880 research outputs found
Palliative and corrective surgery in low-weight infants is associated with an increased mortality risk: How can we do better?
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Detection of Walls, Floors, and Ceilings in Point Cloud Data
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Society of Civil Engineers via http://dx.doi.org/10.1061/9780784479827.229The successful implementation of Building Information Models (BIMs) for facility management, maintenance and operation is highly dependent on the ability to generate such models for existing assets. Generating such BIMs typically requires laser scanning to acquire point clouds and significant post-processing to register the clouds, replace the points with BIM objects, assign semantic relationships and add any additional properties, such as materials. Several research efforts have attempted to reduce the post-processing manual effort by classifying the structural elements and clutter in isolated rooms. They have not however examined the complexity of a whole building. In this paper, we propose a robust framework that can automatically process the point cloud of an entire building, possibly with multiple floors, and classify the points belonging to floors, walls and ceilings.. We first extract the planar surfaces by segmenting the point cloud, and then we use contextual reasoning, such as height, orientation, relation to other objects, and local statistics like point density in order to classify them into objects. Experiments were conducted on a registered point cloud of an office building. The results indicated that almost all of the walls and floors/ceilings were correctly clustered in the point cloud.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements n° 247586 ("BIMAutoGen") and n° 334241 ("INFRASTRUCTUREMODELS")
Twisted SUSY Invariant Formulation of Chern-Simons Gauge Theory on a Lattice
We propose a twisted SUSY invariant formulation of Chern-Simons theory on a
Euclidean three dimensional lattice. The SUSY algebra to be realized on the
lattice is the N=4 D=3 twisted algebra that was recently proposed by D'Adda et
al.. In order to keep the manifest anti-hermiticity of the action, we introduce
oppositely oriented supercharges. Accordingly, the naive continuum limit of the
action formally corresponds to the Landau gauge fixed version of Chern-Simons
theory with complex gauge group which was originally proposed by Witten. We
also show that the resulting action consists of parity even and odd parts with
different coefficients.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures; v2,v3 added references, v4 added two paragraphs
and one figure in the summar
A new perspective on matter coupling in 2d quantum gravity
We provide compelling evidence that a previously introduced model of
non-perturbative 2d Lorentzian quantum gravity exhibits (two-dimensional)
flat-space behaviour when coupled to Ising spins. The evidence comes from both
a high-temperature expansion and from Monte Carlo simulations of the combined
gravity-matter system. This weak-coupling behaviour lends further support to
the conclusion that the Lorentzian model is a genuine alternative to Liouville
quantum gravity in two dimensions, with a different, and much `smoother'
critical behaviour.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures (postscript
On Linear Congestion Games with Altruistic Social Context
We study the issues of existence and inefficiency of pure Nash equilibria in
linear congestion games with altruistic social context, in the spirit of the
model recently proposed by de Keijzer {\em et al.} \cite{DSAB13}. In such a
framework, given a real matrix specifying a particular
social context, each player aims at optimizing a linear combination of the
payoffs of all the players in the game, where, for each player , the
multiplicative coefficient is given by the value . We give a broad
characterization of the social contexts for which pure Nash equilibria are
always guaranteed to exist and provide tight or almost tight bounds on their
prices of anarchy and stability. In some of the considered cases, our
achievements either improve or extend results previously known in the
literature
A practical solution to the sign problem in a matrix model for dynamical compactification
The matrix model formulation of superstring theory offers the possibility to
understand the appearance of 4d space-time from 10d as a consequence of
spontaneous breaking of the SO(10) symmetry. Monte Carlo studies of this issue
is technically difficult due to the so-called sign problem. We present a
practical solution to this problem generalizing the factorization method
proposed originally by two of the authors (K.N.A. and J.N.). Explicit Monte
Carlo calculations and large-N extrapolations are performed in a simpler matrix
model with similar properties, and reproduce quantitative results obtained
previously by the Gaussian expansion method. Our results also confirm that the
spontaneous symmetry breaking indeed occurs due to the phase of the fermion
determinant, which vanishes for collapsed configurations. We clarify various
generic features of this approach, which would be useful in applying it to
other statistical systems with the sign problem.Comment: 44 pages, 64 figures, v2: some minor typos correcte
Facility Location in Evolving Metrics
Understanding the dynamics of evolving social or infrastructure networks is a
challenge in applied areas such as epidemiology, viral marketing, or urban
planning. During the past decade, data has been collected on such networks but
has yet to be fully analyzed. We propose to use information on the dynamics of
the data to find stable partitions of the network into groups. For that
purpose, we introduce a time-dependent, dynamic version of the facility
location problem, that includes a switching cost when a client's assignment
changes from one facility to another. This might provide a better
representation of an evolving network, emphasizing the abrupt change of
relationships between subjects rather than the continuous evolution of the
underlying network. We show that in realistic examples this model yields indeed
better fitting solutions than optimizing every snapshot independently. We
present an -approximation algorithm and a matching hardness result,
where is the number of clients and the number of time steps. We also
give an other algorithms with approximation ratio for the variant
where one pays at each time step (leasing) for each open facility
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