7,372 research outputs found
Droplets displacement and oscillations induced by ultrasonic surface acoustic waves: a quantitative study
We present an experimental study of a droplet interacting with an ultrasonic
surface acoustic wave (SAW). Depending on the amplitude of the wave, the drop
can either experience an internal flow with its contact-line pinned, or (at
higher amplitude) move along the direction of the wave also with internal flow.
Both situations appear together with oscillations of the drop free-surface. The
physical origins of the internal mixing flow as well as the drop displacement
and surface waves are still not well understood. In order to give insights of
the underlying physics involved in these phenomena, we carried out an
experimental and numerical study. The results suggest that the surface
deformation of the drop can be related as a combination between acoustic
streaming effect and radiation pressure inside the drop.Comment: 9 pages, 14 figures. To appear in Physical Review
Conceptual Frameworks for Multimodal Social Signal Processing
This special issue is about a research area which is developing rapidly. Pentland gave it a name which has become widely used, âSocial Signal Processingâ (SSP for short), and his phrase provides the title of a European project, SSPnet, which has a brief to consolidate the area. The challenge that Pentland highlighted was understanding the nonlinguistic signals that serve as the basis for âsubconscious discussions between humans about relationships, resources, risks, and rewardsâ. He identified it as an area where computational research had made interesting progress, and could usefully make more
A Compositional Deadlock Detector for Android Java
We develop a static deadlock analysis for commercial Android Java applications, of sizes in the tens of millions of
LoC, under active development at Facebook. The analysis runs
primarily at code-review time, on only the modified code and
its dependents; we aim at reporting to developers in under 15
minutes.
To detect deadlocks in this setting, we first model the real
language as an abstract language with balanced re-entrant locks,
nondeterministic iteration and branching, and non-recursive
procedure calls. We show that the existence of a deadlock in this
abstract language is equivalent to a certain condition over the
sets of critical pairs of each program thread; these record, for all
possible executions of the thread, which locks are currently held
at the point when a fresh lock is acquired. Since the critical pairs
of any program thread is finite and computable, the deadlock
detection problem for our language is decidable, and in NP.
We then leverage these results to develop an open-source
implementation of our analysis adapted to deal with real Java
code. The core of the implementation is an algorithm which
computes critical pairs in a compositional, abstract interpretation
style, running in quasi-exponential time. Our analyser is built in
the INFER verification framework and has been in industrial
deployment for over two years; it has seen over two hundred
fixed deadlock reports with a report fix rate of âŒ54%
A rescued dataset of sub-daily meteorological observations for Europe and the southern Mediterranean region, 1877â2012
Sub-daily meteorological observations are needed for input to and assessment of high-resolution reanalysis products to improve understanding of weather and climate variability. While there are millions of such weather observations that have been collected by various organisations, many are yet to be transcribed into a useable format. Under the auspices of the Uncertainties in Ensembles of Regional ReAnalyses (UERRA) project, we describe the compilation and development of a digital dataset of 8.8 million meteorological observations of essential climate variables (ECVs) rescued across the European and southern Mediterranean region. By presenting the entire chain of data preparation, from the identification of regions lacking in digitised sub-daily data and the location of original sources, through the digitisation of the observations to the quality control procedures applied, we provide a rescued dataset that is as traceable as possible for use by the research community. Data from 127 stations and of 15 climate variables in the northern African and European sectors have been prepared for the period 1877 to 2012. Quality control of the data using a two-step semi-automatic statistical approach identified 3.5â% of observations that required correction or removal, on par with previous data rescue efforts. In addition to providing a new sub-daily meteorological dataset for the research community, our experience in the development of this sub-daily dataset gives us an opportunity to share some suggestions for future data rescue projects. All versions of the dataset, from the raw digitised data to data that have been quality controlled and converted to standard units, are available on PANGAEA: https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.886511 (Ashcroft et al., 2018)
Statistics at the tip of a branching random walk and the delay of traveling waves
We study the limiting distribution of particles at the frontier of a
branching random walk. The positions of these particles can be viewed as the
lowest energies of a directed polymer in a random medium in the mean-field
case. We show that the average distances between these leading particles can be
computed as the delay of a traveling wave evolving according to the Fisher-KPP
front equation. These average distances exhibit universal behaviors, different
from those of the probability cascades studied recently in the context of mean
field spin-glasses.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Anderson transition on the Cayley tree as a traveling wave critical point for various probability distributions
For Anderson localization on the Cayley tree, we study the statistics of
various observables as a function of the disorder strength and the number
of generations. We first consider the Landauer transmission . In the
localized phase, its logarithm follows the traveling wave form where (i) the disorder-averaged value moves linearly
and the localization length
diverges as with (ii) the
variable is a fixed random variable with a power-law tail for large with , so that all
integer moments of are governed by rare events. In the delocalized phase,
the transmission remains a finite random variable as , and
we measure near criticality the essential singularity with . We then consider the
statistical properties of normalized eigenstates, in particular the entropy and
the Inverse Participation Ratios (I.P.R.). In the localized phase, the typical
entropy diverges as with , whereas it grows
linearly in in the delocalized phase. Finally for the I.P.R., we explain
how closely related variables propagate as traveling waves in the delocalized
phase. In conclusion, both the localized phase and the delocalized phase are
characterized by the traveling wave propagation of some probability
distributions, and the Anderson localization/delocalization transition then
corresponds to a traveling/non-traveling critical point. Moreover, our results
point towards the existence of several exponents at criticality.Comment: 28 pages, 21 figures, comments welcom
The Universal Gaussian in Soliton Tails
We show that in a large class of equations, solitons formed from generic
initial conditions do not have infinitely long exponential tails, but are
truncated by a region of Gaussian decay. This phenomenon makes it possible to
treat solitons as localized, individual objects. For the case of the KdV
equation, we show how the Gaussian decay emerges in the inverse scattering
formalism.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, revtex with eps
Eddy Current Detection of Nucleation and Early Growth of Semiconductor Crystals
Single crystal CdTe and its solid solution Cd1-x ZnxTe alloys (0.0
Living IoT: A Flying Wireless Platform on Live Insects
Sensor networks with devices capable of moving could enable applications
ranging from precision irrigation to environmental sensing. Using mechanical
drones to move sensors, however, severely limits operation time since flight
time is limited by the energy density of current battery technology. We explore
an alternative, biology-based solution: integrate sensing, computing and
communication functionalities onto live flying insects to create a mobile IoT
platform.
Such an approach takes advantage of these tiny, highly efficient biological
insects which are ubiquitous in many outdoor ecosystems, to essentially provide
mobility for free. Doing so however requires addressing key technical
challenges of power, size, weight and self-localization in order for the
insects to perform location-dependent sensing operations as they carry our IoT
payload through the environment. We develop and deploy our platform on
bumblebees which includes backscatter communication, low-power
self-localization hardware, sensors, and a power source. We show that our
platform is capable of sensing, backscattering data at 1 kbps when the insects
are back at the hive, and localizing itself up to distances of 80 m from the
access points, all within a total weight budget of 102 mg.Comment: Co-primary authors: Vikram Iyer, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Anran Wang,
In Proceedings of Mobicom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages, 201
How Many Topics? Stability Analysis for Topic Models
Topic modeling refers to the task of discovering the underlying thematic
structure in a text corpus, where the output is commonly presented as a report
of the top terms appearing in each topic. Despite the diversity of topic
modeling algorithms that have been proposed, a common challenge in successfully
applying these techniques is the selection of an appropriate number of topics
for a given corpus. Choosing too few topics will produce results that are
overly broad, while choosing too many will result in the "over-clustering" of a
corpus into many small, highly-similar topics. In this paper, we propose a
term-centric stability analysis strategy to address this issue, the idea being
that a model with an appropriate number of topics will be more robust to
perturbations in the data. Using a topic modeling approach based on matrix
factorization, evaluations performed on a range of corpora show that this
strategy can successfully guide the model selection process.Comment: Improve readability of plots. Add minor clarification
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