Visualizing Source Code as Comics Using Generative AI

The architecture and inner structure of software is often only implicitly available in the form of its source code and thus not tangible and intuitively easy to understand for non-programmers and laymen. Our goal is to create visualizations as automatically as possible, with which such people can nevertheless understand the software or parts of the software and get a feel for the structure of the software and how its methods work. Especially for newcomers to software projects, for management or even for students and pupils, it can be helpful to get a non-technical insight into the software. We use the concept of visualizing information as comics to present aspects of the software as strikingly as possible, as comics are an effective way to present complex systems and interrelationships for certain target groups. For this purpose, we present a method to generate comics from source code. Our semi-automated process is based on generating a prompt for an LLM from source code, which in turn generates a prompt for a comic image generation using the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion. We show that generative AI methods can be used to rapidly generate human-compatible artistic representations from source code. However, further research is needed to validate the understandability of the results

Image-Schematic Metaphors in Software Visualization

Software visualization (SoftVis) is widely used to facilitate the process of obtaining an in-depth understanding of complex software systems. SoftVis designers can draw on a wide pool of pre-existing conceptual metaphors that model the abstract target domain to tangible source domains. As regular user-centered design methods do not provide guidance on choosing etaphorical mappings, SoftVis designers choose conceptual metaphors primarily based on their subjective similarity to the underlying data structure. We want to include image-schematic metaphors in the SoftVis design process to provide designers with guidance on choosing visualization metaphors that are also in line with the users' mental model. This could allow SoftVis designers to make more data-driven design decisions and result in SoftVis that provides better insights

Kondo screening cloud in the single-impurity Anderson model: A density matrix renormalization group study

A magnetic moment in a metal or in a quantum dot is, at low temperatures, screened by the conduction electrons through the mechanism of the Kondo effect. This gives rise to spin-spin correlations between the magnetic moment and the conduction electrons, which can have a substantial spatial extension. We study this phenomenon, the so-called Kondo cloud, by means of the density matrix renormalization group method for the case of the single-impurity Anderson model. We focus on the question whether the Kondo screening length, typically assumed to be proportional to the inverse Kondo temperature, can be extracted from the spin-spin correlations. For several mechanisms -- the gate potential and a magnetic field -- which destroy the Kondo effect, we investigate the behavior of the screening cloud induced by these perturbations.Comment: updated some data, minor change

Bond-impurity induced bound states in disordered spin-1/2 ladders

We discuss the effect of weak bond-disorder in two-leg spin ladders on the dispersion relation of the elementary triplet excitations with a particular focus on the appearance of bound states in the spin gap. Both the cases of modified exchange couplings on the rungs and the legs of the ladder are analyzed. Based on a projection on the single-triplet subspace, the single-impurity and small cluster problems are treated analytically in the strong-coupling limit. Numerically, we study the problem of a single impurity in a spin ladder by exact diagonalization to obtain the low-lying excitations. At finite concentrations and to leading order in the inter-rung coupling, we compare the spectra obtained from numerical diagonalization of large systems within the single-triplet subspace with the results of diagrammatic techniques, namely low-concentration and coherent-potential approximations. The contribution of small impurity clusters to the density of states is also discussed.Facultad de Ciencias Exacta

Non-dissipative thermal transport in the massive regimes of the XXZ chain

We present exact results on the thermal conductivity of the one-dimensional spin-1/2 XXZ model in the massive antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic regimes. The thermal Drude weight is calculated by a lattice path integral formulation. Numerical results for wide ranges of temperature and anisotropy as well as analytical results in the low and high temperature limits are presented. At finite temperature, the thermal Drude weight is finite and hence there is non-dissipative thermal transport even in the massive regime. At low temperature, the thermal Drude weight behaves as $D(T)\sim \exp(-\delta/T)/\sqrt{T}$ where $\delta$ is the one-spinon (respectively one-magnon) excitation energy for the antiferromagnetic (respectively ferromagnetic) regime.Comment: 16 page

The Novel Immunosuppressive Protein Kinase C Inhibitor Sotrastaurin Has No Pro-Viral Effects on the Replication Cycle of Hepatitis B or C Virus

The pan-protein kinase C (PKC) inhibitor sotrastaurin (AEB071) is a novel immunosuppressant currently in phase II trials for immunosuppression after solid organ transplantation. Besides T-cell activation, PKC affects numerous cellular processes that are potentially important for the replication of hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV), major blood-borne pathogens prevalent in solid organ transplant recipients. This study uses state of the art virological assays to assess the direct, non-immune mediated effects of sotrastaurin on HBV and HCV. Most importantly, sotrastaurin had no pro-viral effect on either HBV or HCV. In the presence of high concentrations of sotrastaurin, well above those used clinically and close to levels where cytotoxic effects become detectable, there was a reduction of HCV and HBV replication. This reduction is very likely due to cytotoxic and/or anti-proliferative effects rather than direct anti-viral activity of the drug. Replication cycle stages other than genome replication such as viral cell entry and spread of HCV infection directly between adjacent cells was clearly unaffected by sotrastaurin. These data support the evaluation of sotrastaurin in HBV and/or HCV infected transplant recipients