Know Thy Toucher

Most of current academic and commercial surface computing systems are capable of multitouch detection and hence allow simultaneous input from multiple users. Although there are so far only few applications in this area which rely on identifying the user, we believe that the association of touches to users will become an essential feature of surface computing as applications mature, new application areas emerge, and the enabling technology is readily available. As the capacitive technology used in present user identification enabled tabletops is limited with respect to the supported number of users and screen size, we outline a user identification enabled tabletop concept based on computer vision and biometric hand shape information, and introduce the prototype system we built to further investigate this concept. In a preliminary consideration, we derive concepts for identifying users by examining what new possibilities are enabled and by introducing different scopes of identification

libcppa - Designing an Actor Semantic for C++11

Parallel hardware makes concurrency mandatory for efficient program execution. However, writing concurrent software is both challenging and error-prone. C++11 provides standard facilities for multiprogramming, such as atomic operations with acquire/release semantics and RAII mutex locking, but these primitives remain too low-level. Using them both correctly and efficiently still requires expert knowledge and hand-crafting. The actor model replaces implicit communication by sharing with an explicit message passing mechanism. It applies to concurrency as well as distribution, and a lightweight actor model implementation that schedules all actors in a properly pre-dimensioned thread pool can outperform equivalent thread-based applications. However, the actor model did not enter the domain of native programming languages yet besides vendor-specific island solutions. With the open source library libcppa, we want to combine the ability to build reliable and distributed systems provided by the actor model with the performance and resource-efficiency of C++11.Comment: 10 page

Fermionisation dynamics of a strongly interacting 1D Bose gas after an interaction quench

We study the dynamics of a one-dimensional Bose gas after a sudden change of the interaction strength from zero to a finite value using the numerical time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) algorithm. It is shown that despite the integrability of the system, local quantities such as the two-particle correlation $g^{(2)}(x,x)$ attain steady state values in a short characteristic time inversely proportional to the Tonks parameter $\gamma$ and the square of the density. The asymptotic values are very close to those of a finite temperature grand canonical ensemble with a local temperature corresponding to initial energy and density. Non-local density-density correlations on the other hand approach a steady state on a much larger time scale determined by the finite propagation velocity of oscillatory correlation waves.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, extende

Revisiting Actor Programming in C++

The actor model of computation has gained significant popularity over the last decade. Its high level of abstraction makes it appealing for concurrent applications in parallel and distributed systems. However, designing a real-world actor framework that subsumes full scalability, strong reliability, and high resource efficiency requires many conceptual and algorithmic additives to the original model. In this paper, we report on designing and building CAF, the "C++ Actor Framework". CAF targets at providing a concurrent and distributed native environment for scaling up to very large, high-performance applications, and equally well down to small constrained systems. We present the key specifications and design concepts---in particular a message-transparent architecture, type-safe message interfaces, and pattern matching facilities---that make native actors a viable approach for many robust, elastic, and highly distributed developments. We demonstrate the feasibility of CAF in three scenarios: first for elastic, upscaling environments, second for including heterogeneous hardware like GPGPUs, and third for distributed runtime systems. Extensive performance evaluations indicate ideal runtime behaviour for up to 64 cores at very low memory footprint, or in the presence of GPUs. In these tests, CAF continuously outperforms the competing actor environments Erlang, Charm++, SalsaLite, Scala, ActorFoundry, and even the OpenMPI.Comment: 33 page

On the universal critical behavior in 3-flavor QCD

We analyze the universal critical behavior at the chiral critical point in QCD with three degenerate quark masses. We confirm that this critical point lies in the universality class of the three dimensional Ising model. The symmetry of the Ising model, which is Z(2), is not directly realized in the QCD Hamiltonian. After making an ansatz for the magnetization- and energy-like operators as linear admixtures of the chiral condensate and the gluonic action, we determine several non-universal mixing and normalization constants. These parameters determine an unambiguous mapping of the critical behavior in QCD to that of the 3d-Ising model. We verify its validity by showing that the thus obtained orderparameter scales in accordance with the magnetic equation of state of the 3d-Ising model.Comment: 7 pages, contribution to Lattice 2011 proceeding

Learning an Orchestra Conductor's Technique Using a Wearable Sensor Platform

Our study focuses on finding new input devices for a system allowing users with any skill to configure and conduct a virtual orchestra in real-time. As a first step, we conducted a user study to learn more about the interaction between a conductor's gestures and the orchestra 's reaction. During an orchestra rehearsal session, we observed a conductor's timing and gestures using the eWatch, a wrist-worn wearable computer and sensor platform. The gestures are analyzed and compared to the music of the orchestra

The small-scale dynamo: Breaking universality at high Mach numbers

(Abridged) The small-scale dynamo may play a substantial role in magnetizing the Universe under a large range of conditions, including subsonic turbulence at low Mach numbers, highly supersonic turbulence at high Mach numbers and a large range of magnetic Prandtl numbers Pm, i.e. the ratio of kinetic viscosity to magnetic resistivity. Low Mach numbers may in particular lead to the well-known, incompressible Kolmogorov turbulence, while for high Mach numbers, we are in the highly compressible regime, thus close to Burgers turbulence. In this study, we explore whether in this large range of conditions, a universal behavior can be expected. Our starting point are previous investigations in the kinematic regime. Here, analytic studies based on the Kazantsev model have shown that the behavior of the dynamo depends significantly on Pm and the type of turbulence, and numerical simulations indicate a strong dependence of the growth rate on the Mach number of the flow. Once the magnetic field saturates on the current amplification scale, backreactions occur and the growth is shifted to the next-larger scale. We employ a Fokker-Planck model to calculate the magnetic field amplification during the non-linear regime, and find a resulting power-law growth that depends on the type of turbulence invoked. For Kolmogorov turbulence, we confirm previous results suggesting a linear growth of magnetic energy. For more general turbulent spectra, where the turbulent velocity v_t scales with the characteristic length scale as u_\ell\propto \ell^{\vartheta}, we find that the magnetic energy grows as (t/T_{ed})^{2\vartheta/(1-\vartheta)}, with t the time-coordinate and T_{ed} the eddy-turnover time on the forcing scale of turbulence. For Burgers turbulence, \vartheta=1/2, a quadratic rather than linear growth may thus be expected, and a larger timescale until saturation is reached.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Accepted at New Journal of Physics (NJP