518 research outputs found
The finite element solution of inhomogeneous anisotropic and lossy dielectric waveguides
This thesis presents a new variational finite element formulation and its implementation for the analysis of microwave and optical waveguide problem with arbitrarily- shaped cross section, inhomogeneous, transverse-anisotropic, and lossy dielectrics. In this approach, the spurious, nonphysical solutions, which ordinarily appear interspersed with the correct results of earlier vectorial finite element methods and thus have been the most serious problem in finite element analysis of waveguides, are totally eliminated. In this formulation either the propagation constant or the frequency may be treated as eigenvalues of the resulting generalized eigenvalue problem. This formulation also has the capability to find complex modes of lossless waveguides. Furthermore, the numerical efficiency of the solution is maximized since this formulation uses the most economical representation of a problem, in terms of only two vector components. This is achieved without losing the sparsity of the matrices of the resultant eigenvalue equation, which only depends on the topology of mesh used. This property is very important for solving large-size problems by efficient sparse matrix algorithms. In this work, a basic vector wave equation which involves only transverse components of magnetic field is straightforwardly derived from Maxwell equations. This differential equation incorporates the divergence condition V.B = 0 and leads to a canonical form of the resultant eigenvalue equation. The Local Potential Method is used to obtain the variational formulation. When implementing the finite element method, the Rayleigh-Ritz procedure is used to find stationary values of the functional to get the resulting generalized matrix eigenvalue equation. To show the validity and applicability of the method, a series of examples of microwave and optical waveguides including inhomogeneity, anisotropy and loss are studied. These examples show good accuracy and complete absence of spurious modes, demonstrating the effectiveness of the new formulation developed
Compensation of analog imperfections In a Ka-band FMCW SAR
International audienceThis paper deals with the compensation of analog imperfections in a Ka-Band FMCW SAR. Due to the presence of phase distortion in the up-conversion and down conversion block, we demonstrate that the calibration of the VCO based on a reference beat signal is range-limited. We propose a post-processing method to compensate the residual sinusoidal nonlinearities of the VCO characteristic as well as the phase distortion coming from the up-conversion and down-conversion block. Processing of SAR data acquisition demonstrates the efficiency of the method
An Anchor-Point Based Image-Model for Room Impulse Response Simulation with Directional Source Radiation and Sensor Directivity Patterns
The image model method has been widely used to simulate room impulse
responses and the endeavor to adapt this method to different applications has
also piqued great interest over the last few decades. This paper attempts to
extend the image model method and develops an anchor-point-image-model (APIM)
approach as a solution for simulating impulse responses by including both the
source radiation and sensor directivity patterns. To determine the orientations
of all the virtual sources, anchor points are introduced to real sources, which
subsequently lead to the determination of the orientations of the virtual
sources. An algorithm is developed to generate room impulse responses with APIM
by taking into account the directional pattern functions, factional time
delays, as well as the computational complexity. The developed model and
algorithms can be used in various acoustic problems to simulate room acoustics
and improve and evaluate processing algorithms.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure
Attentional Prototype Inference for Few-Shot Segmentation
This paper aims to address few-shot segmentation. While existing
prototype-based methods have achieved considerable success, they suffer from
uncertainty and ambiguity caused by limited labeled examples. In this work, we
propose attentional prototype inference (API), a probabilistic latent variable
framework for few-shot segmentation. We define a global latent variable to
represent the prototype of each object category, which we model as a
probabilistic distribution. The probabilistic modeling of the prototype
enhances the model's generalization ability by handling the inherent
uncertainty caused by limited data and intra-class variations of objects. To
further enhance the model, we introduce a local latent variable to represent
the attention map of each query image, which enables the model to attend to
foreground objects while suppressing the background. The optimization of the
proposed model is formulated as a variational Bayesian inference problem, which
is established by amortized inference networks. We conduct extensive
experiments on four benchmarks, where our proposal obtains at least competitive
and often better performance than state-of-the-art prototype-based methods. We
also provide comprehensive analyses and ablation studies to gain insight into
the effectiveness of our method for few-shot segmentation.Comment: Pattern Recognition Journa
Characterizing Out-of-Distribution Error via Optimal Transport
Out-of-distribution (OOD) data poses serious challenges in deployed machine
learning models, so methods of predicting a model's performance on OOD data
without labels are important for machine learning safety. While a number of
methods have been proposed by prior work, they often underestimate the actual
error, sometimes by a large margin, which greatly impacts their applicability
to real tasks. In this work, we identify pseudo-label shift, or the difference
between the predicted and true OOD label distributions, as a key indicator to
this underestimation. Based on this observation, we introduce a novel method
for estimating model performance by leveraging optimal transport theory,
Confidence Optimal Transport (COT), and show that it provably provides more
robust error estimates in the presence of pseudo-label shift. Additionally, we
introduce an empirically-motivated variant of COT, Confidence Optimal Transport
with Thresholding (COTT), which applies thresholding to the individual
transport costs and further improves the accuracy of COT's error estimates. We
evaluate COT and COTT on a variety of standard benchmarks that induce various
types of distribution shift -- synthetic, novel subpopulation, and natural --
and show that our approaches significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art
methods with an up to 3x lower prediction error
COVID-19 causes record decline in global CO2 emissions
The considerable cessation of human activities during the COVID-19 pandemic
has affected global energy use and CO2 emissions. Here we show the
unprecedented decrease in global fossil CO2 emissions from January to April
2020 was of 7.8% (938 Mt CO2 with a +6.8% of 2-{\sigma} uncertainty) when
compared with the period last year. In addition other emerging estimates of
COVID impacts based on monthly energy supply or estimated parameters, this
study contributes to another step that constructed the near-real-time daily CO2
emission inventories based on activity from power generation (for 29
countries), industry (for 73 countries), road transportation (for 406 cities),
aviation and maritime transportation and commercial and residential sectors
emissions (for 206 countries). The estimates distinguished the decline of CO2
due to COVID-19 from the daily, weekly and seasonal variations as well as the
holiday events. The COVID-related decreases in CO2 emissions in road
transportation (340.4 Mt CO2, -15.5%), power (292.5 Mt CO2, -6.4% compared to
2019), industry (136.2 Mt CO2, -4.4%), aviation (92.8 Mt CO2, -28.9%),
residential (43.4 Mt CO2, -2.7%), and international shipping (35.9Mt CO2,
-15%). Regionally, decreases in China were the largest and earliest (234.5 Mt
CO2,-6.9%), followed by Europe (EU-27 & UK) (138.3 Mt CO2, -12.0%) and the U.S.
(162.4 Mt CO2, -9.5%). The declines of CO2 are consistent with regional
nitrogen oxides concentrations observed by satellites and ground-based
networks, but the calculated signal of emissions decreases (about 1Gt CO2) will
have little impacts (less than 0.13ppm by April 30, 2020) on the overserved
global CO2 concertation. However, with observed fast CO2 recovery in China and
partial re-opening globally, our findings suggest the longer-term effects on
CO2 emissions are unknown and should be carefully monitored using multiple
measures
Ontogeny of Synovial Macrophages and the Roles of Synovial Macrophages From Different Origins in Arthritis
The ontogeny of macrophages in most organ/tissues in human body has been proven. Due to the limited number and inaccessibility of synovial macrophages (SM), the origin of SM has not been fully illuminated. The objective of this study was designed to investigate the ontogeny of SM and to evaluate the role of SM from different origins in arthritis. Two origins of SM, embryonic SM (ESM) and bone marrow SM (BMSM) were identified in Cx3cr1-EGFP mice, CCR2−/− mice and bone marrow (BM) chimera model by using a stringent sorting strategy. The cellular features, including dynamic total cell number, in situ proliferation, phagocytosis and expressions of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory genes, of ESM and BMSM were compared. In addition, ESM and BMSM showed different expression patterns in Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) patients' synovium and during the developmental process of collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) mice. Taken together, these results demonstrated that the SM at least has two origins, ESM and BMSM. The different cellular property and dynamic expression patterns in RA patients/CIA mice highlight the notion that ESM and BMSM might play different role in arthritis
Carbon Monitor Cities, near-real-time daily estimates of CO2 emissions from 1500 cities worldwide
Building on near-real-time and spatially explicit estimates of daily carbon
dioxide (CO2) emissions, here we present and analyze a new city-level dataset
of fossil fuel and cement emissions. Carbon Monitor Cities provides daily,
city-level estimates of emissions from January 2019 through December 2021 for
1500 cities in 46 countries, and disaggregates five sectors: power generation,
residential (buildings), industry, ground transportation, and aviation. The
goal of this dataset is to improve the timeliness and temporal resolution of
city-level emission inventories and includes estimates for both functional
urban areas and city administrative areas that are consistent with global and
regional totals. Comparisons with other datasets (i.e. CEADs, MEIC, Vulcan, and
CDP) were performed, and we estimate the overall uncertainty to be 21.7%.
Carbon Monitor Cities is a near-real-time, city-level emission dataset that
includes cities around the world, including the first estimates for many cities
in low-income countries
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