mathematical problem is recast into a numerical problem for solution on the computer. New technology in the space and energy fields led to a growing demand for accurate analysis which at times cannot be met due to the limits set by available budgets for computer time. In response to this need for more efficient numerical analysis, the possibilities of reducing the number of freedoms in the system through a revival of the global function approach were explored

Results of the Hydrodynamics Approach to Heavy Ion Collisions

Recent hydrodynamical calculations for Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s) = 130 AGeV energy are reviewed, and the initial conditions of hydrodynamical evolution necessary to reproduce experimental data are discussed.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, talk at Quark Matter '02, Nantes, France, July 200

Approach to Perturbative Results in the N-Delta Transition

We show that constraints from perturbative QCD calculations play a role in the nucleon to Delta(1232) electromagnetic transition even at moderate momentum transfer scales. The pQCD constraints, tied to real photoproduction data and unseparated resonance response functions, lead to explicit forms for the helicity amplitudes wherein the E2/M1 ratio remains small at moderately large momentum transfer.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, ReVTe

Universal Results for Correlations of Characteristic Polynomials: Riemann-Hilbert Approach

We prove that general correlation functions of both ratios and products of characteristic polynomials of Hermitian random matrices are governed by integrable kernels of three different types: a) those constructed from orthogonal polynomials; b) constructed from Cauchy transforms of the same orthogonal polynomials and finally c) those constructed from both orthogonal polynomials and their Cauchy transforms. These kernels are related with the Riemann-Hilbert problem for orthogonal polynomials. For the correlation functions we obtain exact expressions in the form of determinants of these kernels. Derived representations enable us to study asymptotics of correlation functions of characteristic polynomials via Deift-Zhou steepest-descent/stationary phase method for Riemann-Hilbert problems, and in particular to find negative moments of characteristic polynomials. This reveals the universal parts of the correlation functions and moments of characteristic polynomials for arbitrary invariant ensemble of $\beta=2$ symmetry class.Comment: 34page

The Cerium volume collapse: Results from the LDA+DMFT approach

The merger of density-functional theory in the local density approximation (LDA) and many-body dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) allows for an ab initio calculation of Ce including the inherent 4f electronic correlations. We solve the DMFT equations by the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) technique and calculate the Ce energy, spectrum, and double occupancy as a function of volume. At low temperatures, the correlation energy exhibits an anomalous region of negative curvature which drives the system towards a thermodynamic instability, i.e., the $\gamma$-to-$\alpha$ volume collapse, consistent with experiment. The connection of the energetic with the spectral evolution shows that the physical origin of the energy anomaly and, thus, the volume collapse is the appearance of a quasiparticle resonance in the 4f-spectrum which is accompanied by a rapid growth in the double occupancy.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

A probabilistic approach to some results by Nieto and Truax

In this paper, we reconsider some results by Nieto and Truax about generating functions for arbitrary order coherent and squeezed states. These results were obtained using the exponential of the Laplacian operator; more elaborated operational identities were used by Dattoli et al. \cite{Dattoli} to extend these results. In this note, we show that the operational approach can be replaced by a purely probabilistic approach, in the sense that the exponential of derivatives operators can be identified with equivalent expectation operators. This approach brings new insight about the kinks between operational and probabilistic calculus.Comment: 2nd versio

A Linked Data Approach to Sharing Workflows and Workflow Results

A bioinformatics analysis pipeline is often highly elaborate, due to the inherent complexity of biological systems and the variety and size of datasets. A digital equivalent of the ‘Materials and Methods’ section in wet laboratory publications would be highly beneficial to bioinformatics, for evaluating evidence and examining data across related experiments, while introducing the potential to find associated resources and integrate them as data and services. We present initial steps towards preserving bioinformatics ‘materials and methods’ by exploiting the workflow paradigm for capturing the design of a data analysis pipeline, and RDF to link the workflow, its component services, run-time provenance, and a personalized biological interpretation of the results. An example shows the reproduction of the unique graph of an analysis procedure, its results, provenance, and personal interpretation of a text mining experiment. It links data from Taverna, myExperiment.org, BioCatalogue.org, and ConceptWiki.org. The approach is relatively ‘light-weight’ and unobtrusive to bioinformatics users