Universe Models with a Variable Cosmological "Constant" and a "Big Bounce"

We present a rich class of exact solutions which contains radiation-dominated and matter-dominated models for the early and late universe. They include a variable cosmological ``constant'' which is derived from a higher dimension and manifests itself in spacetime as an energy density for the vacuum. This is in agreement with observational data and is compatible with extensions of general relativity to string and membrane theory. Our solutions are also typified by a non-singular ``big bounce'' (as opposed to a singular big bang), where matter is created as in inflationary cosmology.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures, AASTEX. To appear in Ap

The Rise of Asian-Owned Businesses in Massachusetts

Asian-owned businesses are following a very rapid growth trajectory in Massachusetts. In the last economic census from 1997 to 2002, they increased by 44 percent. This growth is nearly double the national gain of 24 percent for all Asian-owned firms in the United States and astounding when compared to the overall growth rate of 5 percent for all Massachusetts firms. Sales and receipts increased 20 percent in the same period, three times greater than the increase for all firms in the state. The growth in the number of paid employees was also three times greater than the six percent increase for all firms in Massachusetts. By 2002, there were 18,081 Asian-owned firms with sales and receipts of $5 billion and employing over 37,000 people. Professional, scientific and technical services had the largest annual payroll, followed by accomonations/food services, health care and retail trade. Whether as publishers, developers of healing and wellness centrs or as hair salon owners, Asian Americans in these businesses, and in countless other entrepreneurial pursuits, are changing the face of business ownership in the Bay State

Key Capacity with Limited One-Way Communication for Product Sources

We show that for product sources, rate splitting is optimal for secret key agreement using limited one-way communication at two terminals. This yields an alternative proof of the tensorization property of a strong data processing inequality originally studied by Erkip and Cover and amended recently by Anantharam et al. We derive a `water-filling' solution of the communication-rate--key-rate tradeoff for two arbitrarily correlated vector Gaussian sources, for the case with an eavesdropper, and for stationary Gaussian processes.Comment: 5 pages, ISIT 201

Exploration of applying a theory-based user classification model to inform personalised content-based image retrieval system design

© ACM, 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2903636To better understand users and create more personalised search experiences, a number of user models have been developed, usually based on different theories or empirical data study. After developing the user models, it is important to effectively utilise them in the design, development and evaluation of search systems to improve users’ overall search experiences. However there is a lack of research has been done on the utilisation of the user models especially theory-based models, because of the challenges on the utilization methodologies when applying the model to different search systems. This paper explores and states how to apply an Information Foraging Theory (IFT) based user classification model called ISE to effectively identify user’s search characteristics and create user groups, based on an empirically-driven methodology for content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems and how the preferences of different user types inform the personalized design of the CBIR systems

One-Shot Mutual Covering Lemma and Marton's Inner Bound with a Common Message

By developing one-shot mutual covering lemmas, we derive a one-shot achievability bound for broadcast with a common message which recovers Marton's inner bound (with three auxiliary random variables) in the i.i.d.~case. The encoder employed is deterministic. Relationship between the mutual covering lemma and a new type of channel resolvability problem is discussed.Comment: 6 pages; extended version of ISIT pape