On a self-sustained process at large scale in the turbulent channel flow

Large-scale motions, important in turbulent shear flows, are frequently attributed to the interaction of structures at smaller scale. Here we show that, in a turbulent channel at Re_{\tau} \approx 550, large-scale motions can self-sustain even when smaller-scale structures populating the near-wall and logarithmic regions are artificially quenched. This large-scale self-sustained mechanism is not active in periodic boxes of width smaller than Lz ~ 1.5h or length shorter than Lx ~ 3h which correspond well to the most energetic large scales observed in the turbulent channel

Learning Interpretable Models of Aircraft Handling Behaviour by Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

We propose a method to capture the handling abilities of fast jet pilots in a software model via reinforcement learning (RL) from human preference feedback. We use pairwise preferences over simulated flight trajectories to learn an interpretable rule-based model called a reward tree, which enables the automated scoring of trajectories alongside an explanatory rationale. We train an RL agent to execute high-quality handling behaviour by using the reward tree as the objective, and thereby generate data for iterative preference collection and further refinement of both tree and agent. Experiments with synthetic preferences show reward trees to be competitive with uninterpretable neural network reward models on quantitative and qualitative evaluations

Collisions of micron-sized, charged water droplets in still air

We investigate the effect of electrical charge on collisions of hydrodynamically interacting, micron-sized water droplets settling through quiescent air. The relative dynamics of charged droplets is determined by hydrodynamic interactions, particle and fluid inertia, and electrostatic forces. We analyse the resulting relative dynamics of oppositely charged droplets by determining its fixed points and their stable and unstable manifolds. The stable manifold of a saddle point forms a separatrix that separates colliding trajectories from those that do not collide. The qualitative conclusions from this theory are in excellent agreement with experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, supplemental materia

Reward Learning with Trees:Methods and Evaluation

Recent efforts to learn reward functions from human feedback have tended to use deep neural networks, whose lack of transparency hampers our ability to explain agent behaviour or verify alignment. We explore the merits of learning intrinsically interpretable tree models instead. We develop a recently proposed method for learning reward trees from preference labels, and show it to be broadly competitive with neural networks on challenging high-dimensional tasks, with good robustness to limited or corrupted data. Having found that reward tree learning can be done effectively in complex settings, we then consider why it should be used, demonstrating that the interpretable reward structure gives significant scope for traceability, verification and explanation

Social Preferences, Skill Segregation and Wage Dynamics

We study the earning structure and the equilibrium asignment of workers to firms in a model in which workers have social preferences, and skills are perfectly substitutable in production. Firms offer long-term contracts, and we allow for frictions in the labour market in the form of mobility costs. The model delivers specific predictions about the nature of worker flows, about the characteristic of workplace skill segregation, and about wage dispersion both within and cross firms. We shows that long-term contracts in the resence of social preferences associate within-firm wage dispersion with novel "internal labour market" features such as gradual promotions, productivity-unrelated wage increases, and downward wage flexibility. These three dynamic features lead to productivity-unrelated wage volatily within firms.Publicad

An Artificial Intelligence Approach for Tackling Conformational Energy Uncertainties in Chiroptical Spectroscopies

Determination of the absolute configuration of chiral molecules is a prerequisite for obtaining a fundamental understanding in any chirality-related field. The interaction with polarised light has proven to be a powerful means to determine this absolute configuration, but its application rests on the comparison between experimental and computed spectra for which the inherent uncertainty in conformational Boltzmann factors has proven to be extremely hard to tackle. Here we present a novel approach that overcomes this issue by combining a genetic algorithm that identifies the relevant conformers by accounting for the uncertainties in DFT relative energies, and a hierarchical clustering algorithm that analyses the trends in the spectra of the considered conformers and identifies on-the-fly when a given chiroptical technique is not able to make reliable predictions. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by considering the challenging cases of papuamine and haliclonadiamine, two bis-indane natural products with eight chiral centres and considerable conformational heterogeneity that could not be assigned unambiguously with current approaches.</p

Electron-phonon coupling in the conventional superconductor YNi2_2B2_2C at high phonon energies studied by time-of-flight neutron spectroscopy

We report an inelastic neutron scattering investigation of phonons with energies up to 159 meV in the conventional superconductor YNi$_2$B$_2$C. Using the SWEEP mode, a newly developed time-of-flight technique involving the continuous rotation of a single crystal specimen, allowed us to measure a four dimensional volume in (Q,E) space and, thus, determine the dispersion surface and linewidths of the $A_{1g}$ (~ 102 meV) and $A_u$ (~ 159 meV) type phonon modes for the whole Brillouin zone. Despite of having linewidths of $\Gamma = 10 meV$, $A_{1g}$ modes do not strongly contribute to the total electron-phonon coupling constant $\lambda$. However, experimental linewidths show a remarkable agreement with ab-initio calculations over the complete phonon energy range demonstrating the accuracy of such calculations in a rare comparison to a comprehensive experimental data set.Comment: accepted for publication in PR